Cultural left fears Sarah Palin more than they hate her

Claude Sandroff, in an opinion piece for American Thinker, writes that the attempt to dismiss Sarah Palin's real accomplishments represents the low ebb of the cultural left, and it shows that they fear her more than they hate her:

[The] deep, joyful, personal connection Palin makes with the middle class is crudely trivialized by the lamestream media, to use Palin's phrase, as white trash populism. In a bizarre, recent instance of this mindset, Chris Matthews actually provided real-time commentary focusing on the racial make-up of the huge crowds awaiting Palin's first book-signing stop in Grand Rapids. ''Well, they look like a white crowd to me...Not that there‘s anything wrong with it, but it is pretty monochromatic up there...no surprise in terms of the ethnic nature of the people showing up. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a fact."

The fact that MSNBC would this give this cruel, deeply disturbed, fulminating racialist a public forum (though a small one) attests to how venomous our media culture has become. Yet it is Palin who is caricatured as divisive by the left and as superficial even by some putative conservatives. Where Palin's opponents go people are usually angry.

One of the great challenges when writing about Palin is to keep focus on her concrete accomplishments (the energy related legislative agenda she advanced and passed were masterful), while avoiding the traps set by the those intent on reducing her to a mere social firebrand. It is ever the goal of the "elitist loons", a phrase used by Palin to describe John Kerry, to so stigmatize her. Whether by printing an overtly sexist image of her on the cover of Newsweek or by David Brooks insisting that she remains a "joke," the overt goal is to ridicule her beyond redemption.

[...]

As the lamestream media carp away, thousand of eager admirers, including many young women, line up for Palin's signature at every stop. As these young women decide how to comport themselves, as women or as politicians, they could choose a worse model than Sarah Palin.

The soul-nourishing formula that seems to work for Palin is to combine a personal, unthreatening evangelical Christianity with the centrality of family. And then she works very hard, staying true to laissez-faire capitalist principles -- common sense conservatism -- by emulating the much-admired "steel spine" of Ronald Reagan.

The complete American Thinker op-ed by Claude Sandroff is here.

- JP