February 7, 2010
Watching Sarah Palin's speech to the Tea Party National Convention last night in Nashville on PJTV, it was clear that she has a rapport and comfort with the Tea Partiers that is unmatched among politicians at the national level.
While I suspect that mine is a minority view among the leadership of conservative activism and journalism (and I am often reminded in a jocular sort of way that my view of Palin is a minority among my colleagues at The Examiner and The Weekly Standard), I believe Palin is miles ahead of every other national figure in understanding where the country has been in the last year and what the Tea Party movement means about the future course of American politics.That doesn't mean I think Palin is or even should be a candidate for president or any other elective office in 2012 or any other time. What it does mean is I believe Palin has a unique insight into the state of things and is moving systematically and intelligently in concert with that insight. Where that leads, nobody, including Palin, likely knows at this point.
That I am not alone in seeing Palin in such terms is demonstrated by, of all places, The New York Times where reporter Mark Liebovich wrote:
"Her growing cast of advisers and support system could be working in the service of any number of goals: a presidential run, a de facto role as the leader of the Tea Party movement, a lucrative career as a roving media entity — or all of the above. Ms. Palin represents a new breed of unelected public figures operating in an environment in which politics, news media and celebrity are fused as never before.
"Whether she ever runs for anything else, Ms. Palin has already achieved a status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit, a staff to guide her, an enormous income and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office.
“'Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has,' said the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett (who negotiated, among other things, Ms. Palin’s lucrative deal with Fox News, an arrangement with the Washington Speaker’s Bureau that pays her a reported $100,000 a pop, and a deal with Harper Collins to write her memoir, 'Going Rogue,' which has already earned her upward of eight figures)."
Liebovich thus demonstrated, as University of Wisconsin law professor and contrarian blogger Ann Althouse mused, how Palin has gone from "blithering idiot" to "devious genius" in barely more than a year:
"What I love about all this is the extreme contrast to the way Palin was mocked when she resigned as Governor of Alaska. I, myself, did not think it was stupid, because I pictured her doing something like what she is actually doing, but I certainly remember the derision. Her political career was over. She was 'toast.'
"A big difference between what I pictured and what she's doing is that she's staying in Alaska. I thought she needed to get out of Alaska (in order to run for President). It's innovative the way she's staying in Alaska. As a blogger, operating from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, I love that she's working through Facebook and staying rooted in Wasila, Alaska. Fox News is building a TV studio in her house in Wasila. That's so not toast."
During her 40-minute Nashville speech, Palin repeatedly struck rhetorical gold by assailing Washington politicians for talking down to the American people, as when she branded the exploding national debt a form of "generational theft" and proclaimed that "many of us have had enough."
Similarly, she zeroed in on President Obama's policy of treating terrorists like the Christmas Bomber who tried to blow up a Northwest Air plane carrying nearly 300 passengers and crew members with a bomb sewn into his underwear on the same legal basis as an accused liquor store robber, saying "treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at great risk because that's not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this. They know we're at war, and to win that war we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern."
Palin understands the frustration felt by millions of Americans, including legions of independents and moderates, watching as Washington leaders careen down a path of expanding federal power and the skyrocketing spending, taxation, regulation and debt that inevitably accompanies that expansion, even as public opinion surveys document growing oppposition to such a course.
Washington is embarked on a fundamentally anti-democratic course that undermines public confidence and government credibility, the two most essential elements of a regime's legitimacy, and alienates voters across the political spectrum. Most people don't articulate it in such terms but, as political philosopher Willmoore Kendall (himself a product of Oklahoma populism)often said of Middle Americans, they "feel it in their bones," and they are repelled by it.
Palin also demonstrated an understanding that the Tea Party movement must be independent of both major political parties, which share the blame for the country's current morass, in order to be credible.
She encouraged her Nashville audience "against allowing this movement to be defined by any one leader or any one politician. The tea party movement is not a top-down operation. It's a ground-up call to action ... it's bigger than any king or queen of the tea party, and it's a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a teleprompter."
Thus she encouraged the Tea Partiers to remember that they "have both parties running scared" and that their movement is "fresh, young and agile."
While watching Palin last night, I was reminded of something I wrote in The Examiner the day after the 2008 election: "Palin connects with real people as one of them because she is. She has that rare gift of speaking with candor and grace in the common manner."
Palin is not the first conservative politician to display such a gift. With his eight extraordinary years in the White House behind us, it is sometimes difficult to remember that strident voices from the same quarters who today mock and deride Palin did much the same thing to Ronald Reagan. He was old, he was an actor, he was simple-minded.
And, just as Reagan was consistently under-estimated by his opponents in the years before the White House, Palin appears to be blessed with opponents in both parties who accord her a similar lack of respect.
They say God looks after drunks and the United States of America. Maybe that's why Palin's speech last night opened with this tribute: "I am so proud to be American. Happy birthday Ronald Reagan."
