How The Left Went Wrong By Not Getting It Right About Sarah Palin–UPDATED
December 8, 2009 / 9:59 am • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierSarah Palin turns out to not be the mindless, soulless creature the left painted her to be during the 2008 election season.
The liberal press, the leftist bloggers, and the activists who hate Sarah Palin succeeded in turning Sarah Palin into a cartoon during the election cycle and many people were inclined to believe them. Sarah Palin interfered, at the time, with what voters wanted at the moment: young, hip, new, black. If she was turned into a moose-killin’, baby-making, no paper-reading, dummie, then people could justify a decision they already wanted to make. And that strategy also worked only as long as the man they elected, Barack Obama stayed young, hip, and new.
Reality hit President Obama who had the misfortune of having to live up to sky-high expectations. But don’t feel too sorry for him. They were his own creation and they came at the expense of women like Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. As his star fades, people look around and see what they passed over.
Sarah Palin is looking better.
Her new book Going Rogue has sold 2.7 million books and counting. I have it and continue to read it and the more I read it, the more I like Sarah Palin. And that’s the whole point of the book, really: to get Sarah Palin back to neutral public perception ground; to humanize her. She was a cartoon. Now, in her own words (and after reading it, I don’t know how anyone could capture the cadence of rhythm of her rhetorical and prose style, it’s so unique) she’s saying who she is. And she’s believable. And she’s not stupid.
And she’s normal.
The bar was set so low for Sarah Palin, that she’s surprising everyone, including the press. People are even rethinking the Katie Couric interview and Ms. Palin made a really good point: Why not release all the tape, unedited and uncut? If Sarah Palin comes off as such a complete moron, it should harm Sarah Palin worse, not make her look better. A win-win for the left and the press, but Katie Couric won’t release the tape. Too bad, it makes Katie Couric look more like a partisan hack, if that were possible.
Over the next year, I’m guessing that Ms. Palin will just be not scary. In the mean time, she’s hopefully boning up on foreign policy, philosophy, etc. There are hints in her speeches that she’s doing just that.
The press and left will still call her stupid. They did that with Ronald Reagan (doddering grandpa) and Gerald Ford (fumbling moron) and George W. Bush (blathering idiot). Why? Because anyone who disagrees with leftist conventional wisdom is, by definition, stupid. So, once again, the bar will be set so low, even a McChimpyhaliburtan can leap it.
President Obama (dithering on Afghanistan) and the Climategate folks and the Congressional Dems cutting of grandma’s healthcare, have destroyed any reverence for pseudo-intellectualism. Pointy-headed smart looks ineffectual and maybe even evil.
Americans like a pragmatic, action-oriented politician. Smart enough, but not waffling (Obama), haughty (Kerry), and humorless (Gore). By over-selling intellectualism and reducing enemies to mindless dunces, the press and left are themselves, the caricature.
Sarah Palin is turning into a real, fleshed-out human being. Now that she’s established a bare minimum, she can turn toward policy questions. And she has. She has been a fearless critic or encourager depending on President Obama’s policy choices. And if the President keeps making poor choices, her criticism will look genius.
The Left made a big mistake scorning Sarah Palin. They created a solid core of adoring fans and created an image so cartoonish, that she is bound to exceed expectations.
UPDATED:
Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times Top of the Ticket notes the juxtaposition:
Obama’s new Gallup Poll job approval number is 47%. Last month it was 53%.
Regular Ticket readers will recall how in this space in late November we pointed out that Obama’s closely watched job approval slide was coinciding with Palin’s little-noticed rise in favorability. And it appeared they might cross somewhere in the 40s.
Well, ex-Sen. Obama, meet ex-Gov. Palin.
The new CNN/Opinion Research Poll shows Palin now at 46% favorable, just one point below her fellow basketball fan.
9 Responses to “How The Left Went Wrong By Not Getting It Right About Sarah Palin–UPDATED”
December 8 2009 / 11:04 am
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> Because anyone who disagrees with leftist conventional wisdom is, by definition,…
Sorry, I think “wisdom” is the wrong word, here.
“Twaddle”, “Absurdities”, “Talking Points”
All are suitable terms.
Wisdom….mmmmm, not so much so.
December 8 2009 / 11:15 am
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Whatever it is, the Smarty Pants Set believe it. They are the hive-mind and nothing, not even facts, dissuade them.
December 8 2009 / 11:31 am
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Palin’s appeal is her grounded realness. The 2008 campaign was a disaster for her — caused by the McCain handlers and her own inexperience on the national stage. As you say, she’s climbing back to neutral status and must continue her growth. She also must adjust her syntax. She’s extremely prone to run on sentences that fold back on themselves. Not only do they make terrible soundbites but they are incredibly difficult to follow and her points often get lost. Hopefully she’ll listen to someone…it’s a change that won’t affect her essence.
December 8 2009 / 11:51 am
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She wasn’t painted stupid.
She showed herself to be inexperienced and ignorant and unready and willing to run for national office anyway.
It’ll be good for her and her admirers if she takes the time to learn and to mature.
December 8 2009 / 2:31 pm
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In 1988, a rather liberal person of my acquaintance told me, in reaction to George Bush’s selection of Dan Quayle as his running mate, that “nobody votes for vice president.” The thing is, the selection of a running mate is arguably the first decision made by a president because it is a presidential decision that necessarily must be made before the election.
When then-Senator Obama selected the old party hack Joe Biden as his running mate, I knew for certain that President Obama wasn’t going to act as the “Washington outsider” that some were insisting he would. On the other hand, Senator McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin was an interesting choice. Here was someone few people had heard of and who went against all logic as a choice of running mate.
Look, running mates are chosen for a variety of reasons, but usually those reasons revolve around the conventional wisdom of presidential elections. The VP candidate is chosen to deliver the electoral votes of a large home state for the presidential candidate or to strengthen a policy area that is viewed as weak for the presidential candidate or as a sort of payback for support from some powerful group of constituents or, most often, a candidate is chosen because they can do several of those things, but Sarah Palin could do none of those things.
There was absolutely no reason for those who follow the conventional wisdom to expect her to be a choice, nor any reason for her to study up in case she was selected, so I’m not surprised that Governor Palin came off as unprepared because she was. Nobody cares about Alaska’s three electoral votes nor were there any fatcats whose donations came with a Sarah Palin string attached.
It is arguable that she was brought in to shore up McCain’s conservative credentials or was selected to boost his image as a “maverick” who would invigorate the country with new approaches or that her reputation as someone who cleaned up the Alaskan Republicans could make the ticket look more reform-oriented, but that’s not enough, in conventional opinion, to offset the real risks of putting a relative unknown into the spotlight.
But it worked! And it worked in the only way it could work. I’ve concluded that complaining about the media’s focus on her is unreasonable. Of course the media was going to focus on her as the only someone in the race that hadn’t already been written about absolutely to death. She was new, she was interesting, and she got a lot of ink because of it. That attention was a double-edged sword because although it exposed her then weaknesses, which you well state, it took considerable “buzz” away from the Democrat’s campaign.
Her selection vaulted her, quite unprepared, onto the national stage and it was up to her to figure out how to proceed from there. I thought then that she had the ability to make something of herself, once there. As a matter of fact, I still do. I also have concluded that it’s still true that “nobody votes for vice president.”
We’ll have to wait and see what happens next.
December 8 2009 / 7:05 pm
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Might also be creditable to argue that she was also selected because of her looks, relative youth and her sex.
it worked to the extent that it got plenty of ink and positive attention for McCain’s candidacy for a short time. After a week or two, she was unable to do more than help propel the ticket to a rather poor second-place showing.
She was certainly more popular with conservatives than was McCain and she remains popular with conservatives. Perhaps she’ll be able to add something besides popularity in future.
December 9 2009 / 1:33 am
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People are even rethinking the Katie Couric interview and Ms. Palin made a really good point: Why not release all the tape, unedited and uncut?-
Probably, the missing parts will turn out to have been “lost/misplaced/deleted”?
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December 9 2009 / 9:11 am
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The campaign against Palin is nothing new. The collective media pilloried Dan Quayle; who was an elder statesman in comparison to the current resident of the White House while conveniently overlooking Biden’s repeated public gaffes. I may or may not agree with Sarah on all issues but I do believe that our collective media has failed us in their stated mission and should be regarded as no longer relevant.
December 17 2009 / 4:55 pm
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Well, Jerry, Dan Quayle certainly qualifies as an elder in comparison to Obama, but he hasn’t done anything since leaving office that would advance any claim to being a statesman.