“Understanding the Sarah Palin effect”

Wintery Knight points out this great column on Sarah Palin.

Among the many delightful characteristics of Sarah Palin is her seemingly unfailing capacity to capture Barack Obama’s angry attention. This week, she criticized his new nuclear policy. Obama responded by saying “I really have no response to that,” which was, I think we’ll all agree, an awkward prelude to his … response. He went on with: “The last I checked, Sarah Palin is not much of an expert on nuclear issues.” Well, colour me huffy.

The last time anyone else checked, neither is Barack Obama. Chicago politics is no richer in seminars on the finer points of nuclear politics than those of Alaska. Nonetheless, adverting to Sarah Palin’s presumed incompetence — not just on nuclear issues, but on anything — will garner automatic applause and smirks of condescending approval from vast swathes of American public opinion.

Of course, the president of the united states is not a professional on almost all most topics he deals with. He has to take advise from experts. So such responses are more than a little rich.

Sarah Palin irritates, agitates, angers and annoys some of the self-appointed finest minds of America to a point long past reason. She has been the target, since the night she walked on stage to speak at a Republican convention, of some of the most savage commentary that the great republic has seen since Richard Nixon.

Some of this could be put down to George W. Bush. I mean, the hateful vitriol directed at him had to go somewhere.

The great difference, of course, is that Nixon earned some of his venom. He practised political hardball. He was a remorseless partisan with an appetite for political vengeance

And he received some he did not earn, by virtue of a personality — secretive, bitter even in success, humourless, cold and anxious — that made him, fairly or otherwise, a target for the cruellest and most unrelenting attacks. But in any event, he was the President. He had been in politics for a full generation. For those determined to hate him, there was a large field to till.

But Palin is not the president, nor has she been. She’s been a presence in American national politics for only about two years. She is a cheerful human being, with a large family, an apparently easy-going and normal husband. She has a personality that would sell corn flakes — if not grow them. What career she had in Alaska, she earned.

Few realise that the first real political battle that Obama had to fight was the Democratic Presidential primary. He won previous elections by having the strongest opponents removed from the ballot.

She’s at home indoors and out, radiates human warmth, seems to have some balance about herself, and has displayed over the last year or so a considerable fortitude under an avalanche of mockery and hatred. For the final stroke of this cameo I should note she is smart — smarter than 90% of the people who make a point of how rock-stupid they know she is.

She talks funny, that means she’s stupid.

But he’s right about the critics – I saw a critical report that described her recent “entrance” into TV… an industry she’s already worked in for many years previously.

She, by rights, should be queen of the feminists. All that self-reliance, her takeover of Alaska politics, the rocket ride to a Vice-Presidential ticket, a public career she blends with her family life– these seem gold-standard credentials for a real feminist. But official feminism derides herewith an unspeakable intensity. Her early critics were not beyond the inane claim that she was somehow not really a woman.

It was grimly amusing to watch the left, who had just labeled opponents to Hillary in various evil terms, suddenly deciding that “just being a woman” wasn’t enough for political support.

Read the whole thing.

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