The media reaction to Sarah Palin may look like a culture war or a clash of civilizations, but it’s really just politics as usual.
Well, yes, people have certainly got all worked up over Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, to the extent that the national furor of recent days is being characterized as a culture war—or even a clash of civilizations.
Republicans breathed a vast sigh of relief that McCain seemed finally to care about his electoral base, and began leaping with joy at the prospect the campaign finally seemed on track. The consensus among Republicans was definitely that Palin is a superb choice and will surely help the McCain campaign vastly. Her immense appeal to Republican constituencies with the least affection for McCain—evangelical Christians, firearms rights advocates, low taxers, haters of big government, global-warming skeptics, advocates of more natural resource recovery, etc.—seemed effortless, and her appeal to Republican women and abortion opponents played to McCain’s strengths.
Given all that Republican joy, Democrats understandably went mad with fury that McCain could steal their thunder with, in their view, an outrageously inexperienced and corrupt yokel from nowhere. The press, always eager to side with Democrats and other statist scoundrels, quickly jumped in with absurdly obsessive coverage of Palin’s physical attractiveness, the smallness and allegedly ignorant population of the state she governs, and her politlcal enemies’ allegations of political and personal perfidy.
The reality, however, is probably something rather more prosaic than a clash of civilizations. As the Politico website notes, McCain’s addition of Palin to the Republican ticket created "a 20-point shift among white women, from Obama to McCain." That’s huge, and Democrats are understandably in a frenzy.
Hence both Democrat operatives and the press have dispensed a horde of investigators to bleak Alaska in a fevered attempt to find some dirt that will stick to her.
They have found, well, nothing. While one should expect one’s political opponents to go to all possible legal and morally justifiable ends to achieve victory, this press treatment of Palin contrasts vividly with the same media’s hands-off treatment of Obama’s past, which has some seriously unsavory aspects to it, in the form of questionable financial activities and unquestionably damaging associations with quite mad political radicals.
As columnist Roger Kimball put it (ironically, in an essay offering the domestic Clash of Civilizations thesis):
[W]here were the four front page stories, where was Maureen Dowd with her repellent references to breast pumps and go-go boots, where was the smarmy Frank Rich, when it came to “scrutinizing” Barack Hussein Obama? (Or John Edwards for that matter?)
In all, the media’s vastly different treatment of the two people has been clearly beyond the pale and has most certainly backfired. McCain-Palin has passed Obama-Biden in the polls, and the ticket’s lead has continued to rise. As Kimball noted in the column referenced above,
The curious thing about the Palin Payload is that (so far) the most conspicuous damage has been inflicted not directly by Governor Palin but, jujitsu-like, by the media’s efforts to destroy her. It’s been a spectacle of auto-immolation precipitated by the media’s confrontation with a phenomenon whose nature they misunderstood and whose power they gravely underestimated.
Clearly this is all indicative of serious political differences between the two parties and between their respective standard-bearers, and that would seem sufficient in itself to explain the frenzy. In a Politico article on the Dems’ attacks on Gov. Palin, and Mike Allen note that the Democrats’ and press’s reaction is based on fear of the way she has changed the dynamic of the race, giving a huge boost to the Republican ticket:
"The Obama campaign is calculating that it must reckon with Palin and the big public boost she has provided McCain in the past week. When Palin was first named, the Obama staff attacked, then he pulled back. Now, reflecting the threat posed by Palin, Obama is taking the unusual route of attacking the opposition’s No. 2, a job that would more typically be left to Biden, who focused more on McCain and President Bush."
Later in the article the authors include a quote from an academic observer:
"When you change directions [as Obama did in attacking Palin himself] it’s usually because of the polls. Obama is probably getting [so much] pressure from supporters and campaign strategists that he can’t let her popularity go answered," said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. "Since people don’t know so much about her they’re using the opportunity to brand her and nick people’s impressions of her."
The attacks became so intense and unhinged, in fact, that Palin’s political opponents began to defend her, as another Politico article reported:
WomenCount, a group co-founded by top Hillary fundraiser Susie Tompkins Buell, posted a lengthy item on their blog decrying questions over whether Palin can, as a mother of five, juggle her family responsibilities and still be vice president.
"The very notion that Sarah Palin should not have accepted this nomination because she is a mother with demanding challenges underscores just how far we have to go," wrote Rosemary Camposano, the group’s communications director.
She added: "It will be good for America to watch Sarah Palin on the campaign trail—bouncing from parenting to politics. That’s how most women function—multi-tasking, leaning on friends and family, and waking up each morning and doing it all again."
I have news for these ladies: nearly all the fathers I know do the same thing, and without the whining—but I think we can indeed admire WomenCount for their consistency and willingness to put poltiics aside for principle once in a while. The group fully disagrees with Palin’s political positions, but they are to be commended for recognizing that the press were well over the edge in their attacks on her and speaking up to express their convictions.
In his column mentioned above, Roger Kimball eloquently makes the case for the Clash of Civilizations thesis:
In 1996, the political philosopher Samuel Huntington wrote a prescient book called The Clash of Civilizations, which foretold (among other things) the coming struggle between Western civilization and the Muslim world. The reaction to the nomination of Sarah Palin shows that the sort of clash Huntington described can take place within a civilization as well as between civilizations. “The clash between the multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed,” Huntington wrote, is the “real clash within the American segment of Western civilization.”
My friend Mark Steyn is fond of quoting the historian Arnold Toynbee’s observation that civilizations die from suicide, not murder.[Excellent point—SK] Civilizational suicide is rarely a dramatic, one-act performance; generally, it proceeds by a protracted enervation and enfeeblement. I believe that a lot of people in America have an inkling that such enervation and enfeeblement is well advanced in American society and, indeed, that is a major reason
they are so enthusiastic about Sarah Palin. She represents the promise of civilizational renewal, not by the extension of socialism and the embrace of the effete values of multiculturalism–what we might call the Europeanization of America–but by fostering more robust, more elemental values. Of course, the same things about Sarah Palin that have sparked admiration and enthusiasm in one part of the American public have sparked contempt, dread, and outrage in the segment epitomized by The New York Times and what Bill Buckley summed up in the name “Harvard.” They want America to become more like Europe, they endorse the values of multiculturalism and political correctness.
Roger Kimball is a visionary political and social analyst, and his opinions always merit strong consideration. However, I see absolutely nothing that we should not have expected in the Democrats’ and press’s reaction to Sarah Palin as they recoil from her like vampires from garlic. President Bush has been getting it just like this for about six years now, as has any other successful Republican who doesn’t buy the press’s favor by becoming a Rino. The only thing really different about Palin’s situation is that she’s a woman, which really shouldn’t matter.
I agree with Kimball that the yawning political divide in the post-Cold War United States has been quite real, and I have argued that the current disunity is in fact a manifestation of a multi-century ebb and flow between two streams of Western civilization. What we see today is by turns repugnant, harmful, and silly, but it certainly isn’t new.
Like Dan Quayle twenty years ago, Sarah Palin seems strangely immune to the blandishments of the Washington, DC-New York City political and media elites, and like Quayle she must therefore be stopped at all costs. Unlike Quayle, however, who often seemed so desperate for approval, Palin appears remarkably sure of herself and unlikely to back down under fire (and Quayle, to his credit, typically stood his ground as well, which makes Palin’s stolidity even more plausible and threatening to her political opponents).
Clearly, Palin will not be put down easily. Thus the ferocity of the attacks.
Jennifer Rubin summed it up nicely on the Commentary magazine blog:
[T]he unhinged quality of both Obama and Biden since the appearance of Palin suggests either they believe things to be worse than they appear to the rest of us, or that they don’t handle bad news very well.
I suspect that they believe that their prospects for the big prize are fading rapidly. And that’s sufficient explanation for their hysteria and that of their supporters: just politics as usual.