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| Peggy Noonan: the Left has to kill Sarah Palin . . . or else . . . |
| 2008-09-03 |
| Wall Street Journal Gut: The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It's not going to be a little successful or a little not; it's not going to be a wash. She is either going to be magic or one of history's accidents. She is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books. Of which there should be plenty, as we've never had a year like this, with the fabulous freak of a campaign. More immediately and seriously on Palin: Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because 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. There are only two questions. 1. Can she take it? Will she be rattled? Can she sail through high seas? Can she roll with most punches and deliver some jabs herself? 2. And while she's taking it, rolling with it and sailing through, can she put herself forward convincingly as serious enough, grounded enough, weighty enough that the American people can imagine her as vice president of the United States? I suppose every candidate for vice president faces these questions to some degree, but because Palin is new, unknown, and a woman, it's all much more so. *** I don't think the most powerful attack line will be, in the end, inexperience. Our nation appears to be in a cycle in which inexperience seems something of a lure. "He's fresh, he's new, he hasn't appalled me yet!" I don't think it's age. While Palin seems to me young, so does Obama. I freely concede this is a drawback of getting older: you keep upping your idea of what "old enough" is. But only because when you're 50 you know you're wiser and more seasoned than you were at 40, or should be. America, even as it ages, loves youth and admires its strength. I think the left will go hard on this: Fringe. Radical. What goes on in her church? Isn't she extreme? Does she really think God wants a pipeline? What does Sarah Barracuda really mean? They're going to try and make her strange, outré, oddball. And not in a good way. In all this, and in its involvement in this week's ritual humiliation of a 17-year-old girl, the mainstream press may seriously overplay its hand, and court a backlash that impacts the election. More on that in a moment. *** I'll tell you how powerful Mrs. Palin already is: she reignited the culture wars just by showing up. She scrambled the battle lines, too. The crustiest old Republican men are shouting "Sexism!" when she's slammed. Pro-woman Democrats are saying she must be a bad mother to be all ambitious with kids in the house. Great respect goes to Barack Obama not only for saying criticism of candidates' children is out of bounds in political campaigns, but for making it personal, and therefore believable. "My mother had me when she was eighteen…" That was the lovely sound of class in American politics. *** Let me say of myself and almost everyone I know in the press, all the chattering classes and political strategists and inside dopesters of the Amtrak Acela Line: We live in a bubble and have around us bubble people. We are Bubbleheads. We know this and try to compensate for it by taking road trips through the continent -- we're on one now, in Minneapolis -- where we talk to normal people. But we soon forget the pithy, knowing thing the garage mechanic said in the diner, and anyway we weren't there long enough in the continent to KNOW, to absorb. We view through a prism of hyper-sophistication, and judge by the rules of Chevy Chase and Greenwich, of Cleveland Park and McLean, of Bronxville and Manhattan. And again we know this, we know this is our limit, our lack. But we also forget it. And when you forget you're a Bubblehead you get in trouble, you misjudge things. For one thing, you assume evangelical Christians will be appalled and left agitated by the circumstances of Mrs. Palin's daughter. But modern American evangelicals are among the last people who'd judge her harshly. It is the left that is about to go crazy with Puritan judgments; it is the right that is about to show what mellow looks like. Religious conservatives know something's wrong with us, that man's a mess. They are not left dazed by the latest applications of this fact. "This just in – there's a lot of sinning going on out there" is not a headline they'd understand to be news. So the media's going to wait for the Christian right to rise up and condemn Mrs. Palin, and they're not going to do it because it's not their way, and in any case her problems are their problems. Christians lived through the second half of the 20th century, and the first years of the 21st. They weren't immune from the culture, they just eventually broke from it, or came to hold themselves in some ways apart from it. I think the media will explain the lack of condemnation as "Republican loyalty" and "talking points." But that's not what it will be. Another Bubblehead blind spot. I'm bumping into a lot of critics who do not buy the legitimacy of small town mayorship (Palin had two terms in Wasilla, Alaska, population 9,000 or so) and executive as opposed to legislative experience. But executives, even of small towns, run something. There are 262 cities in this country with a population of 100,000 or more. But there are close to a hundred thousand small towns with ten thousand people or less. "You do the math," the conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway told me. "We are a nation of Wasillas, not Chicagos." *** The mainstream media, which has been holding endless symposia here on the future of media in the 21st century, is in danger of missing a central fact of that future: If they appear, once again, as they have in the past, to be people not reporting the battle but engaged in the battle, if they allow themselves to be tagged by that old tag, which so tarnished them in the past, they will do more to imperil their own future than the Internet has. This is true: fact is king. Information is king. Great reporting is what every honest person wants now, it's the one ironic thing we have less of in journalism than we need. But reporting that carries an agenda, that carries Bubblehead assumptions and puts them forth as obvious truths? Well, some people want that. But if I were doing a business model for broadsheets and broadcast networks I'd say: Fact and data are our product, we're putting everything into reporting, that's what we're selling, interpretation is the reader's job, and think pieces are for the edit page where we put the hardy, blabby hacks. That was a long way of saying: Dig deep into Sarah Palin, get all you can, talk to everybody, get every vote, every quote, tell us of her career and life, she may be the next vice president. But don't play games. And leave her kid alone, bitch. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #11 Actually I think she was a speechwriter for Reagan. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2008-09-03 23:01 |
| #10 AllahHateMe, Peggy Noonan was President George H.W. Bush's speechwriter. Now she writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Joournal Op-Ed page, and apparently is a political commentator for MSNBC. She has never forgiven George W. for not being a clone of his father, and has grown increasingly strident and unamusing about it over the years. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-09-03 21:50 |
| #9 "Sarah can take care of herself" Boy howdy. I'm guessing that somewhere, Jesse Jackson will be smiling tonight. |
| Posted by: Minister of funny walks 2008-09-03 20:51 |
| #8 Who's Peggy Noonan? |
| Posted by: AllahHateMe 2008-09-03 20:50 |
| #7 I think Reagan once announced the bombing of Russia off mike... |
| Posted by: European Conservative 2008-09-03 20:39 |
| #6 Sarah can take care of herself: I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities. Watch it all. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2008-09-03 20:36 |
| #5 Regret to report Peggy is helping the MSM to kill Palin. politico.com is reporting that Peggy was caught off air but on a hot mike calling Palin's nomination political bullsh*t. The dems are eating it up. |
| Posted by: MarkZ 2008-09-03 20:33 |
| #4 It's pretty clear that the left has pulled out all the stops and gone into 'anything goes just kill her' mode. They will do or say anything. They are desperate. |
| Posted by: Iblis 2008-09-03 19:39 |
| #3 JohnQC, so that's what - ten, twenty thousand at most? Who probably wouldn't have voted Republican anyway. |
| Posted by: Rambler in California 2008-09-03 19:06 |
| #2 Doesn't look like Palin will get the PETA vote does it? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2008-09-03 18:05 |
| #1 Joe Badin is not her antagonist, even though they are competing for the same office. Metro Male Obama is her cultural foe. My money's on her. She has more balls than Chicago effeminate and I'm pretty sure she knows how to use them. |
| Posted by: Richard of Oregon 2008-09-03 15:13 |