Palin and the "Conservative Intelligentsia" Backlash

A recent Politico piece focusing on a “conservative intelligentsia” backlash against Sarah Palin playing identity politics gleans this nugget from George Will:

Asked if the GOP would remain the party of ideas if Palin captures the nomination, Will said: “The answer is emphatically no.”

I think self-government and individual liberty are grand ideas. Principled and limited governance is a grand idea. I’m not sure what ideas Will thinks will be lost here, but in my estimation, the federal government does not exist as some sort of symposium for over-intellectualizing or a platform for one party to promote their own agenda. Sure, that’s where we’ve been for a very, very long time (around 220 years), but wanting to scale that back is one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard. That’s what Palin brings to the table. Her current media appearances are not indicative of how she would govern, nor are they indicative of how she would conduct herself on the campaign trail.

The piece also quotes the Manhattan Institute’s Heather McDonald as saying:

“She is living up to the most skeptical assessment of her.”

I’m not so sure. The most skeptical assessment of her was that she was an absolute ignoramus whose 15 minutes of fame would be over right after Obama won the election, and we’d never hear from her again. To the chagrin of many, that didn’t happen.

The piece goes on to state:

For now, however, Palin’s appeal is largely rooted in the sympathy she’s gleaned from her loudly voiced resentments toward the left, the news media and the GOP establishment.

I don’t buy this for one second. Any wars of words she has engaged in recently have had little to do with her appeal, they have only served to galvanize her most ardent supporters, while possibly turning off other people. This is sloppy because she is not actually campaigning, nor can we say with any certainty that she is going to.

The media’s hysteria over Sarah Palin’s nomination threw her entire identity, both political and personal, into the deepest recesses of the American psyche. Painting Palin merely as a sympathetic figure, as this Politico piece does, is to deny her real appeal completely, which revolves around a genuine impulse in America that yearns for a much-needed pruning of our federal government. Much of the electorate is way beyond caring what the “conservative intelligentsia” or the GOP establishment has to say. Many Americans are more interested in what people like Sarah Palin have to say.

Regarding her reference to the Bush family as “blue bloods”:

This comment raised eyebrows in GOP circles. According to tradition, the politics of class warfare is supposed to be something that Republicans accuse Democrats of practicing.

Palin was perhaps not correct in using “blue bloods” to reference the Bush family specifically, but she certainly was not using it in reference to class in the proper sense; she appears to have meant strictly in a political sense … after all, 12 years total of Bush males in the White House over a 20 year span is quite substantial. Palin was merely channeling a great trend in the country right now, which is a grassroots opposition to the political elite. In that sense, “blue bloods” certainly applies to the Bush family, and if the term happened to stir up a few resentments in small town America, so be it. It appears that the GOP establishment is feeling a little uncomfortable that the moat around the castle is running a little dry. Many Americans really don’t have any problem with that whatsoever. The tea party movement was no accident; people are fed up with the machinations of both parties.

But Palin’s skeptics said a successful presidential candidacy would need to be buoyed by genuine policy vision, not merely grievance.

This statement is critical; I agree Palin simply must shift gears from pointing out what others say about her to what she believes about this country. She has the name recognition in spades; it’s time to come balls to the wall with a positive vision for what it means to be an American. I believe she will do this if she decided to hit the campaign trail. I think she realizes the teflon must come on eventually, should she decide to run.

Palin can take a jab at anyone she wants, as long as she does so like she did during her acceptance speech for the vice-presidential nomination. In that speech, she called out the media with a quick zinger, then paused and looked straight at the camera with a look of defiance and confidence, almost a bemusement that anyone would dismiss her or think she would sit down and shut up. It was pure political theater but came across as genuine and charming. She then went straight back to talking of her love for American traditions and a reverence for mainstream American values.

That’s the Sarah Palin who can win the White House.