When the elite establishment hates a common sense conservative

Ben Shapiro, in a Townhall.com column:

What would you think of a candidate the Baltimore Sun calls a symptom of "the right, the radical right, which cherishes notions that often are too simple, too negative and too risky"? What would you believe about a candidate one liberal columnist calls "patently ridiculous … frivolous"? What would you say about a candidate one writer says is incapable of "accuracy or depth"? A candidate who "cater[s] to the fears and anxieties of the great middle class"?

Would you back a candidate one New York Times columnist calls "primitive"? That The New Republic calls an "ignoramus"? That The Nation labels "the most dangerous person ever to come this close to the presidency"?

Would you support a candidate even moderate Republicans despise? A candidate whose simple legitimization by the party constitutes a "political dance macabre … the dance of death for the Republican Party"? A candidate described by a moderate competitor as plagued with a "penchant for offering simplistic solutions to hideously complex problems"?

You might simply dismiss such rhetoric as just more shots fired in the assault on Sarah Heath Palin, but you would be wrong. The intended target was another Republican former governor, one Ronald Wilson Reagan, and the rounds were fired at a time when Palin was in her early teenage years.

And, as Shapiro makes a point of reminding us, Reagan was no loser, but a conservative candidate who won big, in a 1980 blowout of Jimmy Carter in which the incumbent only managed to garner 49 electoral votes, and again in 1984 with a landslide of such Biblical proportions that liberal Democrat Walter Mondale carried only his home state of Minnesota and was awarded a paltry 13 electoral votes:

Here's the problem for the liberal media establishment and their erstwhile allies in the Rockefeller wing of the GOP: their hatred and scorn does not ensure their victory. Every Republican who does not have any Ivy League degree, who draws significant crowds, who does not pay homage to government spending and social libertinism, is derided as a boob and a fool. "Ridicule," said Saul Alinsky, "is man's most potent weapon."

Shapiro's point is that sometimes, ridicule is a tactic which backfires on those who attempt to employ it:

Ridicule does not work when the times are too serious to merit the quick and easy dismissal of a promising candidate. It does not work when a candidate is simply too likeable to be pilloried as a budding mass murderer (the Democrats achieved that image with Goldwater, but they failed with Reagan). It does not work when a candidate is seen not just as an ideological warrior, but also as a truly human hero by millions across the country.

The $64,000 Question, as people used to say in The Gipper's day, is can Sarah Palin pull off an electoral victory which, if not a Reganesque landslide, is at least an Alaskan avalanche? That, as people still like to say, remains to be seen. Shapiro predicts that if the economy continues to tank due to the Democrats' printing monopoly money and profligate spending, and if Afghanistan becomes dithered into a quagmire reminiscent of Vietnam, moose hunting and Levi Johnston won't matter much to the American voter.

We would add Joe Biden's three letter word -- j-o-b-s -- to all of the above. If unemployment remains in the double digits, Kathie Couric's questions will not be one of the overriding concerns on the minds of the electorate. Sarah Palin might well be paraphrasing the words of Gen. George S. Patton three years hence: "Alinsky, you magnificent bastard! I read your book."

- JP