In Defense of Sarah Palin

Oct. 5, 2008

When you start up your car in the morning, you can always tell which of the random little knocks and tings are normal, and which are wheels-coming-off serious.
The clatter and screech coming out of the Obama Inevitability Juggernaut has, for months, been your typical, boring, cliche-ridden background noise of a campaign coasting to victory: “McCain is an old coot, he’s actually George Bush in drag,” etc, etc. But since August 29, when this supposed racked-up, dying, has-been cancer patient chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate, the Obama campaign has taken on the tenor of the wheels-coming-off variety.
I offer Exhibit A: In
Robert Downes’ never-so-aptly-titled “Random Thoughts” column in the Northern Express of September 8, we are treated to every sneering bit of condescending, pedantic contempt the left can muster about traditional America:
“If you’ve ever been to Wasilla, Alaska, rest assured, you wouldn’t want anyone from that dirt patch of a town of junk cars and snowmobile wrecks to rise above the post of dog
catcher. For starters, Wasilla has an unemployment rate of 11.2 percent, compared to the national average of 5.8 percent – It’s George Bush’s America.”
Oh, dear.
Speaking of junk cars, ol’ Bob hit all the high points with that little bit of journalistic drunk driving. What, exactly is his point? That George Bush has helped to create an economic dynamo where nearly everyone who wants a job can have one, except where there are old snowmobiles? I somehow doubt it. Or that the stump-toothed locals in Wasilla are clearly unable to clean up the dirt patches, except that one purty gal who escaped the squalor to somehow get elected Governor? Huh? I guess I am just not sophisticated enough to understand the nuanced, cosmopolitan humor. Evidently, Mr. Downes never travels through Cedar, or Kingsley, or Buckley, or Kalkaska on his way to his numerous peace marches in the debonair enclaves of Ann Arbor. Or, maybe he’s never been through Chicago’s south side, that Barak Obama once claimed as his home.
Granted, I’ve never been all that enamored of John McCain, either. Back in the spring, my e-mail was being spammed to death by the geniuses at the GOP who, I felt, had colluded with the geniuses in the Democrat party to so completely front-load their primaries that we would not only be treated to an endless campaign, but that this lack of yeast would result in exactly the wrong candidate. I finally wrote them a response to their money pleas with the following note on May 25, after it was all over:
“As a conservative-traditionalist, I will not vote for McCain under any circumstances, save one: He chooses an energetic, thorough-going, Movement-style conservative. Of course, I will vote “down-ballot,” but the worst governing coalition (at least in terms of preserving liberty) is a liberal Republican Executive, and a “veto-proof” liberal legislature. At 95 years of age (or whatever he is), McCain is at the end of his actuarial rope, and his successor is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Here’s my short list:
1) Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska,
2) Michael Steele, Former Lt. Governor of Maryland and Fox News contributor,
3) Duncan Hunter, US Rep. from
California.
Maybe they took my advice.
In the apoplexy of liberal hysteria over Sarah Palin, they miss the central point that they have been missing for two generations, and that they will continue to cause them to lose elections: There is not supposed to be an aristocratic primogeniture in America. Downe’s allusions to “dirt-patch towns” and “Red-State” Americans that have been “getting married at 14 since God knows when” is a series of third-grade paeans to this insular, juvenile way of thinking. Liberals will be forever tarred as thin-skinned elites as long as their default position on conservatism is we are all extras from Deliverance who really enjoy a bunk-up with our sisters, and beat our wives while watching WWF Raw.
And, rather than have even a teaspoon of curiosity about traditional, religious, sober conservatives, they stick to their Wilsonian dementia, and keep coming to the same stereotypical conclusions about American traditionalists. They used to refer to such elite, dismissive, non-curious people as “aristocrats.”
People left old Europe in droves to get away from these governing aristocrats who looked down their noses at at the rabble of dirt farmers and religious zealots, and these elites-for-life wanted no part of a new, more enlightened (and to them dangerous) way of thinking. When Martin Luther nailed his eviction notice on the door of the Wittenburg Castle, he was telling not only the Pope to get lost, but, he was also telling every governing aristocrat to wake up, the folks were learning to read.
Behind the cloistered walls of their own mental Wittenburg Castle, liberal statists think America yearns to be governed by John Kennedy lounging about in his white cotton sweater and dock-siders, or, at the very least, by someone who’s been to his School of Government up at Harvard. And in the process of proving this bit of silly and self-destructive political science with their sharp-elbowed tactics, they manage to offend nearly everyone within shouting distance who has ever gone to a community college, driven a Chevrolet, and gone to church once or twice in the past year.
In the breathless attacks on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, liberal statists like Robert Downes peel back the curtain of their own projected classist bigotry. In the grand Democrat party tradition of Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry, Barack Obama is a thin-skinned, bigoted, elitist bore. Normal Americans sense this, and no amount of “Random” off-putting attacks on them will ever change their minds. Can’t imagine why.

John C. Arens of Cedar writes as the “Conservative Curmudgeon.”