I read a comment by Freedoms Truth that described the salient feature of this week so perfectly: Sullivan and KOS jumped the shark. So did US Magazine, Sally Quin, Richard Cohen (he of "Incitatus" fame), and even the esteemed Mort Kondracke of Roll Call, who stepped out his normally professional demeanor this weekend on The Beltway Boys to refer to Sarah Palin as "That Far Right-Wing Wack-o". Hmmm....
There were a few days at the beginning of the week when I found the US Magazine treatment of our dear little Sarah (or at least my dear little Sarah - I've been a fan of hers since March, 2008 when she first came to my attention as a possible VP candidate) absolutely abhorrent. I even downloaded the slimetastic content of the Daily KOS and all of its (at that time) 1573 comments as proof positive of the lengths to which the Left will go in transferring Bush Derangement Syndrome to Palin. Silly me, I thought that this was some sort of one-off deviancy - little did I ever, ever suspect that I'd find the meme that Sara Palin was her own baby's grandmother being proliferated on the websites of Alan Colmes or Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish at that stalwart home of American literary talent known as The Atlantic, much less CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and so forth and so on. Perhaps the most amusing display of over-the-top zeitgeist was this photo on CNN's front page on September 4:
This photo was done up by the same media flacks who lionized Barack Obama for speaking to a rally of thousands upon thousands of Germans, and raved about the styrofoam Hollywood columns that some compared to the White House, others compared to a Greek Temple, and some of us thought were merely a cheap copy of the Brandenberg Gate. The irony alone is simply priceless.
The erudite Nick Cohen seems to have the best handle on the phenomenonal snatch of defeat from the jaws of victory by the Democrats this week, in an understated manner that is so exquisitely British:
During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.
In an age when politics is choreographed, voters watch out for the moments when the public-relations facade breaks down and venom pours through the cracks. Their judgment is rarely favourable when it does. Barack Obama knows it. All last week, he was warning American liberals to stay away from the Palin family. He understands better than his supporters that it is not a politician's enemies who lose elections, but his friends.
Indeed. On Sunday, September 7, two significant indicators should strike fear into Democrats. The first is a statement by Fox news producer embedded with the McCain campaign, Mosheh Oinounou. Mosheh said that typically, McCain audiences tended to draw 500-750 attendees. Ever since the convention, however, Mosheh said he's not seen one appearance with crowds under 7,000. The same day, Professor Larry Sabato told Brian Wilson on Fox News that he was privy to "inside information" that McCain's convention bounce will leap ahead of Barack Obama in the following week's polls "well outside the margin of error".
Cohen reminds us that as tempted as we may be to compare Palin's populist appeal to Ronald Reagan, the truest comparison is probably to another great conservative lady who was a dear friend and ally of Reagan.
In Britain, the most snobbish attacks on Margaret Thatcher did not come from aristocrats but from the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who opined that Thatcherism was the 'anarchism of the lower middle classes' and the liberal Jonathan Miller, who deplored her 'odious suburban gentility'.
The Daily Mail called Thatcher the Siouxsie Sioux of politics, a political punk rocker.
Margaret Thatcher was the first politician in a generation to appeal to something visceral in voters. That appeal was not dissimilar to what made punk music attractive to fans of the Sex Pistols. To be a punk fan was to protest against the existing order. To vote Thatcher was a cry of rage. ...Less edifying were the constant sex and sexist jibes about her, often recycled mother-in-law jokes in which she was seen as a ball-breaker.
Most of us undoubtedly assumed that the so-called "vetting" of Governor Palin by the so-called "journalists" of the American Media was nothing more than a pack of hounds attacking what they thought was a very vulnerable fox who'd somehow managed to sneak into their hen house and displace the front-running rooster. By keeping her cool, Governor Palin has out-foxed the flagrant media both by ignoring them, and most shockingly and effectively, by dismissing them by, as Cohen said, going right over the heads of the reporters to the very public they pretend to represent.
'I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion,' she said as she deftly detached journalists from their readers and viewers. 'I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country.'
I think Maggie would just love her. The Piece of Flair one of my Facebook friends just sent me says it all: She is the change that He just talks about.
