Palin Departs

The jumbled metaphors, absent logic, and idiosyncratic syntax of that sequence of digressions piled atop one another that she sputtered forth made it hard to tell precisely what Sarah Palin meant to say. It is more or less clear that she's going, and a good deal of subsequent commentary has been devoted to the question of whether she will be back in some other guise.

Bill Kristol, who helped elevate la pasionaria of Wasilla from well-earned obscurity as the first and most prominent supporter of her selection as John McCain's running mate, made a game try at defending her actions. True, he conceded, she will now enter any subsequent race unable even to claim the experience of a single full term as Alaska Governor. But, he went on, she can now devote her time and abundant energies to swotting up on national issues, raising money and establishing the infrastructure for a presidential run in 2012 (or 2016). If it works, he concluded, what seems now like a crazy gamble will ultimately be judged "crazy like a fox."

Even most other Republican pundits have shown themselves less inclined than Kristol to drink that Alaskan Koolaid. Michael Barone, Fred Barnes, and Mark Steyn have all expressed doubt as to whether she can recover after the farcical display of her farewell, an event that could not have been better-designed to reinforce much of the public's doubts about her temperament, judgment, and intelligence. Barnes, normally a reliable fugleman for the Christianist right, has rejected analogies with Richard Nixon's hiatus from electoral politics from 1962 through 1967, followed by his successful bid for the White House in 1968. Nixon, Barnes pointed out, was a former Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President when he stepped out of the limelight. While much of the public emphatically didn't care for him, his political liabilities did not include the egregious inexperience that Palin has ensured will dog her in any further tries for elective office.

True, "Caribou Barbie" (as Maureen Dowd has dubbed her) has hardly helped herself. But at the end of the day, her appeal to some voters, and the repulsion she elicits in others, has surprisingly little to do with how much experience she has in an executive capacity or how deeply she understands the details of nuclear strategy or international monetary arrangements. And it follows that recasting herself as a more knowledgeable figure (perhaps through a few years in Congress, as Barnes has recommended) will do less for her than it might for other political figures widely judged in need of seasoning.

While many observers were appalled that the ostensibly steady and tested McCain would pick someone with so little experience and gravitas as his understudy, the exceptional intensity of responses to her, pro and con, had more to do with who she was and whom she spoke for. The closest thing I have read to an intellectually respectable case for Palin's political future comes from Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who noticed that her appeal had more to do with class than ideology. Palin, he suggested, is in some ways the natural counterpoint to Barack Obama. Where he incarnates the "meritocratic ideal" that someone of humble roots can, if he has the aptitude, make his way to Columbia, Harvard Law School and the fast track to the White House, she embodies the "democratic ideal" of political success without the benefit of such academic attainments. To some voters, she is the representative of a noble but fading America of small towns, life in the outdoors, and a preference for folk wisdom over fancy book larnin'. To others, she and her loutish brood are one of the weirder sub-species of trailer-trash.

There is something in Douthat's assessment. The clamorous support Palin garnered from downscale voters of limited education and provincial tastes and manners was rooted in just that; so was the often snide mockery by the meritocrats in the press of her academic record, religious views, speaking style and record in office. But if there were occasional exaggerations and distortions in some of the coverage of Palin's history (not least the bizarre conspiracy theories about the parentage of her poor retarded child) there is enough in what has been established beyond plausible dissent to demonstrate that she is not fit to be president. And her unfitness runs deeper than what reading a policy paper here and there can fix.

A healthy skepticism towards the contrivances of academic system-builders is one thing, but an envious antipathy to all that smacks of learning or disinterested expertise is quite another. An attachment to small-town ways that have passed into history almost everywhere in America save for Alaska is one thing; a suspicion of cosmopolitanism and urbanity as next door to treason something altogether different. And it's clear which side of such distinctions Palin stands on, when she casts herself as the voice of "real Americans" and "the pro-American parts of America." It's obvious just how constricted this woman's understanding of her own country is when she boasts to an audience of bawling yokels that her semi-employed, under-achieving, snowmobile-racing hubby is one of those Americans "who knows how to work with his hands"; the tacit implication, I suppose, is that those of us who work mainly with our brains are sissies, subversives, or something equally contemptible. And it's certainly hard to mistake the deep-rooted ignorance of why some familiarity with history or the world beyond one's own shores is indispensable to statesmanship in the unforgettable contention that the visibility of Russia from Alaska gives her a claim to foreign policy expertise.

It is devoutly to be wished that Palin's star fall fast and far; unfortunately, she visibly identifies with and gives voice to a sizeable constituency within the GOP. As I was listening to Palin's remarks, I was reminded of what the brilliant British expat pundit Henry Fairlie, a High Tory, wrote about the legions of provincial social conservatives at the 1980 Republican National Convention, while they were consolidating their power as one of its strongest factions. In a piece reprinted in the new collection of his writings, Bite the Hand that Feeds You, Fairlie describes these Republicans as:

"...narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious...those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy."

That last turn of phrase is somewhat over the top, especially when applied to the GOP of Reagan and Goldwater, even that of George W. Bush. But it is closer to the mark than one would like for at least a large slice of the party which Sarah Palin may still seek to lead. And even if Palin does prove to have damaged her own chances of doing so beyond repair, the blinkered worldview she articulates will find other champions, perhaps all the more dangerously plausible for articulating the same sulfurous resentments in complete sentences.