David Solway: Can Sarah Upstage Barack?

Two more years of Obama, and America may find itself with its first female president
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The more Sarah Palin seems unelectable, argues David Solway, the more electable she may actually be. The media's long war against the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate is not, he explains, an indicator of her unfitness for office, but "precisely as a measure of her eligibility":

Thus we are told that Palin’s “national negatives” are too high for her to be regarded as a viable candidate. But this is to forget that such “negatives” are mainly the result of a coordinated media assault whose effect can be mitigated with time, intelligent pushback and increased exposure on the ground. Presence can counter image and word of mouth can triumph over print. Negatives can be neutralized and even turned into positives. Harry Truman’s whistle-stop tour through the American heartland enabled him to upstage a heavily-favored Tom Dewey in 1948. The cries of “Give ‘em Hell, Harry,” which became his campaign theme, can translate in the present context as “Give ‘em Hell, Sarah,” if she takes her show on the road.

We are also told that Palin has polarized the nation, which is the fiction the media wants us to accept. The truth is that America has been unraveling since the ’60s and that Obama, not Palin, has even further divided the nation, so much so that America has come to resemble not a single, unified country but two or more countries in a state of internecine conflict. As the “culture wars” continue to heat up, E pluribus unum might better read Ex uno plures. Metaphorically speaking, the waters are rising, not receding, as President Canute once assured us. There should be no doubt about this. It is Obama, the putative redeemer of his nation and the great healer, who, through both his agenda and his failings, has brought his nation to the very brink.

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Consequently, the media are in panic mode and will mobilize their inventory of maledictions to sink the candidacy of the woman they fear in order to buttress the fortunes of the man they adore. Their offensive could not be more, well, offensive. The moral filth of the New York Times and MSNBC, for example, among many other similar outlets in the MSM and the blogosphere, is enough to repel anyone who looks for even a modicum of decency in the conduct of the press. To target Palin for her convictions and selected aspects of her demeanor while giving Obama a Get Out of Jail Free card and airbrushing the Democratic crowd of warts and blotches — for example, the innumerable gaffes of Joe Biden, the imbecilities of Nancy Pelosi, the catatonia of Janet Napolitano, or the zingers of Obama himself—is the epitome of bad faith. Intellectually, the media are quite frankly out to lunch; politically, as is increasingly evident, they function as a fifth column in league with the American left, which is intent on transforming the country into something it was never meant to be. And this is precisely what Palin understands.

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Arguably, there is no other candidate in either party at present who can approach her public engagingness, her undoubted patriotism, her authenticity, her experience as a house-cleaning state governor (however curtailed), and her unwillingness to compromise with the truth. This is not to say that Palin doesn’t have a learning curve to climb, but she seems eminently capable of the task. And this is not to say that there are no fine Republican candidates in the offing. I think particularly of Herman Cain, the self-described “dark horse,” Allen West, John Thune and possibly Michele Bachmann, all pretty impressive people. (MSNBC’s resident blowhard Chris Matthews is now going after Bachmann — another good sign.) But there is no one as of this moment who brings the entire package to the table as does Palin.

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h/t: TrueblueNZ

- JP