The Sarah Palin "mystery" unlocked

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard. Ross Douthat - New York Times

One of my odd experiences covering the US in the early 1990s was visiting militia groups that sprang up in Texas, Idaho, and Ohio in the aftermath of recession. These were mostly blue-collar workers, – early victims of global "labor arbitrage" – angry enough with Washington to spend weekends in fatigues with M16 rifles. Most backed protest candidate Ross Perot, who won 19pc of the presidential vote in 1992 with talk of shutting trade with Mexico. The inchoate protest dissipated once recovery fed through to jobs, although one fringe group blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. Unfortunately, there will be no such jobs this time. Capacity use has fallen to record-low levels (68pc in the US, 71 in the eurozone). A deep purge of labour is yet to come. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Telegraph

Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of “Methland,” Nick Reding’s unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years in the life of Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear.(...) The madness stalking tiny, defenseless Oelwein may eventually come for all of us, we learn, and once again, as happens in America whenever our collective attention wanders from the gray struggles of the little guy to the purple capers of the big wheels, attention must be paid. Right now. Or else. Review of "Methland", New York Times

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Reading most of the mainstream media (MSM) comments on Sarah Palin I get the feeling that for the urban Americans who write in those media Sarah Palin is as foreign a personality as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the attraction she possesses for fly-over Americans seems as mysterious to them as the propensity of Koreans to eat cute puppies.

This leads me to believe that the urban-based commentators are "misunderestimating" this woman, for in reality the reaction she produces in them is the mirror image of the the reaction she produces in the masses of people these commentators by turns patronize or despise.

Whoever Sarah Palin may really be, she functions powerfully as a type. What, for deracinated urbanites, constitutes prima facie evidence of trailer trashdom, resonates as identity for the struggling members of America's discouraged and marginalized warrior caste, the rural-rooted scotch-irish and their various semi-urban sept clans. Although it in politically incorrect to notice it, they too are a hyphenated, disadvantaged, ethnic group.

Also on a personal level she also seems to have solved one of America's most crushing and ubiquitous problems: how can a woman without exceptional academic qualifications, or inherited money, successfully have children, a happy husband and a productive career? The sneaking suspicion that this lady is not as dumb as she is made out to be even creeps occasionally into the consciousness of many women of impeccably liberal credentials .

Sarah Palin's attraction for her base is that of the "Woman" of Peggy Lee's big, Lieber and Stoller hit, who sings, "I can make a dress out of a feed bag and I can make a man out of you".

Those who have never seen and handled a cotton feedbag, or seen and handled the type of women who has done so, may have trouble relating to this message. There are millions of Americans who do... and almost all of them live in the lower 48.

Palin's move is the only logical one open to her.

Leaving Alaska is essential if she is to have any future in US politics. In Alaska she sits far from her potential base, only accessible to them through the hostile filter of the MSM.

Now, freed of Alaska, she can begin to tour flyover America making personal contact with her ethnic-identity base in an endless variety of venues. In many ways her putting Alaska behind her is as fundamentally logical as president Obama's leaving Hawaii was.

If another 900,000 jobs disappear by the end of the year--likely, without unexpected improvement--an entire decade of employment gains will have been wiped out. In January of 2000, there were 130.8 million jobs in the country. "It's not that those jobs weren't needed," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute. "The labor force has grown by nearly 13 million people." Forbes

Despite the talk of "green shoots", we are facing a jobless recovery that stretches far into the future and this is already causing notable unrest in Sarah Palin's natural constituency. Who knows who a jobless America might be willing to vote for in 2012?

Sarah Palin's only chance for political survival is to become the "Joan of Arc" of America's white, working poor. And liberals had better pray that she is successful in her endeavor, because, the way things are going, Barack Obama's only chance for reelection in 2012 may be a split on class lines in the GOP, with Sarah Palin as the Perot-like spoiler. DS

Leaving the people behind

(Palin) held a meeting as governor three days after giving birth. “I just put down the BlackBerrys and pick up the breast pump,” she said of her life as a working mother. The Times

In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment. (...) Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end. Camille Paglia - Salon

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I think that Camile Paglia has hit on something.

Sarah Palin seems to embody something we could call "frontier feminism" or "working class feminism" and the question that Democrats should be asking themselves is why somebody whose husband in a United Steelworker is a Republican, because the Democrats have gotten lost somewhere.

In the Rooseveltian days when Norman Rockwell painted "Rosie the Riveter" no woman like Sarah Palin would have ever been a Republican.

What is this "frontier or working class" feminism?

There is a feminist joke that outlines it pretty well; it says that Ginger Rogers danced everything that Fred Astaire did... wearing high heels and going backwards.

The great songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller got a good grip on it with Peggy Lee's classic, "WOMAN":

I got a twenty dollar gold piece says
There ain't nothin' I can't do
I can make a dress out of a feed bag
And I can make a man out of you
'Cause I'm a woman
W O M A N

Paglia quotes the 1905 obituary of a frontier woman:

Abigail Becker

Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830

A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.

My own grandmother Seaton gave birth to my two Uncles in a gold mining camp in northern California and then was a farm wife in Iowa before Roosevelt brought electricity to the farm. Three boys, a homestead, no washing machine, a coal stove... she was small very pretty with black hair and flashing black eyes and played the guitar and sang things like "Annie Laurie" and "Little Brown Jug" in a sweet voice. When she was a young thing she was so pretty and coquette that a jealous and jilted suitor took a shot at her with a pistol through the family dining room window and only thanks to the window glass, the bullet went off course and she only got a superficial wound on her arm. She loved William Jennings Bryant and FDR. Frontier women.

There is this from the Washington Post:

After just a week, Palin is as popular as either Obama or McCain. White women in particular express favorable views of the Alaska governor, according to a newly released Washington Post-ABC News poll. Positive ratings of her spike to 80 percent among white women with children at home and among white women who are evangelical Protestants.

The percentage of white women with "strongly favorable" opinions of McCain jumped 12 percentage points from before the parties' national conventions. And nearly six in 10 white women in the new poll said McCain's selection of Palin increased their confidence in the decisions he would make if elected. In the Post-ABC poll, it is white women who helped McCain erase Obama's late-August advantage and seriously cut into the Democratic nominee's lead as the one who would bring more needed change to Washington.

Republican adviser Juleanna R. Glover calls Palin "the future of the GOP," and that was certainly the consensus at this stop in Ohio on Tuesday. McCain and Palin performed a ritual of Republican politics, speaking from a stage in front of the Golden Lamb Hotel, billed as Ohio's oldest inn. More than 5,000 guests filled the streets, packing it as fully as it had been four years earlier, when President Bush made the same stop.

But this event was more reminiscent of the Clinton campaign earlier this year: Mothers held their young daughters on their shoulders to catch a glimpse of Palin. Women held up pro-Palin signs and wore "I Love Sarah" stickers. One sign read "Working Mom 4 Palin." Another: "Strike Oil with Sarah." And another: "Outspoken Conservative Moms for Palin."Like other women in the crowd, Baron, the home-schooler from Maineville, Ohio, expressed frustration that feminism and women's issues have seemingly been owned by Democrats whose values she does not share.

Julia Burns, 72, a Republican from Lebanon, cut in: "Men had better jump back. Women are going to take over. We're sick and tired of playing by men's rules. We're coming out of the ground, and they had better move out of the way."

The Democrats have gotten lost. How can you have a "people's party" without the people and without their values? DS

Sarah Palin and the primary contradiction

David Seaton's News Links
Jim Sleeper, over at TPM, has written a very fine post on the Palin effect.

In it he touches on some points that have interested me for some time and which I often write about. In this post I would like to quote Mr. Sleeper and riff on some of his themes.

To begin with he says:

(...) if you didn't sense last night how deeply Sarah Palin channeled some of the country's deepest, most powerful currents of pent-up indignation and yearning, you don't sense the trouble we Democrats are in. (...) Rhetorically, she was the anti-Obama,. She was stirring precisely because she was so artless, matter-of fact, and "American" -- with no cadences or grand, historic resonances, but with plenty of mother wit and shrewdness. Credit her as much as the speechwriters.. The two currents she tapped (...) were riptides of deeply wounded pride and groping loyalty, a yearning for vindication of something that is not to be disparaged at all.

The first such riptide was unleashed by Palin's and Giuliani's accounts of John McCain's career-threatening commitment, a year ago, when his campaign was hopeless, to an American military victory in Iraq, Right or wrong -- and I think it was wrong -- it was a commitment grounded in an uncommon courage that will be dismissed as stupidity only by smart-asses who really want to lose this election.

The second current was tapped by Palin's own grounded, calm confidence that "ordinary people's" common sense - her kind, and a lot of other people's - is what it takes to pull this country through its converging crises.

(...) For some reason, courage and generosity never showed McCain what they showed Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s -- the true dangers of our military-industrial juggernaut in a world where corporations are more powerful and corrupting than states and where the biggest threats to liberty are no longer taxes-taxes-taxes, and the strongest defense of liberty is no longer what now passes for "national security."

Trapped into making war for laissez faire, conservatives such as McCain and Palin can't reconcile their yearning for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

About all this, they haven't a clue. To find one, their folksy common-sense, defiant courage, and religious faith are more necessary than some of us acknowledge or even understand, and therefore we may lose the election.

I think Sleeper's mention of Eisenhower is especially fine. To underline that reference, let me quote from Eisenhower's well known speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Today the situation is much worse, but can you imagine any major American political figure, either Republican or Democrat daring to use such language?

Let us have another look at this wonderful paragraph from Sleeper's post:

Trapped into making war for laissez faire, conservatives such as McCain and Palin can't reconcile their yearning for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

This is the center of the whole question, but Sleeper fails to note that neither Obama or Biden or any other major American politician will confront this truth head on or even obliquely. The Democrats are as much a part of the problem, warp and woof, as the Republicans are or ever were.

If Sleeper's paragraph is a masterful summing up of America's central problem. The left should obviously ask "what to do?", which is the question that the left exists to ask.

Obviously the answer is that we should try to change the reality described in the paragraph. The devil, of course, is in the details. Where to begin?

When you organize your days activities, for example, you might make a "to do" list and put the items in order of importance.

One the most useful tools for a political strategist is Mao Tse-Tung's "On Contradiction". Before you laugh and turn away. I suggest you read this quotation from Professor Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore), writing about the errors of American foreign policy in the Financial Times:

Mao Zedong, for all his flaws, was a great strategic thinker. He said China always had to deal with its primary contradiction and compromise with its secondary contradiction. When the Soviet Union became the primary contradiction, Mao settled with the US, even though it involved the humiliation of dealing with a power that then recognised Chiang Kai-shek as the legitimate ruler. The west must emulate Mao’s pragmatism and focus on its primary contradiction.

Therefore, if America's domestic "primary contradiction" is what Sleeper calls:

obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

And Eisenhower defines as:

this is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Then it follows that following Mao's pragmatic logic, the American left much seek allies on the right in order to confront the primary contradiction. The issue of American jobs being outsourced abroad, for example, is something that could find a broad base of agreement among many Democrats and Republicans.

"Compromising on the secondary contradictions" is very painful, it involves leaving cherished principals waiting at the door while the primary contradiction is being attended to. If American militrism and the military industrial complex are seen as the primary contradiction, than something as dear to the hearts of Democrats as Roe Vs. Wade might have to be sacrificed in order to fight it. (Full disclosure: I personally am in favor of women's freedom to choose. As a man, however, I think my opinion is, in fact, irrelevant.

While we are at it, I would ask, why are so many working class and lower middle class Americans so fired up about abortion?

Some commentators in the press have criticized Governor Palin for carrying her youngest son to term when she had been informed that he would be born with Down's Syndrome and at the same time, giving birth to such a child is a strong selling point for Palin throughout much of that America that once voted Democratic. This is an issue where people feel deeply on both sides.

My own theory of this relatively recent impassioned interest in the "right ot life", in a country that approves of the death penalty, ties it directly to the new economy.

The argument for aborting a fetus with Down's Syndrome would be that he or she could not live a useful and productive existance and would thus be a burden on its parents and society.

Do you think that if you were a small town American with just a high school education or only a couple of years in a community college, that you might possibly have cause to identify with such a child? Could we say that great masses of what were America's most productive citizens today might be classed as having "special needs" or being a burden on society?

One of the most interesting things that Mike Huckabee said in his campaign, that showed that interesting things are moving under the surface of American Evangelicalism, was that many "right to life" people only seem interested in children before they are born, once they arrive than it's devil take the hindmost. I consider that one of the most important things any politician of the right has said in a long time. There is some important common ground here.

Let's close with another quote from Jim Sleeper's wonderful post:

their folksy common-sense, defiant courage, and religious faith are more necessary than some of us acknowledge or even understand.

Amen. DS

Pallin: Huckabee with tits?

(Andrew Halcro, who ran as an independent against Palin, said that debating Palin was an exercise in frustration.) "She has a way of walking in a room and filling the room with her presence, so people suddenly forget about their concerns about health care or education or anything else." LA Times

David Seaton's News Links
Ever since I was a kid my birthday, which falls today, September 2nd, almost always coincides with going back to school or work... lifelong, hardly a cause for celebration.

Exactly like when I was a miserable little schoolboy, today is just another day: up at seven and hit the line.

I got a nice present from my wife though, the Egyptian novel, "The Yacoubian Building". It's a beautiful book and was the basis for a beautiful film of the same name. I highly recommend them both.

Back to the business at hand.

____________________________________

Today, I'm working on my Saturday, "dead tree" column, which will be about Russia and I'll probably be posting with some of the material I'm working up on the subject over the next few days. I'm a bit pressed for time, but I'd like to write about the firestorm that McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate has produced.

I have been surprised by the virulence of it all, the truly savage, hysterical, Rovian type abuse, an outpouring of sexist, personal and ad hominem attacks that only Barack Obama has had the sense to distance himself from. Something that does credit to his intelligence.

Why so much hostility?

The answer if pretty simple in my opinion, this lady is a monster politician and unless they destroy her and her story before she is really out of the gate; catch her in the political nasciturus stage as it were, then she is going to do to Barack Obama, exactly what Barack Obama did to Hillary Clinton: take the candy right out of his mouth.

This brings me to a question that I keep coming back to over and over again:

Why can't the Democrats, who are supposed to be the "people's party", come up with candidates that connect solidly with "deep" America.

How is it that Sarah Palin is the one who isn't a millionaire, the one who went to a state university, who was a commercial fisherman, (fisherperson?) served on the PTA and whose husband carries a steelworker's union card? Why is this formidable, working woman a Republican?

Why is it that the only Democrat that seems acutely aware of this problem is a born aristocrat like Howard Dean?

To paraphrase the demon Rumsfeld, you go with the working class you have, not with the working class you would like to have.

America's working people are in need of health, education and welfare, but they are also social conservatives. They are religious. Their rejection of much of contemporary life is bringing together Protestants and Catholics for the first time since Luther nailed his stuff to the door.

Why should this automatically be a force for reaction?

There is nothing in the teaching of Jesus Christ that intrinsically supports economic liberalism, military adventures at the expense of health or education or connects in any way with the beggar thy neighborism of the disciples of Ayn Rand.

Why are America's working people so socially conservative and religious?

In my opinion, not because they are "bitter", but because they are terrified.

During the Republican primaries I wrote a couple of pieces about Mike Huckabee's Evangelical populism that received a lot of kind attention. Out of laziness, or pressed for time, I'll quote myself:

The entire American economy is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure. What, despite all its grotesque fanaticism, is truly healthy about all this Evangelical, rapture, mishegoss is that it is a real rebellion against the basic, inhuman tool of the system... Its unhappiness factory.

(...) Of course many of the same old vultures feed off this rebellion, in the same way that they feed off all the other unsatisfaction, but this is a true rebellion for all of that.

(...) Why are so many of the poor of America, white and black, socially conservative? Because without a welfare state, the only institutions that offer any comfort or protection are the church and the family. The family is the first welfare state. Here is Spain where we have a welfare state and a fine public health system, the traditional family is still in place. In the hospital system this means that the operations are fantastic, but the nursing is deficient, because normally the patients are surrounded by solicitous family members carrying bed pans etc and nurses only come around if patient suddenly takes a turn for the worse. In the USA there is no welfare state and the family is also under heavy pressure from the system.

Poor people are terrified: frightened people take comfort where they can. A divorced waitress with two kids who has to take them to an emergency room to treat their asma can't be criticized for being a "Left Behind" enthusiast. There is no better country than America in the whole world to be rich. It is probably the only country in the world where the rich are loved. Conversely there is no worse country in the world to be poor. Of course these people are paranoid, the system literally hates them.

I find any rebellion of the "lower orders" in the USA positive per se. I start from the premise that it is really the poor, the sniggered at, the excluded and the disadvantaged -- what are called the "lower classes" -- that have to be the protagonists of any authentic change. Up till now, all the "struggle" is coming from the top against the down.

What is new is that now it is America's lower middle classes, once the envy of the entire world, that can't pay for health and education any more and find themselves losing their homes and being pushed toward pauperization.

You have to start from where you are.

Perhaps the only thing that the white, black and Latino populations really have in common is their fear and their faith in Jesus.

There has to be rebellion for anything to happen and the culture of the people has to be taken into account. The lower middle class and poor people of America are religious and we have to start from there.

You don't believe in any of it?

If you are truly progressive and want to change the system, then you should say like Henry of Navarre, "Paris vaut bien une messe".

Like Howard Dean, I believe that America's progressives have to make their peace with evangelical America and find defenders of the "little man" that vibrate in the same cultural key as they do. Where is a contemporary William Jennings Bryan? It is absurd that a credible case can be made that the Democrats are elitist. DS

Hand of God?

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“I was just thinking, this Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven,” (Michael) Moore said, laughing. “To have it planned at the same time – that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for day one of the Republican Convention, up in the Twin Cities – at the top of the Mississippi River.” Business & Media Institute

That's one way of looking at it, but I just read this over on CNN:

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will not attend the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, because of Hurricane Gustav, White House press secretary Dana Perino said Sunday.(...) A senior McCain source said Saturday that officials were considering turning the convention into a massive telethon to raise money for the Red Cross and other agencies to help with hurricane aid. "He wants to do something service oriented if and when the storm hits and it's as bad as it's expected to be now," the McCain source said. They are also hoping to get McCain himself to a storm-affected area as soon as possible. McCain had suggested to a Fox News interviewer that the convention could be suspended if it seemed that a festive gathering was inappropriate in light of the destruction the storm may bring.

So, it turns out that the hand of God will keep both Bush and Cheney from attending the convention... Don't you think that keeping those two politically poisonous individuals away from the convention is something McCain would have been down on his knees praying for?

You bet!

And wouldn't you say having the entire media fixed both on Gustav and the Republican convention 24/7, that this is a God given opportunity for McCain be all over the news cycle and to look, proactive, competent, compassionate and presidential?

A chance for McCain at the scene of one of Bush's greatest disasters, to be "McDifferent" and not McSame?

If I were an Evangelical, which thank God I'm not, I would gather from all this that our Father in heaven is mightily pleased with McCain's Veep pick. DS