As I was explaining to somebody last night, the reason so many people don't 'get' Sarah Palin is because they only engage Republicans as 'them'. What tends to be so surprising about listening to me pontificate about conservative values is that it sounds logical but it remains incongruous. It's a dissonant cultural and racial thing because there remain large numbers of Americans who have no idea that there exist more than a few Cosby kids in reality. Similarly these folks don't understand how such a thing as a black Republican can be - to their minds it is oxymoronic. This is discussed at the Belmont Club today, very timely because, well we wasted a lot of time talking about politics last night...
Perhaps the problem has to do as well with his campaign consultant, David Axelrod. … Axelrod comes out of leftist Democratic politics … and he has specialized in helping his candidates prevail in primary races when winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to winning the entire election. … the general-election contest was a slow-motion coronation. … So this is new for Axelrod, as it is for Obama. They are not running in a mostly liberal, mostly Democratic state. They are running in a 50-50 country, in which far more people describe themselves as “conservative” than say they are “liberal.” For them, it is probably difficult to imagine that Sarah Palin has appeal, but she does.Johnathan Freeland’s amazement at how anyone could take McCain and Palin seriously recalls the famous remark of Pauline Kael, who upon learning that Richard Nixon beat George McGovern by a landslide in 1972 said, “how could that be? I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon.” Kael probably traveled in a self-selected and heremetic social circle whose gatekeepers applied unstated but effective political filters. “All those who don’t belong, keep out.” But it is not just the Left which is cloistered. A glance at my social networking list would show precious few voters for Obama. If Obama were to win by a landslide I wouldn’t know anyone who liked him either. But while in the past the privilege of belonging to a circle was the province of the elite, today anyone can join his own ghetto. The Internet has made it easy for anyone to restrict his gaze to only what he wants to see. And from there it is but a single step to living in a self-referential world which could be shattered by exposure to contrary information.
Somebody counted off Obamaphiles from Obamaphobes and declared the Republicans as 'haves' and Democrats as 'have-nots', which is exactly why they don't understand Sarah Palin. She represents the 'have-nots' more than any of the liberal lawyers of the Left, and it makes Democrats crazy recognizing that the party of the 'Haves' haven't come up with a clone of Dick Cheney in this go round.
It takes some doing to get over this cultural and political dissonance, but that is the kind of thinking needs to happen to make adequate judgments. An example of that kind of dissonance transcendant thinking can be practiced at home. Simply sing the words to 'Amazing Grace' to the tune of the theme from Gilligan's Island. Go ahead, try it. It works.
You cannot just win by winning your people but by effectively governing over the opposition. Republicans who happen to be 'haves' are acutely aware of this - because the Left is always comfortable blaming America's problems as caused by the presumably immoral actions of the wealthy, and are always ready to tax them into submission, transferring their ill-gotten gains in a moral, welfare state, money laundering scheme. "All the money we spent on this immoral war could have..." is the prefix for a typical rant.
I'm not afraid of a nation under Obama, I'm a hedge-betting 'have'. But I recognize his Chicago machine scorched earth policy that buried the Clintons, who, not surprisingly conceded that Obama's dog has the biggest teeth. Have no doubt that the Clinton War Room will be reconstructed into the Clinton Armageddon Bunker, and the hardness of next battle for the Democratic soul gets kicked up a notch next season. Obama understands that he had to triangulate to win the country, but it leaves him less consistent than McCain, who was and is a maverick from the GOP Party line.
Still that seems to be something Democrats don't, or refuse to understand, which is why they freak when I speak about McCain and Schwartzeneggar in the same breath. These are men who know that progress cannot be made by strong arming the opposition. They defy the Republican stereotype, as Palin defies it. But they have always, these Dems, been able to neatly throw McCain into the Bush bucket, and the Republican Party into the guise of the Christian Right, social conservatives. It doesn't pay, in a race to the top of the Democratic pile to make real distinctions between Republicans. Now that Obama is at the top, their weakness is that their big supporters don't recognize the rest of the electorate for what it is. Instead, they assume we are all Bush Zombies, yearning for four more years. Again, this is why Palin who is not a geopolitical neoconservative wonk, like Cheney, is such a mystery to them. Palin is the 'Dirty Jobs' candidate who works bi-partisan miracles that leaves her state 8 billion in the black, and she looks like a lot of America. It's just an America which is sadly foreign to the Obama machine.
