Palin's "real America" vs. America

Frank Rich nails the racial subtext to the Sarah Palin phenomenon. This may explain why minorities voted for Obama in droves--because they know a defender of white privilege when they see one.

She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It[S]he stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind.And:The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)

The latest flashpoint for this kind of animus is the near-certain elevation to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings arrive this week. Prominent Palinists were fast to demean Sotomayor as a dim-witted affirmative-action baby. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the Palinist hymnal, labeled Sotomayor “not the smartest” and suggested that Princeton awards academic honors on a curve. Karl Rove said, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” Those maligning the long and accomplished career of an Ivy League-educated judge do believe in affirmative-action—but only for white people like Palin, whom they boosted for vice president despite her minimal achievements and knowledge of policy, the written word or even geography.And:The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised—by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.And for those who think the "liberal" media is picking on Palin, here's a response:Certainly, the press in collective scandal mode is often an unpretty thing. But the reasons for what eventually became Palin's titanic bad press stemmed from three causes--1) her rapidly demonstrated lack of grounding or familiarity with almost every major policy question facing the country, 2) the fact--which took reporters a bit longer to get a handle on--that her governance of Alaska had amounted almost to one string of ethics violations and possibly illegal behavior. Time and again she showed a signal inability to grasp that executive power was not to be used to pursue personal vendettas or enrichment. And then 3), growing from the recognition of items #1 and #2, that Palin was simply a liar, even judged against the frightfully generous standard customarily applied to the truth-telling abilities of elected officials.Comment:  Pretty darn funny that Republicans would attack Sotomayor's intellectual abilities while defending Palin's. Hypocritical much?

Needless to say, these are the same people throwing tea parties against the first black president. They had nothing to say when Bush increased the national debt unnecessarily--the only president to do so during wartime. But they're full of mock outrage when Obama increases the national debt to counter the worst recession since the Depression.

No news here. Conservatives are hypocrites, and the sun rises in the east.

For more on the subject, see Good-Bye and Good Riddance to Palin and The 2008 Presidential Campaign.