Maureen Dowd: why can't Obama be more like Palin?

With one week of the book tour behind her and the political wind firmly in her sails, Gov. Palin's fortunes are on the up - as are her poll numbers. LA Times political correspondent Andrew Malcolm was among the first to notice that if the current polling trend continues, Palin could soon be overtaking Obama in the polls. In fact, in the usually reliable Rasmussen poll her favorable ratings are already five points higher than Obama's job approval numbers.

It's enough to drive liberals pundits like Maureen Dowd to distraction. The NYT-columnist even went so far as to ask why Obama couldn't be more like Palin. "It would be easy to dismiss Sarah Palin," she writes. Well, it's certainly what Dowd's been trying to do for the past twelve months. Actually getting rid of her, though, isn't quite as straightforward as she had hoped. And so Dowd is forced to conclude that perhaps there's Something about Sarah after all: "Democrats would be foolish to write off her visceral power." She even goes so far as to advise her hero, the Man-God Obama, to study Palin's approach: "Barack Obama, who once had his own electric book tour testing the waters for a campaign, could learn a thing or three from Palin."

I think she's right, though not in the way she suggests. Contrary to what she claims, for example, his problem isn't that he "so values pragmatism, and is so immersed in the thorny details of legislative compromises, that he may be undervaluing the connective bonds of simpler truths." His real problem is that he is an ideologue who seems hellbent on turning America into something it's not, namely a European style social democracy. The reason Gov. Palin is so popular in the heartlands is that she understands why Obama's approach is wrong, and she's not afraid to say so. "She respects our constitution. She's for limited government, lower taxes, and free markets" is one argument you'll hear time and again when listening to the interviews of people in the queues at her book signing events. Americans like America the way it is. They don't want it to be turned into something different. Palin gets it, he doesn't. That's one thing he could learn from her.

Dowd goes on to claim that "Palin can be stupefyingly simplistic, but she seems dynamic. Obama is impressively complex but he seems static." Apart from the fact that this is condescending tripe, it's also wrong. Palin is dynamic only at the personal level. At the political level, she's not interested in active government - legislation for legislation's sake. As governor, she did what needed to be done, and not one iota more. In fact, the main thing she was famous for during her governship (apart from the ethics reform and the gas pipeline legislation) was her use of the veto pen. She wasn't joking when she called on Obama to veto the $787 billion stimulus bill. There's no doubt that that is what she would have done, if she had been in his position - even if the bill had been produced by her own party.

If Palin is the Mrs No of American politics, Obama is the Mr Yes. Yes we can! - pass new legislation on every subject under the sun. Yes can can! - ram through Congress bills thousands of pages long, without scheduling any time for proper scrutiny or debate. Yes we can! - nationalize whole sections of the American economy. Obama's problem isn't that he's static. His problem is that he's doing too much - way too much. That's another subject on which he could learn from Gov. Palin.

Dowd's final observation is that Gov. Palin "nurtures her grass roots while he neglects his." This just shows that Dowd really doesn't know the first thing about Palin, or about why the average American instinctively connects with her. Anyone who has followed the Governor's activities for the last twelve months will have noticed that she's spent little to no time 'nurturing her grassroots'. While still in the governor's office, she barely left the state of Alaska. Since handing over the reigns to her Lt. Governor, she spent even less time outside the state. The only way she communicated was through Facebook, and even there part of the time she was talking directly to Washington about Washington policy issues. She's understaffed, underfunded (though if the first week sales figures for her book are anything to go by, she probably won't suffer from that particular problem much longer), and underorganized in the early primary states.

The fact that at every stop on her book tour people are still out there in their thousands isn't because they're being herded like sheep to show up when she wants them to. They're there because they instinctively recognize that she's grassroots herself. It's what they keep telling the many journalists queuing up to interview them: "She's understands me. She's one of us. She's like me." That's why they support her, and why many of them would smash through a brick wall for her - or indeed, spend a night sleeping outside in the cold. It's not something you can fake, it's not for sale, and there isn't a political consultant out there who can help you develop it.

What consultants can teach you is a dark art that Obama has already mastered to perfection, namely how to organize grassroots support, make it march to your tune, and use it to fund your operations. But once you've won your election, and your actions in government betray that you never really cared about them in the first place, it's impossible to make them do the same thing a second time. Not out of love, anyway. Obama knows this, so he'll run an extremely negative campaign in 2012 to try to scare his grassroots into voting for him a second time. It'll work with some of them, but it won't work with all of them. Without Hope&Change, Obama will be just another politician.

If there's one thing Obama could learn from Gov. Palin, it's to stop thinking that he's better than the people he's been elected to represent. He should stop believing his own myth (propagated by people like Dowd), come down from his throne, and actually try to see things from their perspective. He would see people who couldn't care less about healthcare reform or cap & tax. They just want him to fix the economy at home, win the war abroad, and keep America safe, strong, and prosperous. As Gov. Palin would tell him, everything else is bullcrap.