Category Archives: Ordinary barbarians

Barack Obama, uniter?

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In a way, perhaps. No, President “I Won” hasn’t proven to be the post-partisan “new politics”political messiah his campaign promised, but no rational human being could have expected that he would be; it’s simply not in the cards for a politician to come along and bring consensus between the parties (though if he were actually trying to build coalitions and create compromises rather than steering such a partisan course, we might be closer). More seriously, though, he can’t even unite his own party, which is why his domestic agenda has had such a rocky course of late despite Democratic dominance on the Hill.

What our community-organizer president does seem to be doing, though, is uniting and inspiring large chunks of the grassroots. To be sure, lately he’s been uniting and inspiring them against him, but hey, you can’t have everything. I was amazed to hear predictions that the Tea Party movement’s March on Washington would draw hundreds of thousands of people; the House leadership even put out a memo projecting two million participants, but I figured Glenn Reynolds and Moe Lane were right:

I think they’re floating huge numbers—two million? are you kidding?—so that they can paint it as a disappointment if we see “only” hundreds of thousands. . . .

Two million would be about double the turnout of Obama’s inauguration. I don’t believe the Dems really expect that.

Usually, when it comes to politics, if you go with the cynicism, it will get you where you need to be. Not this time. In fact, media estimates do indeed have the 9/12 Tea Party in D.C. pushing two million people—the police estimate, though lower, still had the count at 1.2 million—and from the pictures and the stories, it isn’t hard to believe. At the top of the page, you can see a picture from Mary Katherine Ham, courtesy of the Instapundit.

I liked Professor Reynolds’ comment on the Daily Mail article I linked above:

So maybe I was wrong to be so skeptical. But cut it in half and it’s still a huge number. And this is priceless: “Many protesters said they paid their own way to the event—an ethic they believe should be applied to the government.” Why is the British press more honest in its reporting on this stuff than the American press?

Meanwhile, a reader emails: “I’ll tell you what I find impressive. I’m watching the Fox news video about 15 minutes after the end of the event. The crowd has thinned out enough that you can see the ground and there is not a speck of trash on the grass. Absolutely clean. To contrast, google ‘pictures of litter on the mall after the inauguration.’”

The mind boggles. More people descended on D.C. today to protest the president’s socialist agenda than came for his inauguration—possibly twice as many—and that was a huge event. No wonder Wall Street is confident the government takeover of health care is dead.

On elites, ordinary barbarians, and the willingness to accept help

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The Anchoress linked back the other day, in her Ted Kennedy retrospective, to a 2005 Peggy Noonan column (one of her best, I think) expressing her foreboding about America and its future:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.” . . .

I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding—the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.

But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

Now, there’s a lot I could say about this. If I wanted to analyze Noonan, I could talk about this being the seed of her infatuation with Barack Obama that would bloom three years later—that his general and amorphous promise of “hope” and “change” offered her a psychologically irresistible escape hatch from her worry that “things are broken and tough history is coming.” Or I could look at it theologically and express my agreement with her, my belief that in fact, things are broken, and tough history is coming, that we have dark times looming ahead before the final return of Christ. Or I could consider her point from an historical perspective, with the reminder that many had a similar sense in the 1960s; one example would be Allan Drury, whose foreboding of the brokenness of American society caused the series of novels he began with Advise and Consent, a straightforward work of political wonkery, to evolve into something that can only be called political apocalyptic.

As it happens, though, I’m more interested in where Noonan went with this, with her analysis of the elite response to the situation she limns.

Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don’t think that’s our elites’ problem.

This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it. . . .

That’s what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don’t even express it to themselves, wonder if they’ll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

I lack the advantages of Noonan’s insider position, but I think she’s right about what’s going on; at least, that’s certainly how things look from out here in the hinterlands. I do not think, however, that she’s right about elitism being a problem. I think elitism is a problem for our elites; I think we saw it to some degree in their response to Harriet Miers, and I think we see it in a much larger way in their response to Sarah Palin—and I don’t think you have to believe in the particular ability and fitness of either woman to see that. (In retrospect, I don’t think they were wrong about Miers; but that doesn’t mean they were right for the right reason.)

For those who have made their separate peace, whose unspoken motto is “I got mine, you get yours,” this elitism is rooted in the simple, very human but very juvenile desire not to share. They believe they’ve earned what they have, and they don’t want anyone pushing into their little club from outside. This is the attitude common to the worst of the aristocracy in every human civilization throughout history; we need not be surprised to find it in ours.

That said, it’s the elitism of the second group that’s more dangerous, for a reason very similar to what I called last week “the leaven of the Pharisees.” It’s their elitism that Noonan herself expresses, that is the root of her disdain for Gov. Palin, with her assertion that “Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us.” The unspoken corollary to this is that it’s only our elites who are supposed to do that, and how dare anybody else try to horn in? It’s a big job, and at some level they’re worried (most of them, anyway; I have the sense our president doesn’t share this humility) that they aren’t going to pull it off—but by jingo, it’s their job, and they aren’t going to share it.

Why? Because they know that whether they’re up to the task or not, they’re the best possible people to be doing it, and certainly nobody else could possibly be. They have all the proof they need for that complacent certainty in the fact that they are the ones who are rich and educated and accomplished and famous, and nobody else is; their worldly accolades are all the evidence they could require of their own superiority to the rest of the world.

The only problem with this attitude is, it’s pure and utter bunk. The science-fiction novelist Elizabeth Moon explains this well in her book Against the Odds, where she has one of her characters observe,

Any system which does not give ample opportunity for talent to displace unearned rank will, in the end, come to grief. . . .

My point is that every time society has given it a chance, it’s been shown that talent exists in previously despised populations. . . . Over and over again, it’s been shown that an ordinary sampling of the population, including those considered inferior or hopeless, contains men and women of rare intelligence, wit, and ability. Just as ponds turn over their water yearly, revitalizing the pond’s life, so a good stirring of the human pot brings new blood to the top, and we’re all the better for it.

The reason for the elite opposition to Gov. Palin is that she’s from “an ordinary sampling of the population”—not from an elite family, not from an elite school, not from an elite profession, but a journalism major from the University of Idaho (her fourth college, no less) who lived in a small town on the edge of civilization who actually worked (and killed things!) with her hands. She’s an ordinary barbarian like most of us in this country. As such, they refuse to believe that she could possibly be a woman of “rare intelligence, wit, and ability”; the very idea creates severe cognitive dissonance for them.

This prejudice—for it’s nothing less than that; in its extreme forms, we may fairly call it bigotry—is highly unfortunate, because it only worsens the difficulty of getting the trolley back on the rails. For one thing, it aggravates the distrust that already exists between us ordinary barbarians and the elites of this country; this makes us less likely to follow them when they have a bad idea, to be sure, but it also makes us less likely to follow them when they’re right. It makes our politics more reactive and more divided, which inevitably makes them less productive.

And for another, whether our elites want to admit it or not, they’re simply wrong in their belief that they and only they have the talent, skills, perspective and character to right the trolley. There are many ordinary barbarians in this country—on the right and on the left, both—who would have a great deal to contribute to the leading of this nation, if they only got the chance. Gov. Palin is in many ways their avatar, someone who has already created that chance for herself and demonstrated prodigious talent as a leader and politician, and who I hope will create opportunities for others to follow suit.

What America really needs (one thing, at least) is for others to rise up and follow her into leadership roles in this country, to turn over the water in the pond and bring “new blood to the top”—new blood with new ideas, new experiences, and a new perspective on our nation and its problems. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see that happening on any major scale as long as the elites resist—and they will continue to resist, both out of their sense of their own superiority and out of their desire not to share their baubles. The latter is probably the easier to overcome; the former is harder, because it can be very, very difficult to admit that we need help, and especially to admit that we need help from those we’ve been accustomed to regarding as less capable than ourselves. As long as our elites can continue to see the rest of us that way, they’re not going to be willing to make that admission.

Which means that the only way to improve our situation is a grassroots revolution; the levers of power and of media influence may be in the hands of our elites, but the levers of the ballot box are still, ultimately, in ours. If we, the people want to force a path for ordinary barbarians into the halls of the elites, we have the ability to do so, if we will band together and use it. But in the meantime, we need to support the ones we have—with Sarah Palin at the head of the list.

Now, if your political convictions are simply too different from Gov. Palin’s for you to support her, then so be it; those matter, no question. In that event, though, I’d encourage you to look for ordinary barbarians who do agree with you, whom you can support. I firmly believe that the domination of our politics by one class of our society is, in its own way, as serious a political issue as any we face; and it’s one which we need to address, and soon, if we want to keep the trolley from going clean off the rails. Our elites aren’t up to the task by themselves, whether they’re willing to admit the fact or not; they need our help, and we need to provide it. Wanted or otherwise.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

 

The Palin Revolution, one year on

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One year ago today, I was going bonkers, and so was my blog traffic, as the whole political world was going mad at John McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. After the truly awe-inspiring disinformation campaign Sen. McCain and his staffers ran to keep his pick a secret, and the wondrous overnight thread on Adam Brickley’s site, with Drew (who turned out to be a staffer with the McCain campaign in Dayton) dropping hints that Gov. Palin would be the pick, to have the news come out and be confirmed was the greatest joy I’ve ever had in politics (not that there are many competitors for that particular honor).

One year later, I don’t take any of that back. I’m sorry for the hammering Gov. Palin and her family have taken, much of which has sickened me; I’m sorry for the lies and smears she’s had to deal with, and for what that says about the state of our political culture. But my respect for her, and my sense that she’s the best leader this country has to put forward, haven’t changed, even through a fairly bumpy year.

Some might say that’s unreasonable of me; but in proper perspective, I don’t believe it is. That perspective, I think, is supplied by a long article Stephen F. Hayward posted a couple days ago on NRO entitled, “The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents.” It’s a good and thoughtful piece, and I commend it to your attention for a number of reasons. Hayward wrote it, by his own statement, to clear away some of the fogginess of nostalgia from the conservative memory of President Reagan and his accomplishments, and also to remind us, almost thirty years on, of the political reality the Great Communicator faced in his day; the piece succeeds quite nicely in both aims, in my judgment. I was particularly interested, though, in this section for its application to the current political situation:

Both [Reagan and FDR] had to battle not only with the other party, but also with their own. Both men by degrees successfully transformed their own parties, while at the same time frustrating and deflecting the course of the rival party for a time. This, I suggest, is the heart of the real and enduring Reagan Revolution (or Age of Reagan).

Liberal ideologues who despaired over the limits of the New Deal overlooked that FDR had to carry along a large number of Democrats who opposed the New Deal. Reagan’s experience was similar, as he had to carry along a number of Republicans who were opposed to or lukewarm about his conservative philosophy. This problem would dog Reagan for his entire presidency. Robert Novak observed in late 1987: “True believers in Reagan’s efforts to radically transform how America is governed were outnumbered by orthodox Republicans who would have been more at home serving Jerry Ford.” . . .

Reagan’s dramatic landslide election in 1980 posed two problems: Democrats had to figure out how to oppose Reagan; Republicans, how to contain him. . . .

The lesson of FDR and Reagan is that changing one’s own party can be more difficult than beating the opposition.

As Hayward says, understanding that lesson is critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of President Reagan, or for that matter of Gov. Reagan; and as has been pointed out here before, it’s also critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of Sarah Palin.

This is true in two ways. In the first place, of course, it’s true of her career before last August 29; even more than President Reagan, her political rise was a rise against the establishment of her own party. If you’re not familiar with the story, R. A. Mansour’s post “Who Is Sarah Palin”offers an excellent sketch. Sarah Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla as a political insurgent against a good old boys’ network that was running the town for its own benefit; once in office, she continued to show the guts to buck the town establishment.

Later, having been named as ethics commissioner and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission—her big break, and her first big payday—when she discovered that one of her fellow commissioners, Randy Ruedrich (who also happened to be the head of the Alaska Republican Party) was misusing his position, she blew the whistle, even though it meant resigning her job. Then she ran against the Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, who had appointed both her and Ruedrich; in retrospect, we can say “of course she won,” but it was anything but an “of course” at the time.

Like Gov. Reagan, she was not the choice of the party establishment, but was launching a takeover from outside that establishment; as with President Reagan, her dramatic victory posed as big a problem to her own party, who saw her not as their leader but as someone they had to contain, as to the theoretical opposition. President Reagan never told the Congress “All of you here need some adult supervision!” as Gov. Palin did (earning herself the lasting enmity of the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green), but I’m sure he would have appreciated the line.

This is why she spent the first part of her term in Alaska working as much with the Democrats as with her (supposed) own party: she had to, in order to accomplish things like chopping up the backroom deal Gov. Murkowski had worked out with Big Oil to replace it with a workable new severance-tax law that would be good for Alaska, not just for Big Oil, or to put a bill together that would finally get a process moving to build a natural-gas pipeline from the Northern Slope to the Lower 48.

Now, of course, her opponents like to minimize her accomplishments and carp about this or that, but they’re missing the point: given the fact that she was governing in the teeth of opposition from her own party, working to transform that party as much as to enact policy, it may well be possible to say of her as we can of President Reagan that Gov. Palin did less than she had hoped and less than people wanted—that doesn’t change the fact that, as Gary McDowell said of the Gipper, she did “a **** of a lot more than people thought [she] would.”

This is a point which is especially critical to bear in mind in considering this last calendar year for Gov. Palin. Where before, she was able to work with the Alaska Democrats to get legislation passed—after all, her initiatives were popular, and her war with her own party establishment only helped them in their efforts against Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young—her performance in the presidential campaign made her Public Enemy No. 1 for the national Democratic Party, meaning that the Alaska Democrats could no longer afford to do anythingthat would give her good publicity. (Given the close connections between prominent Democrats in Alaska and the Obama White House, there’s no doubt in my mind that that imperative came all the way from the top.)

This, combined with the time- and energy-wasting barrage of ludicrous, transparently malicious ethics charges, combined to hamstring her administration. The #1 goal of the Left was to keep her from accomplishing anything (yes, I believe that was even ahead of bankrupting her through legal bills, which I figure was #2), so as to be able to portray her in future races as a lightweight who was overmatched by her office. Now, in a rational world, this wouldn’t have worked, because by the numbers, the Republicans had sufficient votes in the legislature to pass her agenda into law; but as already noted, this isn’t a rational world, and a large chunk of the Alaska GOP wasn’t on her side, but rather sided with the Democrats against her. This is the sort of thing that can happen when you’re faced with having to try to transform your own party.

To complicate matters, this struggle in Alaska has been mirrored on a national scale. The GOP is referred to as the party of Reagan, but it isn’t in any meaningful sense; indeed, I think Heyman overstates the degree to which it ever really was. One can point to Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994 and the Contract with America as evidence of a Reaganite legacy, but Rep. Gingrich himself was an insurgent in the party, and the conservative principles of the Contract didn’t really last long; perhaps the most telling thing is that the party didn’t nominate a conservative as its standard-bearer in 1998, but an old warhorse of the pre-Reagan Republican establishment, Bob Dole. Indeed, to this date, for all his success, Ronald Reagan remains sui generis among Republican presidential nominees.

As a result, the national Republican establishment reacted (and keeps reacting) to Gov. Palin in the same way they reacted to Gov. Reagan—belittling her intelligence, mocking her ideas, trying to deny her credit for her accomplishments, and generally trying to tear her down in any way they can, while still trying to make as much use as they can out of her popularity. This, combined with the hostility of the party’s state organization in Alaska, left her with little structural support or cover against the attacks of the Left (an understatement, actually, given that some in the party actually piled on). Collectively, this put her in a very unusual position for an elected official: having her office become a hindrance to her effectiveness and ability to function rather than an advantage.

As such, Gov. Palin’s utterly un-telegraphed resignation is one of those events that was shocking at the time but in retrospect seems almost obvious—we should have seen it coming. We would have, were it not the sort of thing that professional politicians never do. Your typical politician, after all, holds on to power with the awe-inspiring single-mindedness of the clinically obsessed; we knew Gov. Palin to be anything but a typical politician and a woman who could say, “Politically speaking, if I die, I die,” but our expectations are too well shaped by the normal course of events to be truly able to predict that she would defy that norm as she did. Had we been able to join her in thinking outside the box (or perhaps I should say, the straitjacket) of those expectations, though, we would have seen what she saw: that the only way for her to carry on effectively with her mission was to step down from office and go to work as a private citizen.

Which, of course, she has, with verve and gusto and considerable effectiveness. (Google “Facebook ‘Sarah Palin,'” and you’ll get “about 9,520,000” hits.) As Gov. Reagan did, so Gov. Palin has found it necessary to go “into the wilderness”—which is to say, back into the real world outside a government position—in order to carry on with her efforts to shift the institutional GOP back toward its conservative base. The Juneau statehouse was too small, remote and encumbered a platform for her to be able to work effectively; she needed to create a better one for herself. In her use of Facebook, she’s demonstrating her ability to do exactly that—yes, she’ll need to go beyond Facebook as well, but it’s proving a mighty fine place to start—and though she’s dragging much of the GOP elite with her kicking, screaming, and complaining, she is dragging them nevertheless. No matter how much they might protest or wish it were otherwise, she is the one who has set the agenda for the party’s opposition to Obamacare; she is the one who played the biggest part in stopping the administration’s energy-tax agenda cold; and increasingly, she is recognized as the Republican whose leadership matters the most in this country, regardless of official position or lack thereof.

Of course, there are many people in both parties who have a vested interest in changing that reality—Democrats who oppose her, and Republicans who want to contain her—and so the resistance continues. As such, though Gov. Palin’s resignation outflanked them, the efforts to use it against her continue as well. Most of those efforts are pointless and ineffective, since they rest on the assertion that Gov. Palin is finished in politics because she no longer holds office; that doesn’t hold water, both because of their continued attacks and because the American people don’t value being elected to office as highly as politicians do. There is one question, however, that does linger with many people: if she resigned from office once, how can we be sure she wouldn’t do it again if she won the White House?

The answer to that is found in considering both halves of the problem she faced in Alaska. One, the state’s executive-ethics law, does not exist on the national level; were she elected president, she would not be vulnerable to a barrage of bogus charges as she was as governor. The other, the absolute opposition she faced from a majority of her own party in Alaska, is as I said part and parcel of the work of transforming the GOP, and would be a problem for President Palin to some degree as it was for President Reagan. However, there are two good reasons to think that it would be a problem which would be far easier for President Palin to overcome than it was for Governor Palin.

One, if she does in fact end up running and winning in 2012 (or at any later date), she will by virtue of that simple fact have a demonstrated national support base of some 60 million voters. As Barack Obama has already shown, being able to remind people that you won gives you considerable political leverage. That’s leverage far beyond what she had simply by virtue of winning a single gubernatorial election in a low-population state, because that’s a vastly greater number of voters. (Had things played out differently in Alaska, had she had a couple of terms, her re-election and her ability to influence the re-election campaigns of other Alaskan politicians would have started to give her that sort of leverage on a state level, but that leverage would always have been affected by events on the national scene.) As such, she would have a lot more political capital to use to deal with recalcitrant members of her own party, as well as with more conservative members of the Democratic caucuses.

And two, Gov. Palin has a tremendous opportunity ahead of her in the 2009-10 elections. By campaigning for Republican candidates around the country, she has the chance to build a constituency for herself in the national party institution, in three ways. The first, most basic, and most important, is by working to get people elected who share her principles, and who thus will tend out of their own political beliefs and instincts to support the same things she supports. By campaigning, especially in House elections, for the election of true conservatives—and I hope she finds good opportunities to do so not just in the general election but in primaries, working to win nominations for conservatives over establishment types (as for example, dare I say, Marco Rubio in Florida?)—she has the chance to shape the congressional Republican caucuses into bodies which will be more likely to follow her lead, should she run and win in 2012.

The second way is dicier, but still essential: by campaigning for other Republican candidates and helping them win elections, she’ll earn good will and put them in her debt. As the recent behavior of Saxby Chambliss shows, this isn’t as reliable a way of building support as it should be—you just can’t count on most politicians not to welch on a debt—but it’s necessary all the same. You might not be able to count on them returning the favor if you help them, but you can surely count on them not helping you if you don’t.

The third comes back to that whole question of leverage. As I said, if Gov. Palin becomes President Palin, she will have shown by that fact that she has a strong political base; but that will be much more impressive to folks on the Hill if she’s already shown that her base won’t just help her get elected, but also translates into downballot clout. If she flexes real political muscle during the mid-term elections, if she shows that her support is broad enough and strong enough to influence House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the country—if she makes it clear to everyone that being endorsed by Sarah Palin is a good thing for Republican politicians—then the GOP will get the idea that opposing her is not likely to be a good thing for Republican politicians. That will make the congressional GOP and the rest of the party establishment much more likely to follow her lead.

All of which is to say, the next key stage of the Palin Revolution, if it is to come fully to fruition, is the next election cycle; that will be the point at which her leadership will, I believe, really begin to take hold in the party in an institutional way, and the necessary groundwork for the future Palin administration for which we hope. It’s been a hard year for Gov. Palin, but it’s been a year which has produced many good things, too; and as startling and controversial as her resignation was, she has proven that it was not the beginning of the end of her political career, but rather the end of the beginning. The best, I believe, is yet to be; and for that, I am thankful.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

 

The real bigotry of Gatesgate

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isn’t racism, but classism—not black vs. white but elite vs. ordinary barbarian. Michael Barone captures this well in his Examiner piece from yesterday when he writes,

When Gates was shouting in the hearing of passerbys that Crowley was a racist, Crowley must have regarded this as a threat to his entire career. Allegations of racism could result in losing his job, being publicly disgraced, being unable to get another good job—the end of everything he’d worked for all his adult life.

Gates had much less to lose. His foolish mouthing off—in street talk, for goodness sake—at worst would get him a couple of hours in jail, as it did. That’s unpleasant, but even before being hauled off he could see a more-than-offsetting benefit: this could be the subject or the jumping off point for his next television documentary! Crowley had the power to put Gates in jail for a few hours, but not much else.

Gates, on the other hand, had the power to destroy Crowley’s career. And he seemed to enjoy wielding that power, or at least to be acting in reckless disregard of his capacity to destroy the professional life of another human being. Yes, Gates was jet-lagged and presumably irritated that he was locked out of his house. But the possibility that Crowley was a decent professional, not at all a racist, properly investigating a possible crime, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. Crowley was just one of the little people, a disposable commodity in the career of an academic superstar.

This accounts well for something that rather surprised me: the swiftness and unflinching conviction with which Sgt. Crowley’s colleagues and the officials of his union stood up for him and stood behind him. I would have expected some of them to try to curry favor with Professor Gates, Harvard, the mayor of Cambridge, and the president, in the face of the radioactive allegation of racism—but none of them did. I think Barone’s right, that they recognized the real bigotry in the Gates-Crowley encounter, and though they didn’t play the victim, they weren’t willing to knuckle under to it, either.

As Barone put it, they refused to let “a Harvard swell . . . destroy one of their peers . . . on a totally specious basis for his own fun and profit.” Good on them. I don’t imagine there are a lot of Palinites on the Cambridge, MA police force—but they clearly have their fair share of strong, proud ordinary barbarians, and that’s a profoundly good thing.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Clearing the decks

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There are folks out there (like Examiner.com‘s George Copeland) suggesting that Sarah Palin may have resigned from office to set up a run for the presidency in 2012, not as a Republican, but as an independent candidate. While I tend to doubt that that will be her approach, the party mandarins have every reason to worry about what she might do to them. After all, the last time Sarah Palin resigned from a position, it was the beginning of an all-out assault on the Alaska GOP, which had betrayed the party’s core principles with its corruption and cronyism. Following her resignation, her political career was widely pronounced dead at the scene, but in fact it was only the beginning of the political insurgency that would carry her to the governor’s mansion. The past is no guarantee of the future, but there is certainly considerable reason to think that we might see history repeating itself here.

And if so, there’s good reason for it. Michelle Malkin took a well-deserved rhetorical machete to the Beltway GOP last week after the news broke of David Keene’s utterly disgusting attempt to extort money from FedEx, declaring,

We’ve got major battles on the Hill and fundamental principles to defend.

Show the corrupted, Beltway-infected, power-drunk Republicans the door.

And get back to work.

I heartily agree. To this point, though, not enough Republican voters have; when I tried a while back to argue over on RedState that conservatives should back Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-LA) in a primary challenge to Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), I was shouted down by a bunch of folks saying, in essence, “His voting record’s good—never mind the prostitution thing.” Here’s hoping that sort of attitude is starting to change; it has to. My second-favorite politician, Florida’s Marco Rubio, is right to say,

The Republican party should be the party that always understands that what people want more than anything else in life is for the chance to provide security for themselves and their family and to leave their kids better off than themselves. . . .

For many Americans our party has become indistinguishable from the Democrats. We’re viewed as the party of hypocrites who say one thing and do another.

The only way we’re going to fix that, and the only way we’re going to have a political party whose leaders represent and stay true to the beliefs and concerns of those who elect them, is to finish clearing the decks of the low-character power-focused Washington-corrupted lowlifes who currently make up the bulk of the national party establishment. Gov. Palin, throughout her political career, has been about cleaning folks like that out of the Republican Party, first locally and then on the state level. Now she’s stepping down from her position in Alaska so she can take them on—and take them out—on the national stage. All I can say is—you go, Gov.; we’re behind you every step of the way.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Sarah Palin: Worth fighting for

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Why? Dan Calabrese of the North Star Writers Group has part of the answer:

So, Republicans, you’re looking for people who can serve as faces of a party on the upswing. What qualities would we want to see in such people?

Maybe these:

  • They’ve served in public office and have actually governed effectively.
  • Rather than just talking about fiscal responsibility, they’ve made it happen under their watch.
  • When possible, they’ve made sure the private sector would take the lead in crucial initiatives.
  • They’ve taken on corrupt, entrenched interests to make government more responsive to the people it serves, even when those interests were fellow Republicans.
  • They pull no punches in criticizing Democrats, but they do so with a positive outlook and a pleasant demeanor.
  • They’re not intimidated by the inevitable crap they will catch from the media, celebrities and whomever else.
  • They have an enthusiastic following upon which to build.
  • Finally, if you’ve got all of the above, it can’t hurt if you also look fantastic.

As he notes, there’s one person who fits all eight of those criteria: Sarah Palin.

Calabrese understands that it’s stupid to judge the Governor by the mockery she gets from those trying to take her down. He poses the GOP the key questions:

If you read substance-challenged media like Politico, you think it’s all about unnamed GOP operatives grumbling about the way her scheduler works, or GOP senators (who refuse to put their names on the record) finding her annoying.

Have you ever listened to Palin talk about policy? Have you examined her record in Alaska? Do you know the political courage she has demonstrated achieving crucial goals there?It’s especially important to listen to Palin’s discussion of policy matters now, as compared with during the presidential campaign, because then she was hamstrung by the need to tout the McCain campaign’s discombobulated message. Now that she is free to craft her own message, and can base it on her own record, she is exponentially more compelling.

Those of us who’ve followed her career without prejudging her know that Gov. Palin is strong across a wide range of policy issues; we know she’s an effective, innovative governor who consistently puts principle first, even at the cost of fierce opposition from many in her own party (to say nothing of the folks who are supposed to be the opposition). Still, it’s refreshing to see that Calabrese gets it:

The way she governs Alaska represents a principled, serious approach that is missing in the conduct of far too many Republican officeholders. What’s more, the way she talks about the excesses of the Obama Administration shows that she not only sees the problems we are creating for ourselves, but understands the alternatives we should be championing. . . .

Palin knows her stuff, backs it up with action and expresses herself with the perfect mix of substance and agreeable style.

Calabrese’s column is explicitly not intended to champion Gov. Palin for the GOP presidential nomination; instead, he’s trying to do something much more basic and, I think, more important. His thesis is that the Republican Party needs to embrace, and support, and promote—and lean on—every significant Republican whose track record shows intelligent, successful application of conservative principles to the real issues that face America, not in Washington, but in actual executive roles around this country.

As he says, there’s no need to take sides, because conservatives are really all on the sameside, and the more people we have like Bobby Jindal and Mitch Daniels, the better; but it does mean recognizing that on substance, Gov. Palin belongs at the head of that list (and that those who don’t see that have been “focused on nonsense instead of what really matters”). Calabrese’s advice here is absolutely spot-on, and something the GOP mandarins badly need to take to heart; though he doesn’t quote Ben Franklin here, what he’s saying reminds me of the old sage’s words, which are squarely on point for today’s Republican Party:

“We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Calabrese’s column is absolutely vintage. Read the whole thing, and pass it on; and if you can, join the webathon and donate.

(Cross-posted, edited, from “Dan Calabrese: ‘Nail, Meet Hammer. BANG!’” at Conservatives4Palin)

Support citizen government; support Sarah Palin

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It’s no secret, of course, that I’m a supporter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Even if I weren’t, though—even if I were one of the Beltway types pulling for Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush, let’s say—I would be angry at the way in which Gov. Palin’s opponents in Alaska have chosen to use an onslaught of ludicrous, frivolous “ethics complaints” to try to bring her down by bankrupting her with legal fees. (It’s not just me calling these complaints frivolous; the head of the committee responsible for addressing them, a Murkowski appointee who owes the governor nothing, has dismissed them all with that judgment, and has been musing in recent weeks about ways to make complainants pay for their complaints.) So far, not one of these complaints has passed even the first smell test, yet her enemies will stop at nothing to try to grind her down and bury her with legal debt defending herself for such actions as wearing a warm coat when she showed up for the start of the Iron Dog snowmobile race.

Unlike so many of our professional politicians, Gov. Palin is not a rich member of our nation’s elite class, and she doesn’t have a trust fund or a private fortune to use to pay her lawyer; she’s a blue-collar woman with a blue-collar husband. As such, she started a legal defense fund to cover her legal bills, but her ankle-biting opponents have driven her bills up over a half-million dollars, so she has a long way to go. As such, my colleagues over atConservatives4Palin have launched a webathon, running through June 22, to help retire as much of her legal debt as possible.

I understand that these are tough economic times, and in general, I tend to be one who’s skeptical of donating money to politicians or parties, so I understand that point of view; but if you’re in a position to help, I encourage you to do so—whether you’re a supporter of Gov. Palin or not.

That might seem to be a strange thing to say, but hear me out. I firmly believe that one of the reasons why the political elite has tried so hard to marginalize and destroy this woman—elitists on the Right as well as on the Left—is that she’s not one of them; she’s not from the elite class, she didn’t rise through any of our political machines, and so she’s not beholden to them and they have no leverage on her. Our monoclonal political class likes its grip on power; sure, they have their ideological differences that reflect the differences in beliefs that exist in the rest of the country, but their deepest loyalty is to their class, their deepest commitment to business as usual. They are not truly representative in any meaningful sense.

If we want to change that, we need to elect people—liberals as well as conservatives—from outside that class, people who truly are a part of we, the people rather than “we, the Beltway.” Gov. Palin isn’t just a conservative politician, she’s a complete outsider to the Beltway, someone who came from a normal (if somewhat uncommon) American family, upbringing, and life. As such, she’s a test case for this: can any politician who is truly of the people, by the people, for the people long endure?

I don’t expect many liberals to support her, much less vote for her, because like anyone else, in general, liberals should vote for people who share their political principles, and she doesn’t; but I do think that liberals should be pulling for her to succeed, to thrive, to win re-election in 2010 and the GOP nomination in 2012, even if they then want her to lose in November. Why? Because if she succeeds, if she triumphs, she will show other potential citizen candidates that it can be done, and it can be endured, and it’s worth doing; if she succeeds, she will be followed, she will be emulated, and we will see others—in both parties—walking the trail she blazed. If Republican and Democratic voters are going to reclaim our parties for the principles in which they’re supposed to believe, it’s going to require candidates who are beholden to us rather than to the structures of those parties—and if that’s going to happen in our generation, it has to begin here, with Sarah Palin. We cannot let her be snuffed out if we want to see anyone else who isn’t machine-approved (and machine-stamped) run for anything much above dogcatcher.

As such, I’ll say it again: liberals who would like to see the Democratic Party break free of the corruptocrats who run it have just as much vested in Gov. Palin as conservatives who would like to see the GOP break free of the domination of its own trough-swilling pigs, and just as much reason to help her overcome this challenge. If you can, please give, so that this abuse of Alaska’s ethics laws will cease, and Gov. Palin can be on about the business for which she was elected.

 

Political machines hate reformers

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That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of most of the news stories about Sarah Palin in recent months. It’s the reason for the wrangling between her and the Democrats over the Juneau-area state senate seat; it’s the reason for the fight over her AG nominee, Wayne Anthony Ross; it’s the reason for the sniping from machine tools in the state legislature like Fairbanks RINO Jay Ramras; it’s the reason the New York Times paid a visit to Alaska. This is what all the badmouthing boils down to.

Obviously, the stories about members of her family are not, in and of themselves, in this category; however, the fact that the MSM is more interested in the likes of Levi Johnston than they are in, say, President Obama’s child-rapist half-brother Samson is also a reflection of the fact that political machines don’t like reformers. Now, I don’t happen to think that Samson Obama ought to be a major political story, or indeed that he has any greater significance than anyone else who likes to rape 13-year-old girls, which is one reason I haven’t blogged about him; Barack Obama is human, and therefore a sinner like all the rest of us, and the same is true of his family, and some of those folks are going to be worse sinners than others. What matters is who he is and what he does. However, the same is true of Gov. Palin, even with respect to her children—anyone who thinks it’s possible to be a good-enough parent to ensure that your 17-year-old daughter is immune to the kinds of bad decisions and sinful acts to which 17-year-olds are prone is probably expecting that check from Nigeria any day now.

If Bristol Palin deserves attention from the MSM, well, what Samson Obama did was a heck of a lot worse—by that standard, he ought to be on front pages as far as the eye can see. And he isn’t. Why? Because of ideology, to be sure, but also because President Obama doesn’t threaten the machine—he’s of the machine, he owes it, and he can be trusted to behave accordingly. Gov. Palin isn’t, and doesn’t, and can’t, and so every bit of influence she gains is a direct threat to the (bi-partisan) political establishment that can neither predict nor control her.

This goes all the way back to the very beginning of her political career. (Note: much of this is covered in R. A. Mansour’s excellent post “Who Is Sarah Palin?”) In her first step into politics, she won a seat on the city council of Wasilla. At that point, she had the backing of her mayor. Did she repay his support by being a loyal supporter of his administration, following the expected rules of political patronage? No, she didn’t; when she decided that he was governing badly and in a manner that she considered bad for the community, she challenged him, ran against him, and defeated him. He’s still complaining about her ingratitude.

Later, after she lost the race for lieutenant governor in 2004, the new Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, one of the entrenched leaders of the oil-money-fueled Alaska GOP political machine, appointed her as ethics supervisor and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. One of her fellow commissioners was Randy Ruedrich, who also chaired the Alaska Republican Party; when she discovered he was guilty of ethics violations, she blew the whistle on him, even though she ended up having to quit the commission (giving up a six-figure salary) to do so. Gov. Murkowski backed Ruedrich, but he ended up paying a significant fine for his actions. In 2006, at least in part because of this and other dubious actions on Gov. Murkowski’s part, she ran against him as a Republican but a party outsider, and beat him.

If you’re keeping score, that’s twice that she was recruited by a Republican incumbent to be a good little foot soldier, declined to be a good little foot soldier in the face of her political patron’s bad conduct, and knocked said incumbent out of office. Those of you with a taste for old political fiction will probably understand why, even more than Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, the politician of whom Gov. Palin reminds me most is Orrin Knox, the fictional senior U. S. Senator from Illinois (small irony there) in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. When it comes to dealing with her own party, she has definitely acted in line with Sen. Knox’s motto: “I don’t give a —- about being liked, but I intend to be respected.”

Now, up until about August 28 of last year, none of this posed any particular problems for the Democratic political machine, either in Alaska or nationally. You see, the national political machine’s biggest concern (in both parties) for holding statehouses has to do with the redistricting that takes place every decade, and Alaska has only one House seat and isn’t likely to gain a second one; as such, that doesn’t apply. Democratic interest in Alaska, then, was primarily focused on trying to unseat the state’s senior U. S. Senator, the corrupt but wily and very powerful Ted Stevens, and its lone House member, Rep. Don Young—and in that effort, Gov. Palin was a great help, which made her the Democrats’ favorite Republican. Sure, they had every intention of trying as hard as they could to unseat her in 2010, but at that point, she was more a help to them than a hindrance. She’d worked with Democrats in the Alaska legislature to replace laws that had essentially been written by oil-company lobbyists—specifically, the tax code on resource extraction and a gas-pipeline bill—with laws that were better for the people and state of Alaska. Back then, while Alaska Democrats weren’t above trying to take her down, they were happy to give Gov. Palin the credit for killing the “Bridge to Nowhere,” because it helped them make their case against the Alaskans who really mattered in her party.

And then John McCain named her his running mate—and everything changed. Suddenly, she was the Alaskan who mattered in her party, because she mattered in the presidential race; she gave the McCain campaign an energy it hadn’t had since the New Hampshire primary—the 2000 New Hampshire primary, that is—and thus became Public Enemy #1 for the national Democratic machine, and so for the Alaska Democratic machine as well. Conservatives4Palin has chronicled at length how the Obama campaign’s officials in Alaska, folks like State Senators Hollis French and Kim Elton, tried to bring her down (even going so far as to promise an “October surprise”), and how St. Sen. Elton got his payoff for his actions in support of the Obama campaign.

That, by the way, was supposed to be a cascading payoff; the Alaska Democratic Party machine thought it could giftwrap St. Sen. Elton’s seat for St. Rep. Beth Kerttula (one of those Democrats who’d supported Gov. Palin until she became a threat to the Obama campaign), and then giftwrap her seat in turn for Kim Metcalfe, who chairs the local party in Juneau. But Gov. Palin doesn’t appreciate machine politics when practiced by either party—she’s willing to work with Democrats, but she’s as opposed to the Democratic machine as she is to the Republican machine, and so she’s been refusing to play along with their back-room maneuvers.

Gov. Palin is now in a difficult, though probably inevitable, position: she is opposed by a bi-partisan coalition of the machine politicians in Alaska, who oppose each other on policy but share a common higher loyalty to the old boys’ club and the perks and procedures to which they’re accustomed. Gov. Palin has the support of a strong majority of the Alaskan people, but only a minority of the state’s politicians. This has meant that the state legislature has been in full foot-dragging mode through the entire session—a fact which they now intend, via the Democratic Party PR department (aka the MSM, specifically the New York Times), to blame on her.

That the MSM will coordinate with the Democratic/Republican machine in Alaska on this is, I believe, a sign of their deepest agenda here—not just their general bias against conservatives, but a deeper bias yet: as much as they bleat about “speaking truth to power,” they are not the outside critics of the machine that they pretend to be. Rather, they are a part of the machine, they are inside the corridors of power, that’s where they want to be, and they really have no true understanding or interest of the world outside those corridors.

This is true, I believe, even of the conservatives within the MSM, which is why a lot of the elite conservative writers have been almost as unfair to Gov. Palin as their liberal colleagues; and if a Democratic version of Gov. Palin were ever to emerge, a true reformer who bucked the party machine, I don’t think the likes of Eleanor Clift and Paul Krugman would be any kinder to that individual than the likes of David Brooks and David Frum have been to Gov. Palin. The initial MSM reaction to the appointment of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton’s vacant seat in the U.S. Senate certainly supports that thought.

In other words, what we’re seeing here is the utter bankruptcy of the MSM as an “independent free press”; they are nothing of the kind. They are organs of elite opinion, constituent parts of the political machine. This, more than ideology, is the reason why they’re so determined to bring Gov. Palin down, because she represents a threat to their worldview on a more basic level even than ideology: she threatens their sense of their own superiority, and the rules by which they operate, and the perks and the comfort zone which those rules ensure, just as much as she threatens all those things for the machine politicians she’s been relentlessly at work to overcome and bring down.

This is one of the reasons why we need the continued rise of the citizen punditry via the blogosphere—we need to reclaim the national discussion on issues from the machine almost as much as we need to reclaim our government. (I say “almost” because whatever its failings, talk radio has also been outside the political machine, for the most part.) And it’s why we need to support Gov. Palin, and why I so much appreciate the independents and moderate Democrats who do, because if she goes down to defeat—if the Alaska political machine defeats her, or the national Democratic machine defeats her—the odds that someone else will try to buck the machine and bring real political reform to this country approach zero . . . from beneath.

Remember this, as you read the stories about Sarah Palin: remember that she’s spent her career trying to reform the machine politics of Alaska, and remember that political machines hate reformers—and they’re the ones who have the money, and the media. All Gov. Palin has is the truth, and the support of those of us who are fed up with the machine. Remember that, and don’t believe the hate.

Update: Welcome to folks dropping by from C4P; my posting has tilted toward religious topics in the last week or so, but even if that isn’t up your alley, you might also find my post in defense of the citizen punditry of particular interest. I hope to have a reflection on Gov. Palin’s visit to Evansville up in the next day or two as well.

In defense of the citizen punditry

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When the term-limits movement began, I was initially a big supporter of the idea. Over time, that changed, as it became apparent that the real effect of term limits for politicians is primarily to shift influence from elected officials to unelected staff and lobbyists; but I’m still a believer in the underlying principle, even if term limits are a bad way to realize it. We should not have a separate class of professional politicians; that undermines the very nature of representative government.

Our leaders are, in large part, representative of no class and no group but their own; while they retain some connection to the voters who elect them, they have shed any real identification with us, any real sense of belonging to and with us and being a part of us, in favor of their new class, their new group, their new culture. It’s a class and a culture which has some resemblance to the country as a whole, including a roughly similar ideological spectrum from left to right, and so we can select people whose voting patterns are more or less congenial to our beliefs—but this doesn’t mean that they share our cultural referents or that they actually think like the rest of us, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking they do. We should expect most politicians, even those with whom we most agree, to at least occasionally do something we find completely incomprehensible, because they’re operating in a different reality than ours, with different priorities.

I don’t know how we solve this; I don’t even know that there is a solution. Happily, however, I believe we’re seeing a solution arising for a linked problem: the hegemony of the professional punditocracy.

Just as I don’t think there should be professional politicians, so I don’t think we’re better off for having professional pundits; I believe in citizen pundits just as I believe in citizen politicians, and for the same reasons. Living in the echo chamber does bad things to your understanding of the world. You can imagine the effect if the only mirrors you ever saw were funhouse mirrors—it would distort your vision and give you a false view of yourself and the world around you; the effect of becoming entirely a creature of the political inside is similar. Even the best of the pundit class suffer the effects of having no real perspective on the outside world.

Here, however, the Internet and the rise of the blogosphere is providing a counterweight. While I grant that the blogosphere can’t simply supplant the news media because it is itself dependent on the work of professional reporters, and while Sturgeon’s Law applies here as well as everywhere else (if anything, we might be lucky if as much as 10% of the stuff out there is worth reading), yet what Seattle sports blogger John Morgan says about sports media is true on a much broader scale:

There are two layers of media at work. A nascent shadow media of questionable reputability and standards that, ironically enough, actually pursues the truth, and an established media that reports naïve truth as it’s fed to them.

I would argue that the best of our online commentators have already rendered most professional columnists and talking heads redundant. The MSM haven’t realized this yet, of course—or they haven’t admitted it if they have—and so folks like David Brooks, David Frum, Ellen Goodman, and Jeff Jarvis continue to wield influence; but at this point, they’re only significant because people are still trained to think they’re significant. They’re already obsolete. The only thing keeping them in service is that their true obsolescence hasn’t registered with most of the media consumers in this country . . . yet.

In their place we will see the continued rise of the citizen punditry. This is a development with significant downsides, no question, most notably the sort of vicious nastiness we see in the online comments on newspaper websites like that of the Anchorage Daily News. We’ve had, thanks in considerable part to the professionalization of the media, a period of relative sanity and civility in our political discourse. That’s been unraveling for a while, though, and the growing deprofessionalization of our political commentary will likely only hasten that unraveling; given the behavior of the MSM in the last election, I don’t see any reason to believe that they would be any better in the end.

Over against that, I think the proliferation of citizen pundits will in the end bring a sort of Wikipediazation to our political commentary. The free market doesn’t work perfectly, but it works better than a command economy; what we currently have is something of a command economy of opinions, and as the free market of the Internet supersedes it, I think we’ll see a more balanced commentariat emerge than what the MSM has given us for generations. Individual pundits may well be less fair and/or farther from the center (or maybe not, I don’t know), but in the aggregate, I would bet that the result will provide a relatively even portrait of American politics. It’s not that we’ll have a neutral point of view (something which I don’t believe exists anyway), but rather that each point of view will have its equal and opposite, which should make it easier to identify the truth among the competing claims.

Doing so will of course take work on the part of readers; but then, for readers who are willing to put in that work, this may well be the best part of all. It won’t be as easy as simply believing what the newspapers tell them, but it will be far more satisfying . . . and far more free.