It's Sarah Palin's Party

Sarah Palin is the Jacksonian "outsider" now.

The latest Rasmussen polling numbers are quite instructive. Palin's biggest group of supporters are young, unmarried, and not social conservative evangelicals. Her supporters do not view her as the social conservative candidate. Social conservatives prefer Huckabee as a candidate in 2012; however, they think just as highly of Sarah Palin as they do Huckabee. Sarah Palin's considerable base of supporters are attracted to her because she is the Beltway Outsider. She is the ordinary American who is fed up with the arrogant and incompetent Beltway elites who got us into the mess we're in and yet still show such disdain for the ordinary hardworking people who want nothing more than for their government to be "on their side and not in their way." Sarah Palin is our voice. When they laugh at her, we feel them laughing at us. Someday we'll have the last laugh.

The permanent political punditry on the right and the left really don't understand average schmoes like us. The current batch of rightwing pundits are graduates of the Reagan years and yet they no longer really understand what made him new because they themselves have grown old.

The rest of us don't spend our days chronicling Beltway intrigues. We don't know what the "Dingell-Norwood" is and frankly we don't care. Many of us don't even feel the need to vote because we've come to expect government to be useless and politicians to be little more than pandering freeloaders. We pay our taxes every April 15 and expect that our elected representatives will do their jobs or at least not make things worse for us. We secretly suspect that they do next to nothing, or at least nothing really useful. They just live off our money. Fine, just don't burn down the house. And don't try to soak us for more money.

What do we Ordinary Americans hear in Sarah Palin? We hear a person who doesn't make wild promises. She doesn't promise to give everyone a pet unicorn and an eco-friendly magic carpet. She promises to protect our interests by reining in the growth of this selfish beast that eats our tax dollars and finds new ways to bring our country to the brink of disaster. She promises to responsibly lead us in completing missions in distant countries where we never wanted to go and hope never to have to return. She doesn't promise that the wars will be over tomorrow, but she does promise that we will listen to our generals from now on so that we won't be seeing dozens of flag-draped coffins every month. She doesn't promise that the whole world will love us again (if they ever did), but she promises that we will stay strong enough to deter those who don't like us, and we will become self-sufficient in the one area most crucial to our long term security and peace -- energy.

Two recent articles reminded me of Palin's appeal to ordinary people. The first is by Chris Stigall:

Conservative voters both independent and Republican don’t trust the crew in Washington. Historically it is true they never have when asked. But this is not your typical “throw the bums out” mentality fomenting at tea party protests of late. This is a time when long term blue dog Democrat and Republican moderate office holders are nervously wondering, “Just how real IS the anger?” Bailouts, takeovers, stimulus spending, aggressive energy taxes, and nationalized health care have this electorate frightened and angry. The public is paying attention to their every vote, and those that are on the side of the American taxpayer will be rewarded in coming elections.

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Enter the most powerful motivator and fundraiser in all of Republican politics today.

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Palin has achieved a level of authentic, average-Joe appeal unmatched by any Republican on the national stage since Reagan and that is sexy as hell to a party who needs money and excitement now more than ever.

No, they’ll not say it publicly. In fact, they’ll dismiss her influence altogether if asked. But I’ll bet my house that the weekend voice mailbox of Governor Palin was full of begging, pleading Republican Senate, House, and gubernatorial candidates humbly requesting this “erratic, irrelevant, lightweight” to come stand at their side during their upcoming picnic/potluck/town hall/ cocktail fundraiser.

Perhaps the political chattering class is correct. Maybe Sarah Palin isn’t electable anymore. It’s highly doubtful that even came close to the top of her list when weighing the option of resigning last week. Sarah Palin knows she holds something more powerful than elected office right now. She has a consistent, unwavering commitment to celebrating American exceptionalism, freedom, and less government in the lives of every American. She now has the ability to hold each and every politician who calls on her for help to rise to her standard and maintain the integrity of the conservative movement. Put plainly, she will now determine the standard, direction, and message of conservatism going forward if they want her help. And there can be no doubt they crave her help.

Our favorite intellectual, Victor Davis Hanson, discusses Palin in an article titled "What is Wisdom? Sarah Palin and Her Critics":

Euripides asked that in the Bacchae? So who is the better one to sit down across from Putin? What training is critical to size up a Chavez, or say ‘no thanks, bud’ to Iran?

Does it require brains to manage a family with five kids, live on a limited budget, get elected to local office, fish, hunt, go to sea, cook your own food, navigate in politics with no money, without an influential dad and powerbroker husband-or is real wisdom finishing prep school, doing B+ work at Yale, and writing a novel, column or short story? (A little of both, you say? That’s why I started this piece off with my suggestion she take her new time to read and digest.)

In all seriousness at last, I’ve found it was harder to calibrate an old spray rig (without getting Parquat ['liquid death' we used to call it] up your nose and Simazine down your pants), with a shot roller pump and worn nozzles. It took some skill to put one pound (and only one pound) of Parquat and Simazine per acre on a two-foot-wide vineyard berm, correcting for tractor speed, wind, leaks, pump idiosyncrasies, soil conditions-knowing that too much preemergent herbicide gives you sick vines, and too little, weeds–than it was to do an apparatus criticus of 200 lines of the Greek text of Aeschylus’s Suppliants-all things, of course, being considered.

Sorry for the ‘either/or’ reductive binary: but I saw more stupid people in graduate school and three decades in academia than I ever did who ran 100 acres without going broke-and more of the latter whom I’d trust not to bankrupt the country and let down our defenses than of the former.

While we rightly argue that the Sarahs of the world, if they are to be taken seriously as leaders, must read and study more, why do we not also suggest that the Baracks of the world could do a little more chain-sawing, run a coffee shop for a summer, or drive a Winnebago cross-country? (Who knows, he might meet a fellow woodcutter who knew there were 50 states or that it was dumb to make fun of the Special Olympics.)

After all, a lot of geniuses are now calling for a “second stimulus” to borrow another trillion or so still, but I don’t think they come from Wasilla.

So I am afraid right now, but not of Sarah Palin.

Read the rest of VDH's article. It's vintage.

Another favorite intellectual of ours is Camille Paglia. She refuses to dismiss Palin too. And like VDH, Paglia encourages Palin to get a speechwriter and essentially use her time in the wilderness like Reagan did -- study, read, write, speak, and listen. Collect a coterie of sharp minds loyal to her vision. Palin will be back and she will be a force to reckon with.