Of all the blogs I’ve ever run across, I think Heaven Better Have Lightsabers has to have the most fun name. Fortunately, Hurley’s blog doesn’t waste its title. Today, he (?) has a post up called “H. L. Mencken on Leadership” which is a commentary on an extended quotation from a Mencken piece on Grover Cleveland, including these selections:
There was never any string tied to old Grover. He got into politics, not by knuckling to politicians, but by scorning and defying them, and when he found himself opposed in what he conceived to be sound and honest courses, not only by politicians but by the sovereign people, he treated them to a massive dose of the same medicine.
*****
No President since Lincoln, not even the melancholy Hoover, has been more bitterly hated, or by more people.
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He came from an excellent family, but his youth had been a hard one, and his cultural advantages were not of the best.
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He banged along like a locomotive. If man or devil got upon the track, then so much the worse for man or devil.
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Any man thus obsessed by a concept of duty is bound to seek support for it somewhere outside himself. He must rest it on something which seems to him to be higher than mere private inclination or advantage.
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He was not averse to popularity, but he put it far below the approval of conscience.
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It is not likely that we shall see his like again, at least in the present age. The Presidency is now closed to the kind of character that he had so abundantly. It is going, in these days, to more politic and pliant men. They get it by yielding prudently, by changing their minds at the right instant, by keeping silent when speech is dangerous. Frankness and courage are luxuries confined to the more comic varieties of runners-up at national conventions.
Hurley comments,
From my opinion it’s perfectly applicable to replace the ‘he/him/his’ with she and her, president with governor, and Grover Cleveland with Sarah Palin. I don’t know what the Governor wants in the future, but she doesn’t seem like the sort of lady who is going to let a hoard of ignorant tools define her as a person.
I have to agree, and to add that the last selection he cites is a dead ringer for Barack Obama (and, for that matter, for Joe Biden, definitely among “the more comic varieties of runners-up”). I am reminded in all this of a famous line about President Cleveland, from the speech in which he was nominated for what would be his second term (his third convention, since Benjamin Harrison held the office between Cleveland’s two terms), which I have often thought applies to Gov. Palin:
They love him for the enemies he has made.
I think Sarah Palin just needs more experience and has to do more "homework". So she might be a far better politician. But at her current state she really would have been a bad vice president.
Why? For one thing, she's very strong on certain issues; for another, the VP has few actual responsibilities. I suspect that if she were living at the Naval Observatory now, she'd be playing sponge–learning everything she could at NSC meetings, learning the Senate while presiding over its sessions, studying briefing papers, meeting with Cabinet officials, and generally doing everything possible to prepare herself to make whatever decisions she might someday need to make.
In the original article, Mencken connected his characterisation to concrete examples from Cleveland's two presidencies. Unmoored from this context, his praise is vague enough that you could use it with regard to just about any politician you care to admire. Sarah Palin? Why not Ralph Nader? or Pat Buchanan?