Russ Douthat has a somewhat decent column in today’s New York Times that argues persuasively that Sarah Palin never should have accepted John McCain’s invitation to join his ticket. I agree with Douthat about that. She used poor judgment. She should have known that she was badly underqualified for the position and she also should have considered how the national spotlight would reflect on her family before subjecting them to it.
But Douthat makes another argument in his piece that I have to quarrel with.
That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.
Douthat is probably right that Palin’s appeal to people who have no college education is explained by the democratic ideal. But there’s a problem. Dan Quayle went to DePauw University and earned a law degree from the University of Indiana-Indianapolis. George W. Bush graduated from Yale and earned a degree from Harvard Business School. They both came from blueblood families and they both went to excellent universities. But they both resemble Sarah Palin more than any other prominent national politician because they share her willful ignorance about national and global affairs.
The distinction between Sarah Palin, and Dan Quayle and George W. Bush (and John McCain, for that matter), is that she can be seen as an overachiever, while they were all underachievers. When Republicans approach the electorate they tend to use the populism of planned idiocy as a way of making Wall Street’s priorities appealing to farmers, ranchers, and the lower classes. That is why jackasses like Quayle and Bush succeed as conservative politicians. It’s also why Palin was so popular with the Republican base. You can call it Dumbass Appeal.
Palin didn’t flop because she’s a dumbass. She flopped because she’s corrupt, she can’t tell the truth, she’s incoherent, and she can’t even fake being qualified.
But, here’s another tip to Douthat. He says:
Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)
Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.
This is not inevitable. But the Republican Party is anti-women, anti-black, anti-latino, and anti-gay. If you are black, latino, female, or gay and you run as a Republican, you can expect people to constantly ask, WTF? They will go after you for being a opportunistic hypocritical half-a-fool, and that has nothing to do with class or (really) gender. It’s just the natural response to seeing someone campaign on issues that make no sense.
