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.
To the point.
My main gripe with Douthat’s clumn is that he asserts, (like so many others in our preposterous media-circus do), that she is ‘…talented enough…” to “…have a second act…” on the national stage.
Of course none of the media people aske each other to define what specific talent they ascribe to her, or ask what value the talent they do perceive has as far as good and capable governance is concerned.
For me, the only talent Palin displayed in the national spotlight was her ability to inflame and weaponize the ignorance of a small segment of the lunatic rightwing.
I think too that her monumntal narcissism and the attendant high levels of delusion and denial that accompany such a character affliction, preclude herfrom having even the basic skills required even for rational thought, let alone the cognitive, critical thinking skills necessary for apprehending reality and responsible decisionmaking.
she may notbe dumb, but functionally she is a dumbass.
her appeal is that she acts like a dumbass. Whether she actually is one or not is not the point.
Yes, but my point is that functionally she is a dumbass; I don’t believe it’s an act. Sure there are strategic components to her staging and rhetoric designed to appeal to the violent and the ignorant, but I maintain that even aside from these calculated tactics, her inability to comprehend the essence and complexity of any main issues or ideas delegitimizes any claim to responsible ‘talent’ trumpeted on her behalf by her supporters and the vacuous media hounds.
I agree with you, but my point is that the GOP likes dumbasses because they appeal to a segment of the poor and middle class that would be otherwise inaccessible to them. It’s their form of anti-elitism to put forward dumbass candidates and then watch a bunch of dumbass people get offended when the candidate is attacked for their stupidity and rube tastes.
I agree with you. My lament is the claim of ‘talent’, and my broader complaint is that the major media doesn’t challenge such an absurd claim on the merits, or at least attempt to draw a distinction between valuable, productive talent and the sort of manipulative skills that serve to increase the levels of ignorance.
But, of course, the media is more centered on entertainment value than information value, so their failure on this score is no surprise.
I vote she’s a dumbass but crafty. If not, she’s an incredible actress, and I don’t think that’s true.
I agree with you too Heart of the Rockies. There are plenty of people out there who are dumb as tree stumps but who possess the ‘talent’ to exploit and dumb down others in a way that manipulates them into supporting ideas and actions that are diametrically opposed to their own best interests and counter to reality.
If our media was responsible they’d not foster an apparently praiseworthy view of such “talent”, and when they did their peers would challenge them on it.
Sadly, as with so much else, I doubt I’ll see such reformation of the press in my lifetime.
My mother called people like Palin “smart like a fox.”
“But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.”
Except that Sarah Palin is not a great success story.
Depends how you define success.