Jack Cashill: The Competing Narratives of Barry and Sarah

Jack Cashill has written an interesting article at American Thinker in which he compares the narratives of Governor Palin and Barack Obama. Here a a few excerpts:

From a classical perspective, Palin's is the more compelling narrative. The obstacles that she must overcome to fulfill her destiny are many, varied, and real. Raised in the frozen outback by a schoolteacher father and a school secretary mom, Palin accomplishes nothing without a good deal of work, often under difficult physical circumstances.

[...]

Back in Hawaii, either through his grandparents' connections or by dint of affirmative action, Obama spends grades five through twelve at Hawaii's poshest prep school. Like Palin, he plays basketball, but while she is leading her school to the state championship, he is a second stringer on a team whose wins and losses go unremarked. The only scores Obama shares are the imagined racial ones that need to be settled, a working out of his "pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against [his] mother's race."

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After two druggy, uninspired years at Occidental College, Obama transfers to the Ivy League -- Columbia, to be precise. In Dreams, Obama dedicates one half of a sentence to a summer job on a construction site. Otherwise, he is silent on how his tuition might have been paid for. As to his grades and SAT scores, it would be easier to pry North Korea's nuclear secrets out of Kim Jong-Il.

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In 1992, while an anxious Obama dithers in an office that the University of Chicago has given him to write Dreams, half of his $150,000 advance already cashed, Palin is pulling her babies, Track and Bristol, along on a sled as she goes door-to-door seeking votes in her run for Wasilla city council.

Not yet thirty, Palin settles upon the philosophy that will guide her political career: reducing taxes "and redefining government's proper role." Like few Republicans this side of Ronald Reagan, Palin will adhere to these principles throughout her political ascent.

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Although the prose of Dreams is often lyrical, it is not Obama's. As I have argued in these pages, and as Christopher Andersen has confirmed, Obama's gifted friend Bill Ayers gussied up the rough outlines of Obama's life and imposed upon them the mythic dimensions of Homer's Odyssey. To accomplish this, the authors invented any number of incidents, many of which are easily disproved. For a serious seeker of facts, Dreams is Sutter Creek in 1848.

In Going Rogue, by contrast, Palin does not shy from crediting Lynn Vincent for "her indispensable help in getting the words on paper." And yet the story is told honestly and sincerely in Palin's voice. There is no artifice, no postmodern mumbo-jumbo, and not a sentence in the book that Palin could not have written herself. My personal favorite, "I love meat." I suspect that, unaided, journalism major and former reporter Palin is a better writer than Obama.

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Left to their own devices, Palin is clearly the better speaker. In Going Rogue's climactic moment, the unknown Palin serves up the most dazzling convention speech in modern political history, and she does so in spite of a malfunctioning teleprompter. "I knew the speech well enough that I didn't need it," writes Palin.

Had Obama's teleprompter malfunctioned at the 2004 convention, he would not be president. He has always depended on the eloquence of others. So thoroughly hooked on the teleprompter is Obama that the irrepressible Biden jokes about it. "What am I going to tell the president?" Biden asked the crowd at the Air Force Academy after a teleprompter blew over. "Tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?"

Read Cashill's entire article here. It's a bit lengthy but well worth your time.