Camille Paglia on Palin

One of the most enjoyable writers on Salon is Camille Paglia, a strong Obama supporter and feminist -- but who also has the unfortunately uncommon ability to view contemporary feminism through a relatively apolitical lens. This, of course, translates into an ability to admire Gov. Palin and her accomplishments -- and to acknowledge that politics will never be the same for women again after Palin. It will be better, and not just for Republicans:

The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin’s bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up.

Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition — without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She’s no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she’s pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite — which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey’s witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin’s cadences and charm, she can’t capture the energy, which is a force of nature.

She also raises the fascinating question of whether Gov. Palin, like her husband, is part Native American:

And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don’t think sex — I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry — including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is “dumb.” Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism — the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

She even points out what millions of ordinary Americans already know -- those who don't speak as though their words have come filtered through the New York Times style book:

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English.

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Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment.

On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse — which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.

We have to admit that we prefer someone who can both: speak in "shapely and syncopated syllables" while consistently speaking in complete sentences as well. But having endured two Presidents Bush who could do neither, we'll take Sarah, gladly. And like Paglia, we have the feeling that Palin has the ability to learn, which is more than one can say for a great many politicians who are more greatly admired by the media and the left.

OK, we give -- Democrats are smart and sophisticated, Republicans are stumblebums

It has been a fairly regular feature of Montana Headlines to engage in honest self-analysis of the right side of the political spectrum. After all, does it really hurt to admit that those on the left are smarter, better educated, more sophisticated, better read, more widely traveled, etc.? Why argue with the obvious, after all? Certainly here at Montana Headlines, with manure still clinging to our boots, we know our place.

A commenter in the last post compared Republicans to Nazis, but then really decided to get serious and go for the jugular, shaming us for our "reflexive" support for a "beauty queen" who is "dumb as can be." The Nazi thing hurts, but really, to that last part all we can say is an emphatic "ouch!"

It must be acknowledged that it has been some time since Montana Headlines has forthrightly confessed our intellectual inferiority, so it is time for one of our periodic exercises in verbal self-flagellation for our sins against reason.

After all, what are we thinking when we support someone who went to North Idaho College and then made the big move up to the (drum roll, please) University of Idaho (using scholarship money from the Miss Alaska pageant -- how embarrassing is that?) Especially when we could have as our next President someone who graduated from Columbia and from Harvard Law? With a choice like that, there really shouldn't be any point to even holding an election. Oh yeah, that white-haired guy went to the Naval Academy (a reactionary thing to do in and of itself,) but graduated near the bottom of his class, so he really doesn't help.

After all, as Bob Herbert decrees in the august pages of the New York Times, Palin is "dimwitted." Well, that settles it.

Actually, Herbert and the many others who heap scorn on Sarah Palin (and by association, all of us Neanderthals on the right) could just as well save their breath. After all, we already know that we aren't as bright, educated, and sophisticated as our peers on the left (or perhaps it is being presumptuous to call them our peers -- perhaps "counterparts" would be a more appropriately humble word.)

We just tend not to be paralyzed by insecurity, even though we probably should by all rights be crawling into corners in shame because of our paleolithic mindsets. We've seemed somehow to figure out that our lack of intellectual sophistication doesn't have to keep us from becoming productive citizens -- running businesses that keep people employed, becoming successful professionals, achieving financial security for our families, reaching positions of leadership in the military, or even (most shocking of all) winning elections and effectively governing. In this enterprise, we are of course aided by our counterparts, as Tony Blankley recently put it when quizzed by the 3 left-leaning members of a public radio talk-show panel:

One of the reasons the Republicans have done so well in national elections over the last 30 years is that we’ve been blessed with a liberal media and a liberal Democratic party that cannot help but sneer at about, you know, 65 percent of American culture, the people of small town America.

So we benefit from that, and even the stumblebums can figure out how to take advantage of snobs who are our opponents. And it’s sort of remarkable that they can’t restrain themselves even for a season.

We as stumblebums nevertheless keep getting re-elected...

One of his lefty opponents on the panel protested loudly when Blankley made the point that Sarah Palin's experience level was comparable to that of Barack Obama. The evidence that he cited for Obama's superiority? Why, Obama's impressive education and travel experience. Seriously. Well, that really settles it.

But when you look at it historically, he has a point. After all, if you took a poll of university professors, who would be consdidered to be smarter and more intellectually sophisticated, and which was was the hapless bumbler?

Ike or Adlai Stevenson?
Kennedy or Nixon?
Johnson or Goldwater?
Nixon or Humphrey?
Nixon or McGovern?
Carter or Ford?
Carter or Reagan?
Reagan or Mondale?
Bush I or Dukakis?
Clinton or Bush I?
Clinton or Dole?
Bush II or Gore?
Bush II or Kerry?
Obama or McCain?

Really isn't very fair, is it? I'd like to hear from anyone on the left who wouldn't choose the Democrat in every single one of those elections -- or at best declare certain matchups to be more or less a tie. (Diabolically shrewd doesn't count -- we're just talking intellectual depth that would make the faculty club swoon.) After all, if the Republican in question were all that bright, he wouldn't have been a Republican, correct? And to be fair, while we would probably choose or defend the Republican in each of those races, it wouldn't be because of a belief that he would conduct a better graduate seminar in the philosophy of conflict resolution.

And yet, the electoral history is, in spite of it all, surprisingly impressive for those inferior Republican candidates.

The link escapes us right now, but someone recently wrote that for the first time in his life, Sen. Obama is running against actual Republicans -- and he is shocked to be up against opponents who don't care what the editors of the New York Times or Washington Post think. He also has the simultaneous misfortune of encountering, also for the first time in his political life, an electorate where well over half of the voters will be people who likewise really don't care what smart set thinks.

That has to be a disconcerting experience for someone who believes that a 100% ADA rating is a path to post-partisan politics. Maybe on the south side of Chicago -- but in the rest of the country, not so much.

We hayseeds have an annoying habit of showing up to vote, and perhaps that is why a Democratic candidate has only reached the 50% mark in the popular vote exactly twice since WWII. Wouldn't it be something, in a year that was supposed to be a Democratic landslide of 1964 proportions, if the Republicans stumblebummed themselves to yet one more victory?

Gov. Palin and the Bush Doctrine

Not having watched the interview, and only having heard some indirect chatter about Gov. Palin hesitating about the "Bush Doctrine," it was irresistable to want to avoid studiously following any more of the chatter until having the chance to go through the exercise of how one would have answered that question if asked.

The first thing, of course is to know what the "Bush Doctrine" actually is. Palin is being talked about as though she is some sort of class dunce for giving the appearance of not knowing what it is. But is it really all that easy? Off the top of one's head, there are at least a couple of choices:

1. Pre-emptive strikes on terrorists who might attack America -- i.e. "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here." One can agree with that, applied judiciously.

2. Proactively deposing hostile regimes in other countries and replacing them with ones that are more democratic, on the theory that creating stable democracies in previously hostile countries will decrease the chances of future aggression against the U.S. -- in terror or otherwise. i.e. the kind of nation-building that Bush said in 2000 that he wouldn't engage in. Not good, we would humbly submit.

Maybe both of these would fail a purist's test, and maybe it means something even more. Readers can write MH and critique these impromptu definitions.

But suffice it to say that Bush's foreign policy -- not to mention the perceptions and portrayals of that policy (to which Gibson could just as easily have been referring) -- is complex and multifaceted enough that it would be foolish simply to say categorically that one rejects or embraces it. It would be best, especially when being interviewed by someone like Charlie Gibson, who is himself not a foreign policy expert, to ask for a more precise question. Which is pretty much what Palin apparently did.

Palin's reported hesitation in answering that question is actually relieving to this conservative. Leaving aside the fact that it is never wise to commit to any theoretical doctrine, not knowing exactly where real-world circumstances will logically lead that doctrine, what exactly would Palin have been saying yes or no to in answering that question? Given the expansive reading that has been given to the Bush doctrine by some overly-enthusiastic neoconservatives, it is relieving that that Palin would demur from giving it carte blanche, even while generally speaking in support of the need to be aggressive in the war on terror.

There are parts of the Bush foreign policy that are rational and have probably made us safer -- there are parts that have been very ill-advised and that, if pushed to logical conclusions, could lead us to disastrous over-reach and to being militarily embroiled in every politically unstable hell-hole around the planet. Sarah Palin surely knows it, and in light of that, she gave the right and cautious response. That hesitation to give a broad, sweeping foreign policy pronouncment is actually about what one would expect from the conservative governor of a libertarian-minded state.
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Note: Now, having taken the time to look around a little, the sense that the "Bush Doctrine" is complex and means different things to different people is confirmed. This piece gives a nice summary of the various pillars and facets of the "Bush Doctrine," demonstrating that it can't be summarized in one sentence. Gibson only was asking about one facet of that doctrine.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as Gibson showed at that point in the interview.

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Update: Charles Krauthammer (who knows a thing or two about the term "Bush Doctrine," since he was the first to use it) basically backs up the above MH analysis of this question and why Palin's response was the correct one. We would disagree with Krauthammer, one suspects, on whether the most expansive, democracy spreading, form of the doctrine is something that is good foreign policy. But he is spot-on in his analysis of that moment between Palin and Gibson:

Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted.

In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

McCain up big in new Montana poll

As Montana Headlines has pointed out, the selection of Sarah Palin for Veep should make Montana a wrap for Sen. McCain, even in a worst case scenario. The most recent Rasmussen poll shows McCain leading 53% to 42%

More importantly, 70% of McCain supporters in Montana say that they are enthusiastically voting for McCain, while only 28% say that they are primarily voting against Sen. Obama. This is quite comparable to the 79% and 18% numbers among Obama supporters in Montana -- the enthusiasm gap appears to have been largely erased. Based on anecdotal MH experience talking to Republicans, this is an accurate assessment of the right-leaning part of the Montana voting public. It is also a phenomenal turn-around for McCain, and has to be in large part attributed to Gov. Palin's addition to the ticket, not to mention the new general excitement around the McCain campaign.

With the addition of Ron Paul to the ballot, it is said that this could turn the state to Sen. Obama, but this is far from certain. The Montana GOP treated Ron Paul supporters very well, especially when compared to other state organizations. Several former Ron Paul supporters that MH has spoken to have made up their minds to vote for John McCain, in large part because he chose a conservative running mate. Is this representative? Only time will tell, but the wisdom that Erik Iverson showed in welcoming Paul supporters into the party and treating them warmly at the state convention should pay off by at least not having made them hostile to the party organization (other than the malcontents that tend to attach themselves to fringe movements of any kind, who are never satisfied.)

Not that Paulinistas are going to become raving McCainiacs -- but at the very least there isn't the animosity that would have come had Ron Paul's people not been allowed to have their say and to have a genuine, fair shot at nabbing Montana's delegates.

As the choice becomes clear on the differences between McCain and Obama, it would be suprising if Paul and Barr together break 5% in the final vote tally.

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Update: We can perhaps expect the coming state-by-state polls in Western states to follow this trend. The grand "Western strategy" of the Obama campaign may be coming to an ignominious end. Or at least we can hope -- and continue to watch the polls.

The New York Times editors weigh in with surprising opinions on the issue of experience in the Vice Presidency

From the Gray Lady herself:

Where is it written that only senators are qualified to become President? . . . Or where is it written that mere representatives aren’t qualified, like Geraldine Ferraro of Queens? . . . Where is it written that governors and mayors... are too local, too provincial? . . .

Presidential candidates have always chosen their running mates for reasons of practical demography, not idealized democracy. . . . What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow into statesmen. . . .

Why shouldn’t a little-known woman have the same opportunity to grow?

Why not, indeed? We are so excited to see that the NYT is rising to the occasion and that we can agree with her editors....(insert sound of engine growling and whining to a dead stop and silence.)

Whoops, sorry... that was from 1984, defending the choice of little-known Geraldine Ferraro for the Democratic Veep spot, someone who hadn't run in a campaign outside her NYC borough, and who was in only her second term in Congress.

I guess that the standards are different when it's a (gasp) conservative Republican woman we're talking about. One suspects that we'll see conservatives digging up all sorts of similar quotations dating to 1984, set side by side with snide Palin put-downs from the same liberal house organs (and perhaps the same individuals.)

Meanwhile, Ms. Ferraro is on record, not surprisingly, as scoffing at the idea that Palin is unqualified to be Vice President. In fact, her studied silence is raising questions about whether she is contemplating joining some other feminists in supporting Palin:

On the day McCain announced her selection as his running mate, Palin thanked Clinton and Ferraro for blazing her trail. A day later, Ferraro noted her shock at Palin's comment. You see, none of her peers, no one, had ever publicly thanked her in the 24 years since her historic run for the White House. Ferraro has since refused to divulge for whom she's voting.

(Thanks to Jay Nordlinger at NRO for the compilation, which is apparently making the rounds.)

Rich Lowry nails it regarding the left's reaction to Gov. Sarah Palin

Great article. Read it.

The virulence of the reaction of the left and the personal tone that the feeding frenzy has taken is indeed largely culturally-based. Even out here in fly-over land (Lowry notes that Palin is in a part of the U.S. so remote that it technically isn't even in fly-over country,) the criticism seems to reflect a desire to want to mimic the rhetoric of the coastal leftish political smart set.

All of this is irrelevant, though. Can Sarah Palin do the job of being Vice President, and President if need be? Absolutely. One need go no further back than the most recent Presidential election: she is far more ready than John Edwards was in 2004, a man who had one undistinguished term in the U.S. Senate and who hardly showed up for that job, since he was too busy running for President.

Now that we think about it, John Edwards in 2004 was more qualified to be President than Barack Obama is in 2008 -- he had spent 6 years in the Senate with his primary job being running for President, while Sen. Obama has only spent 3 1/2 years in the Senate with his primary job being running for President.

The real question is this, and Lowry is not alone in pointing it out: can Gov. Palin withstand the rigors of the campaign trail in a national campaign? No one knows, and there is no way that anyone can know, until we see how she performs. If she handles herself with poise and confidence and if the McCain staff does a good job of running her part of the campaign, then the McCain/Palin ticket has an excellent chance of winning the election.

If she tanks, they could be on the receiving end of a blowout. Montana Headlines, like conservatives across the country, is rooting for her, but sympathy isn't enough -- she will need to perform well. Somehow, we suspect that she will. Much is made of whether the McCain camp vetted Palin sufficiently. They did, and they knew exactly what they were getting. Taking a chance? Absolutely, but McCain's team was smart enough to know that they weren't going to win this election if they played things safe. Good for them.

Update: a commenter brought attention to this piece by Peggy Noonan, who likewise nails it. Out of many great passages in this piece, one of the best is this, where after listing many of her manifestly attractive qualities, Noonan continues:

...conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

She could become a transformative political presence.

So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.

And it's going to be brutal. It's already getting there.

Read the whole thing. Especially her plain-spoken words to those who are dragging Palin's daughter through the mud.

Gov. Palin understands federalism?

It's just a little thing, and perhaps we're reading too much into it, but browsing through old video clips of Gov. Sarah Palin, it caught our attention in this interview with Charlie Rose, that Gov. Palin twice used the phrase "these United States."

Again, it is just a small thing, it's just not a phrase that we commonly hear anymore. Sometimes, those who are attentive to the importance of decentralized government will occasionally refer to the United States in the plural -- something that was, in older (and to curmudgeons like MH, often better) days, more the rule than the exception. In fairness, it isn't just conservatives who use this older phrase, so it doesn't necessarily carry political connotations.

Still, as the idea that the federal government should be supreme and that the states should be little more than administrative units of that centralized government has slowly penetrated the American consciousness, we have come to say "the United States of America is," rather than "these United States of America are."

Yes, we're aware that the venerable Shelby Foote, among others, have stated that the Civil War was the watershed between "the United states is" and "the United States are" -- but there has been good documentation of extensive use across the political spectrum and across the country of use of the singular and plural both before and after the Civil War. So don't anybody get the idea of labeling Palin a neoconfederate or something like that -- although we'll doubtless have things much worse than that said about Palin from the left.

Much of the debate over the plural vs. singular usage regarding the United States has been grammatical -- especially since the Constitution refers to the United States, Congress, etc. in the plural.

Maybe it's an Alaska thing, but is it too much to hope that in Gov. Palin, a true believer in federalism has been vaulted to the center of the Republican party and the American political scene? Or maybe she's just a little schoolmarmish about her grammar and knows that the word "states" is a plural. After the way those of us who are particular about the niceties of language have suffered over the last 8 years, can even that be all bad?

Speaking of schoolmarmish, that reminds us of this classic Gov. Palin TV appearance with Craig Ferguson on the Late Late Show. (Yes, it will be coming out that Montana Headlines has been following Gov. Palin's career with interest for quite some time -- we just didn't think she had a real chance in the McCain Veepstakes.)

McCain - Palin ticket is a sure winner in Montana

While the Obama campaign doubtless still harbors dreams of a Montana upset, the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska should shatter them and cause them to move on to truly battleground states. We now better understand why the McCain campaign, in spite of the polls, has elected not to spend precious resources in Montana -- they have known for some time (unless Obama had surprised the world by choosing Sen. Clinton for his Veep) that the presence of Gov. Sarah Palin on the ticket would seal the deal in Montana.

Gov. Palin is from the northwest, hunts moose, yet probably knows better than to carry live ammunition around in her pocket as an attention-getting prop, has a husband who is a member of a steelworkers' union, hates pork-barrel spending, loves developing natural energy resources (i.e. oil) in an environmentally-sensitive way (and unlike our own governor, actually got infinitely more done in less than half the time,) and is in general a libertarian-minded conservative with a soft touch.

All we have to do is get Palin to Montana a time or two, and this state will be out-of-reach for Obama. She probably doesn't even need to show up. Although we want her to!

Yes, we realize that there are those who are concerned about putting a first-term governor "a heartbeat away from the Oval Office." And yet Dems. had serious talk about Gov. Kaine of Virginia, and even the Montana governor (first-termers, both) as legitimate VP contenders. Is the problem that Palin is a woman, while they are men? (We saw that ugly sexism rearing its head in the Obama campaign against Hillary, and it came pretty naturally to them, much to the dismay of many women.)

But more to the point, if one wants to fault McCain for choosing to put a first-term governor in the backup slot, then what on earth are we to think about the Dems putting someone of Obama's paper-thin qualifications in their first position? The election of McCain-Palin would indeed raise the theoretical possibility of McCain dying shortly after arriving in office, and having a relatively inexperienced person rise to the Presidency.

The election of Obama-Biden would bring the certainty of an immediate elevation to the Presidency of a man with neither the executive experience that Gov. Palin has nor the real Senate experience that McCain has (and, to be fair, that Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and even Mike Gravel had.) It will make certain putting a man into the Oval Office who won an essentially uncontested U.S. Senate election in an overwhelmingly blue state less than 4 years ago -- and who has spent all of those last 4 years running for President rather than tending to the business of learning how to be a good Senator.

As Kirsten Powers notes regarding those who are shrieking about McCain choosing a running mate who has been governor for two years:

Where were they when Obama, two years into the Senate, announced his candidacy for president?

Indeed. If we are to fear inexperience, then we should run, screaming in terror, from the thought of an Obama presidency. Obama's election would mean the election of a man who has neither extensive Washington experience as a Senator (such as McCain has) has nor executive experience at the state level (such as Palin has.)

This whole "experience" thing that Democrats are desperately trying to make stick will only backfire, since ultimately, people vote for the top of the ticket -- the more the Obama team highlights the issue of experience, the worse it is for them.

We believe that Montanans will take to heart the words of Sen. Hillary Clinton herself, waxing eloquent, " I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

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Addendum: For those who haven't gotten enough of photos of Gov. Palin and her beautiful family, click through the Post's photo gallery.