Don't Count Palin Out

At a time when even such Republican primitives as Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough are bemoaning the sorry state of the GOP, when such Republican fallen saviors as John Ensign and Mark Sanford seem intent on making full-scale, long-play horses' asses of themselves in public, when polls imply that the lion's share of the so-called Reagan Democrats are skittish or downright embarrassed about identifying themselves with the Republican Party and when the legions of people paid to do so are scratching their collective head about who the Republicans can run in 2012 -- well, even at a time such as this, I say let's not make the mistake of writing a premature finis to the short, strange public career of Sarah Louise Heath Palin, governor of Alaska, mother of improbably named children, former beauty queen, wife of Todd, and prima ballerina assoluta of the New Media.

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PD toolbar!Sarah! Sarah, whom the camera loves; Sarah, whose greatest performance of the long, ugly campaign season was on a stoner-inspired late-night sketch show; Sarah, who looked those spoilsport Eastern Establishment meanies Katie and Charlie right in the eye and brazenly flubbed her answers to their junior-high-school Constitution test questions; Sarah, whose "you-won't-have-Nixon-to-kick-around-anymore" news conference at least momentarily stole the spotlight from the stomach-turning coverage of Michael Jackson's death and burial. SARAH!

Never has a political figure so polarized the television-watching, voting, blog-following public. And I do mean never, since no other candidate for high national office was ever so well equipped to offer a tabloid-ready, "Access Hollywood" persona to a decadent (some would say depraved) news media willing to swallow it whole. DePauw-educated newspaper scion Dan Quayle, his Sam Goldwynesque bloopers notwithstanding, was Lloyd Bentsen in comparison with her. The pratfalls of the Clinton administration, for all their "Beverly Hillbillies" ratings potential, never got the traction that even one of Palin's televised winks got. But an interesting, perhaps historic, dynamic was at work the whole time: while one segment of the population, the one long identified with the educated, liberal wing of the Democratic Party, was laughing hysterically, another segment -- the other segment, long identified with Middle America, with organized low-church religion, and with Ronald Reagan's ascendancy -- had found a national sweetheart.

More surprising and disturbing yet: Neither group knew what the hell the other was talking about.

She was either "one of us," someone we'd like to see standing up on our behalf to the Congress and the Supreme Court, or she was the worst possible choice John McCain could have made, an early and important indication of his nascent senility. She was either being savaged by a left-wing, very possibly misogynist press, or she was a pig in lipstick, blithely ignorant of geography, history, and pretty well everything else. Moose hunting and fly fishing either made her like us, or made her decidedly, definitely, indisputably not like us.

What she raised, in short, were questions of class and taste, things egalitarian Americans have not traditionally liked talking about. She seemed for all the world a driven, successful representative of the last class about whom --bafflingly, and sadly -- it seems OK to tell demeaning jokes, the lower middle. And no member of that demonized class had ever risen so high or come so close.

McCain lost for reasons that may or may not have had to do with Sarah Palin. He was not a compelling candidate, and he was beaten by a candidate in every way more charismatic and more photogenic, if not more qualified. America was in bad, bad shape at home and overseas, and the same stubborn old white guys who had turned against Jimmy Carter in 1980 turned again, this time toward an epoch-making African American.

But history tells us nothing if not this: They'll turn again. In 1968, they hoisted their middle fingers at the Great Society and all it stood for and elected a law-and-order political survivor who had all the charisma of your creepy uncle who lived with his parents and never married. In 2000, they rejected a smart, well-spoken blueblood who could form complete sentences and whose grasp of the issues nobody doubted, in favor of a bumbling, mumbling governor who didn't seem to know that the Gettysburg Address was a pretty darned good speech or that the Arab world was volatile and very, very pissed. Who's to say that after four or eight years of Camelot Revisited they won't get mad as hell, vow not to take it anymore, and resurrect a good-humored, still-youthful pol who may have had it right all along?

Pawlenty? Who's ever heard of him? Newt? Gross. Jindal? Oh, please. Sarah Palin will leave politics and host a cable talk show, you say; but are voters who elected the Gipper, the Terminator, Al Franken, and Jesse Ventura to high office incapable of electing an Oprah? She's facing possible ethics violations, you say; but aren't we the most forgiving people imaginable? She's let down the people of Alaska, but does anyone in the Lower 48 really give a rat's ass?

To the Left: the Culture Wars are neither won nor lost, but merely on hiatus due to conflicting priorities. To the Right: Stand By Your Woman.


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