A Dangerous Lightweight?

Sometime last week the narrative reached the right wing commentator, Kathleen Parker that Sarah Palin was just Caribou Barbie: she ought not be running for Vice President and who was dragging down the McCain campaign and ought to pull an Eagleton.

Now, like Peggy Noonan before her, Ms. Parker has eaten some crow. In particular, Ms. Parker states of Mrs. Palin, "to Democrats, she’s still a dangerous lightweight..." which raises the question? If Mrs. Palin is a lightweight, how can she be dangerous?

I had a conversation with my neighbor when I put a McCain-Palin sign in my front yard. (I had foregone putting any Republican signs in my yard until I could get one with Mrs. Palin's name on it.) He announced with glee that Mr. McCain had pulled out of Michigan and thought that significant. He is probably correct at that point. But when I mentioned my support for Mrs. Palin, he said, "She knows nothing."

Very well, if she knows nothing, she should pose no threat to anyone with "D" next to their name, correct?

But my neighbor was not finished with Mrs. Palin. He said, "You know she's a Pentacostal. She supports Israel. She wants Armageddon to force the Second Coming." Now, I doubt that my neighbor recognized the naked religious bigotry in his assertion. I suppose that if Mrs. Palin's middle name were "Hussein" it might be different. But I gave him a pass, going after the sheer ignorance and falseness of this representation of premillenial eschatology. I am a premillenialist Christian and I find this canard of the left utterly ridiculous. If you think this way, you don't know what you're talking about. Christians who speak of the imminent return of Jesus Christ do so to warn that one must always be ready to meet one's maker and give account of one's life. The point is that God is in the driver's seat, not the other way around. But I digress.

I dislike this line of rhetoric: seeking not only the political defeat of someone whose opinions you contradict, but their personal destruction. I've come close to this myself, comparing Mr. Obama with Steve Urkel and contrasting him with John Shaft. I plan to vote against Mr. Obama because he advances policies I dislike and I plan to vote for Mrs. Palin because she advances policies I support.

By moving away from the policies of the candidates to their personal attributes, we set for ourselves a trap. When we speak of policies, we can more easily remain civil in our conversations. On the other hand, when we say the other guy is an empty suit, the other guy will speak of lipstick on a pig, and the conversation goes downhill very quickly. In conversation with my neighbor, most of my replies were, "Oh really?" and "Is that so?" while believing none of it. I don't think my neighbor realizes how close his assertions came to 1930s style antisemitism, or sexism and ageism of more recent vintage. But they got past his civility filter because he'd gone past policy into the ad hominem.

This isn't new. Mrs. Palin is getting the full Ronald Reagan treatment. And the left is tacking very close to the wind while doing this. If she's a lightweight, she can't be dangerous. But if she's worthy of the vitriol we've seen since her nomination for Vice President, someone must regard her as very dangerous. She has proved articulate and she manages to say things I haven't heard from a Republican candidate since Mr. Reagan left public life.

I'm not altogether convinced that Mrs. Palin's enemies are limited to those with "D"s next to their name. This year is not completely unlike 1976 and someone who so channels Ronald Reagan will find few friends in the Nelson Rockefeller wing of the party. One wonders what would have happened had Gerald Ford made Ronald Reagan his running mate. My hopes are that Mrs. Palin is more dangerous than lightweight.

Another Day, Another Sarah Palin Spin

The mainstream media and Democrat operatives, as good post-modernists, cannot change the facts of the world, but they can frame those facts to suggest their preferred interpretation of them.

Fact: John McCain nominated Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

Spin Attempt #1: She's the second coming of Dan Quayle. Like Mr. Quayle, nobody who mattered knew her and she wasn't a regular on the Sunday thumb-sucker shows. And she can't be qualified, otherwise our masters in the Beltway would have lunched with her and would tell us so.

However, Mrs. Palin failed to cooperate by responding to bright lights like a deer in the headlights. (This might have something to do with her beauty pageant experience.)

Spin Attempt #2: She's trailer trash with too much hair, too many kids, and her youngest is probably the fruit of an incestuous union between her husband and her daughter.

The conspiracy theories to support the latter hypothesis utterly buggered belief and couldn't pass the laugh test. All they did was to make the extra-chromosome wing (Al Gore's words) of the Republican party, i.e. me, furious. (Why yes, I have gone back to calling myself a Republican.)

Spin Attempt #3: (whispered) She's a bad mother with an out-of-control 17-year old daughter, taking dangerous risks flying on airplanes (imagine that, airplanes) while pregnant, and doing G-d-knows-what in the Governor's office while she should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

This also failed because Democrats can't keep a straight face when they say a wommon's place is in the home. To add insult to injury, the Religious Right failed to drop her like a hot potatoe when they learned of daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Spin Attempt #4: OK, Sarah Palin is beleaguered from all of the above and is really Thomas Eagleton, v2.0 and the Republicans will come to their senses and drop her from the ticket.

Then Mrs. Palin gave a speech that a lot of people watched (to find out what all the buzz was about). It's hard to maintain 37 million instances of the "who you going to believe, me or your lying eyes" narrative. Meanwhile, a lot of Republicans remembered how tasty red meat is and are now saying they'll vote for Sarah Palin and that guy with her.

Spin Attempt #5: [speaking of the messiah] Sarah Palin used... sarcasm. She knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. She was vicious.

Well, being the "attack dog" of the ticket is the main job responsibility of the Veep. Obambi was in her sights and she put lead on target.

This brings us to now.

Spin Attempt #6: Sarah Palin is Spiro T. Agnew v2.0. Given the poisoned atmosphere of recent rumor-mongering and hard-to-deny media-bias, she's going to make the campaign all about the press bias and Leave Obama Alone! Please, please, Leave Obama Alone! Leave Obama Alone! Call us nattering nabobs of negativity, please. Leave Obama Alone! Call us an effete corp of snobs. Leave Obama Alone! Please!

Here's a bit of meta-analysis. When the story changes each day, you don't have to pay much attention to it, or take it particularly seriously, because it'll be different tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I've got a suspicion that doesn't have sufficient data to support it. Mrs. Palin appears to have a track record of taking on powerful enemies and hanging tough against them. Something had to sustain her through the viciousness of this last week's attacks upon her family from the ends-justify-the-means left. You might call her an Iron Lady, but that title is currently held by Dame Margaret Thatcher. Don't take my word for it. Just keep your eyes open and we'll see.