It’s interesting, watching liberals try to find some sort of caricature for Sarah Palin that will really stick. They’ve gone through several versions over the last year and a half, but while they’ve managed to give a lot of people a negative impression of her, they haven’t had anything like the sort of success they had in destroying George W. Bush’s public image, and she’s shown a disconcerting ability to blow their efforts away whenever she speaks in public or shows up on camera. That may be why the New York Times has elected to take a new tack: portraying Gov. Palin as a political mastermind.
It’s a remarkable tactical shift, as long as you don’t expect consistency or coherent argument. Ann Althouse, never one to suffer fools gladly (or at all, really), captured the NYT’s shift nicely: “Sarah Palin was a blithering idiot until she became a devious genius.” I feel a little sorry for the NYT, though—not much, but a little; they don’t understand Gov. Palin, because they really don’t understand this country as it exists beyond their elite bubble, and so they can’t predict what she’s going to do next because they don’t really know why she’s going to do it. As Mark Tapscott points out, her political influence and her strong core of support come from her ability to connect powerfully with the broad base of American voters who feel alienated from our government and the elite political class who control it.
That’s also, I believe, why elitist attempts to attack and dismiss Gov. Palin have had relatively little lasting effect; people who’ve only heard the elitist caricature tend to believe it, but that caricature tends not to survive comparison to the actual woman. In the end, if the Left is going to beat her, it’s going to have to do so the old-fashioned way: by accepting that she’s a respectable and serious opponent and trying to convince the voting public to choose an equally respectable and serious liberal candidate instead. The politics of personal destruction just aren’t going to work against her.
That possibility clearly worries our political and media elites—including the conservatives among them, many of whom it seems would rather lose to a liberal of their own class than help elect a conservative from the hoi polloi—because Gov. Palin is a powerfully gifted and effective politician who excels at retail politics, the kind of handshaking and baby-kissing that propelled Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate. They’re used to playing the game of politics by a certain set of rules, and she’s doing everything differently, and it seems to be working; that threatens everything they know. Andrew Malcolm, one of the very few truly indispensable political observers out there, sums it up well:
Fact is, love her or loathe her, Palin is doing everything wrong. Unless the game has changed.
That’s a possibility that should have our elites lying awake at night with cold sweats.
Update: Add the Huffington Post to the list, as Joan Williams declares,
Sarah Palin is playing chess. I don’t know what game the Administration is playing, but they just walked right into her carefully laid trap. Palin, the strategist, is amazing to watch. Her brilliance is her ability to tap in to the class conflicts that drive American politics these days. Obama, whom I have supported since Iowa, just doesn’t get it.