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Yuval Levin profiles Sarah Palin and the country’s reaction to her.
… The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear. The response of liberal feminists was in this respect particularly telling, and especially unpleasant.
“Her greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman,” wrote Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago. “Having someone who looks like you and behaves like them,” said Gloria Steinem, “who looks like a friend but behaves like an adversary, is worse than having no one.”
This preposterous effort to excommunicate Palin from her gender suggests that the kind of new-order feminism she represents—a feminism that embraces cultural traditionalism and workplace egalitarianism at the same time—is especially frightening to those on the feminist Left because they recognize its power and appeal. The attempt to destroy Sarah Palin by rushing to paint her as a backwoods extremist was not a show of strength, but rather a sign of desperation.
Meanwhile, on the Right, Palin was the cause of a manic episode of a different sort. The governor’s touching life story, her folksy way of speaking, and her gut-level appeal to the culture of the lower middle class exercised tremendous power over many conservatives, which inclined them to fill the sizable blanks in Palin’s political profile with their own wishful assumptions, and to make flustered excuses for her shortcomings.
There was a strong case to be made in her defense. Palin had as much foreign-policy experience as most governors do, and Americans have been willing time and again to overlook such inexperience in their hunger for proven executive acumen in Washington. (Four of the last five Presidents had been governors, after all, and Palin was running for Vice President with a foreign-policy expert at the top of the ticket.) And while Palin seemed out of her depth in several television interviews, she was extraordinarily effective on the stump, was a quick study, and proved to be at least an even match for Joe Biden, a six-term senator, in the vice-presidential debate.
Yet, for all these defenses, there could be no denying Palin’s real deficiencies. Nonetheless, Palin was embraced practically without reservation in many conservative circles. The very heat of the Left’s campaign against her made her all the more a darling of the Right. She became the 2008 poster child for the longstanding conservative grudge against the mainstream media. And, of course, having warmly accepted her unborn child with Down syndrome and having supported and encouraged her teenage daughter’s decision to bring to term an unplanned pregnancy and to marry the baby’s father, Palin instantly became an icon of the pro-life cause.
It seemed to matter not a whit that Palin had never taken any action on abortion in her time as governor, and rarely had much to say on the subject. Indeed, even as she campaigned before captivated audiences, drawing tens of thousands of proud conservatives to rallies in a display of rock-star popularity no vice-presidential candidate had ever earned, Palin barely spoke about abortion or social issues.
Palin did not merit her instantaneous conversion into the Joan of Arc of the American Right, just as she did not deserve the opprobrium that was heaped upon her by the Left. …
… In the end, Palin had a modest impact on the race. About 60 percent of those interviewed in the exit polls said McCain’s choice of Palin had been a factor in their vote. Of these, 56 percent voted for McCain while only 43 percent voted for Obama. In other words, she appears to have helped McCain more than she hurt him, but not by much, which is as it should be; we were voting for a President, after all. In the face of unprecedented attack, Palin succeeded where almost no vice-presidential candidate ever has before in winning sustained support for the ticket.
This suggests Palin’s potent combination of cultural populism and social conservatism might provide the roadmap a Republican politician will need in the future to make headway against the Democratic tide. But that roadmap will only take that Republican politician so far. The rest of the journey requires the articulation of a broader vision for American families, American prosperity and freedom, and American security; a vision of conservatism, not only a nimbus of populism.
There is every reason to believe Palin will try to accomplish just this in a future national election. It may be, however, that other ambitious Republicans will be better suited to the task of perfecting the formula for electoral success she introduced last fall.
Either way, the Palin moment shed a powerful light on the power, the potential, and the ultimate inadequacy of a conservatism grounded solely in cultural populism. It also exposed the vulnerability of the Left to a challenge to its most cherished claims—as the sole representative of the interests of the working class and the only legitimate path to political power for an ambitious woman.
And, perhaps even more telling, it revealed the unfortunate and unattractive propensity of the American cultural elite to treat those who are not deemed part of the elect with condescension and contumely.
John Fund reveals Sen. Stabenow’s interests and provides informed Supreme speculation.
… So let me get this straight. Senator Stabenow is married to a left-wing radio executive whose efforts to get listeners for his programming has largely flopped. Now she wants to use her legislative powers to rein in the competition and ensure the views pushed by her husband get an artificial advantage in the marketplace. These days it really does feel as if we are living out scenes from an Ayn Rand novel in which “looters” try to tie down and suppress the “producers” in an economy.
John Kerry doesn’t like the tax cuts in the stimulus package because of all that freaky ”freedom.” Weekly Standard Blog has the story.
… “If you put a tax cut into the hands of a business or family, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to invest that or invest it in America.
They’re free to go invest anywhere that they want if they choose to invest.” …
David Warren points out some of the ways our new nanny state will get rid of much of the freedom we have left.
One of the key functions of modern government is to reduce, by law, the options people have, especially when they are facing challenges to survival.
A classic example of this is socialized medicine. Like all socialist systems, government health care creates big shortages and surpluses, beyond the reach of market correction: in this case, serious shortages of doctors, nurses and essential equipment, balanced by huge surpluses of administration and unspecialized support staff.
By contrast, one need never go far to find a dentist or a veterinarian in Canada, because these fields have not been fully “socialized.”
So if you have a toothache, or your cat is ill, you know where to go. If the case is serious, you hardly need an appointment. It will cost you or your insurer money, of course, but within reason, and there will be no waiting lists, or all-night encampments in a crowded lounge outside the emergency ward, among the moaning and wheezing. (Then later, the waiting room inside.)
If you need serious tests, because you are stressed-out by medical symptoms, you may wait for a very long time. If you have money, and are still mobile (unlike so many of our old and ill), you may consider crossing the border. But in principle, in Canada, you wait your turn — and if symptoms get worse you can try emergency. You might be extremely willing to pay for the tests, but the government won’t let you. You could, in more than theory, die, because the government has restricted your options.
Guns are another good example. …
Cato’s Alan Reynolds says it’s not the worst economy since the Great Depression. Jimmy Carter in 1980 owns that distinction.
… A wise adviser to President John Kennedy, Arthur Okun of Yale, devised the “misery index” to gauge the pain of economic crisis – a measure that simply adds together the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. It hit 22 percent in June 1980, during an inflationary recession that preceded the Fed’s disinflationary squeeze of 1981-82. The misery index was nearly as bad in January 1975, at 19.9 percent.
Assuming inflation was close to zero this January, the misery index would have been roughly the same as the unemployment rate, or 7.6 percent. By this standard, we have a very long way to go before the economy feels nearly as miserable as it did in 1975 or 1980. …