In an
opinion piece for Toronto's Globe and Mail, Rex Murphy compares and contrasts they styles of President Obama and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:
They are, in the way fate or the mysteries of politics sometimes offers such things, curiously equivalent or parallel figures, polar opposites but equals. Ms. Palin connects: Mr. Obama inspires. She's a latter-day frontier figure, impulsive, instinctive; he's pure urban cool, highly deliberate, even detached. Both have real charisma.
It will make Obama fans perspire to hear this, but Ms. Palin has a more forceful bond with her supporters than he with his. Mr. Obama offers a kind of self-flattery to his worshippers. They feel exalted that they have the intelligence or sensibility to see how remarkable their man is. But he remains remote. Ms. Palin works close up. She offers those much invoked, but actually neglected figures, “the ordinary Joe or Josephine,” a real sense that she does represent them.
Liberals will like the following assessment by Murphy even less:
Ms. Palin is a real and evolving element in the great story of American politics. She is the “other half” of the Obama moment, and she may be in the ascendant. Mr. Obama is losing his lustre, his appeal is dimming, at the very moment the Alaskan outsider is staking her claim. Those who call her a joke are expressing an anxious hope not offering a rational description.
Read the full op-ed
here.
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