Rex Murphy: The Sarah Palin Effect

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In a National Post Saturday op-ed, Rex Murphy writes about the Sarah Palin Effect on the elitist left:

Sarah Palin irritates, agitates, angers and annoys some of the self-appointed finest minds of America to a point long past reason.

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She is a cheerful human being, with a large family, an apparently easy-going and normal husband. She has a personality that would sell corn flakes -- if not grow them. What career she had in Alaska, she earned. She's at home indoors and out, radiates human warmth, seems to have some balance about herself, and has displayed over the last year or so a considerable fortitude under an avalanche of mockery and hatred. For the final stroke of this cameo I should note she is smart -- smarter than 90% of the people who make a point of how rock-stupid they know she is.

She, by rights, should be queen of the feminists. All that self-reliance, her takeover of Alaska politics, the rocket ride to a Vice-Presidential ticket, a public career she blends with her family life-- these seem gold-standard credentials for a real feminist. But official feminism derides herewith an unspeakable intensity. Her early critics were not beyond the inane claim that she was somehow not really a woman.

I side with those who venture that the nerves Palin hits have more to do with class -- where she's from, how she speaks, where she was educated, what she likes (the moose-hunting), than her politics or her gender. She's rural, she came into national politics from (ugh) Alaska. She and her husband have the unerasable stigmata of the modern working class. She would not be embarrassed to be seen walking into Wal-Mart.

As Murphy points out, those are characteristics that the left should not find objectionable. They celebrate the hymns written by songsters from Woody Guthrie to The Artist Formerly Known as John Cougar Mellencamp. Ah, but those are just abstractions, and the left has trouble distinguishing from fantasy working class heroes and those we live in the real world. Plus, there's that hypocrisy thing, a prerequisite for being a leftist tool these days.

But Sarah Palin is very real -- too real for the lest to handle:

She also happens to be the most naturally charismatic politician at the moment in the United States. She is the one major figure who can claim authenticity without morally choking on the word. That makes her the populist rallying point of a nascent rejection of the fervid partisanship and Washington insiderism that is eroding the consent on which American politics is founded.

Murphy concludes that while Obama still owns Hope, Sarah Palin is all about real Change in American politics. We take issue with that conclusion. Abandon all hope ye who voted for Obama. Hope is Sarah Palin's too, or at least she embodies the boundless optimism of Ronald Reagan, and in that there is hope for the majority of Americans who don't want to go where Obama is trying to take this great nation.

Craig Carter has more analysis of Rex Murphy's commentary here.

- JP