How would Palin change conservatism?

Oh man. I was smitten with Palin before.

Now I hear she's against the scary, fascist Real-ID Act.

How far is it from Oklahoma to Alaska again?

Mr. Dreher,

I would have figured your interactions with Goldberg would have disabused you of any notions that libertarianism is compatible with either crunchy conservatism or traditionalism.

It all depends, of course, on whether Palin would have the Reaganesque leadership ability to steer the party where she wants, or whether she would become a Carteresque pariah abandoned by her own party.

All assuming, of course, that she actually becomes president in the first place.

Thank you, Joel! She hasn't been elected vice-president yet, but we are all acting as if she should start measuring the Oval Office for drapes. This is beginning to remind of four years ago, when Howard Dean won a primary or two and suddenly the media were falling over themselves wondering what his physician wife would do with her medical practice when (not "if") he was elected president. One thing at a time, people.

Now, now, David. Personally, I still think Obama's going to win, simply because the fundamentals of this race are so heavy in his favor. But I'm far less sure of that today than I was three weeks ago. Even if McCain-Palin loses, Palin's going to be a force to be reckoned with inside the GOP and within the conservative movement, and she'll almost certainly seek the GOP nomination in 2012. I think it's interesting to contemplate how she might shake up Republican/conservative politics.

M.Z., I'm not a libertarian, as you know, but John Schwenkler has made me reconsider ways that the kinds of things crunchies/neotrads care about might best be achieved under a more libertarian understanding of government power.

I'd like to second aimai, and to direct everyone to the article here at Salon.com which gives more details on the book and other issues. Some choice quotes (boldface emphasis and bracketed material added):

" Conservative ministers targeted [Pastor, I'm Gay, by local Evangelical minister Howard Bess], and the only bookstore in the valley that dared to stock it -- Shalom Christian Books and Gifts [a Christian,/i> bookstore!] – soon dropped it after the owner was barraged with angry phone calls. The Frontiersman, the local newspaper that ran a column by Bess for seven years, fired him and ran a vicious cartoon that suggested even drooling child molesters would be welcomed by Bess' church. And after she became mayor of Wasilla, according to Bess, Sarah Palin tried to get rid of his book from the local library. Palin now denies that she wanted to censor library books, but Bess insists that his book was on a "hit list" targeted by Palin. 'I'm as certain of that as I am that I'm sitting here. This is a small town, we all know each other. People in city government have confirmed to me what Sarah was trying to do.'"

"Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. 'She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,' said Munger, a music composer and teacher. 'I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, "Sarah, how can you believe in [young-Earth] creationism -- your father's a science teacher.' And she said, "We don't have to agree on everything." 'I pushed her on the earth's creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she'd seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.' Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. 'She looked in my eyes and said, "Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime."'"

Please note: I know that in actual fact Palin did not actually ban books; but I strongly suspect her questioning of the librarian was a feeling-out to see if Palin could strong-arm her to do so. Obviously, the librarian showed too much backbone for Palin to pursue it further. And I'm not interested in whether the particular book is necessarily something one agrees with. The point is that a library should stock books with differing points of view, and that you don't, as a mayor, even hypothetically, start looking at unilateral book bans. In a free country, you just don't do stuff like this. And for God's sake, a Christian bookstore carried the book!!

In the earlier thread, Rod posted the homey, small-town piece about Mrs. Palin and her hairdresser. That is part of rural, small-town life, and I, too, can relate to it. However, the behavior exhibited here is also part of small-town life. As are other things: people badgering you as to whether you're "saved" (especially if, gasp, you're Catholic); parents sending you angry notes because you teach evolution in biology; vendettas against people who believe differently than you do; people trying to get books removed from libraries; adults who spread rumors that a kid is gay because he is shy and doesn't date in high school (which actually happened to me, as I found out years later); huge amounts of money from sports boosters to the football team (even buying them victory rings) while academic teams languish; and on and on. There is truth in the picture Rod paints, but it's not the full truth. Mayberry and Yoknapatawpha County are always flip sides of each other. Maybe that's why I'm leery in buying into someone on the grounds of "folksiness" or "like-us small town" appeal. There's a lot about "small-towniness" that would be good in Washington; and stuff about it that I'd want as far from the levers of power as possible.

Dreher: "Might Sarah Palin steal the conservative movement out from under the noses of the old guard?"

Answer: That's about as likely as the chances of the proverbial snowball down in you-know-where, although it's nice to dream.

Sarah Palin could very well become a major force in the Republican Party. The party bosses may not love her, but the rank and file base does. If McCain (who will likely be a one-term president) chooses to groom her as his successor and she proves herself to be capable, she'd have to be considered the frontrunner for the 2012 race (think of it as McCain's parting gift to Mitt Romney). Who would beat her in the Republican primaries? Mitt the plastic Mormon? She has more charisma in her left little toe than he has in total. Huck-a-boob? She cuts him off at the knees with his own base. Jindal might take her, but if she quietly offered him the VP slot and her backing for Prez in eight years, he's young enough to take the deal. And a Palin-Jindal ticket in 2012 would pair the first female presidential nominee with the first non-white veep nominee. Who would the Democrats run against them? Obama-Clinton? Clinton-Obama? Bwahahahaha! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, throw me in that brier patch! :D

Four years of McCain, followed by eight years of Palin, followed by eight more of Jindal. It could be 20 years before a democrat sees the inside of the Oval Office except as a guest. We might win the war on Islamic fascism, after all.

Think of McCain/Palin as Yoda/Skywalker (McCain's almost as good an orator as Yoda). Much she can learn from the old master. Teach her much, he can.

that last was me, sorry.

Kevin, I'm happy to hear that they're back to using phonics now. I learned to read long before school, and made sure my kids did, too. If you can teach them to read when they're three or so, it's a lot easier to take them on long car trips. ; ) Once they learn to value books, they also get feisty when someone tries to censor the library. But I guess this is somewhat off topic . . . .

I have a book called "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons." My soon to be four year old is just now getting interested in it.

I tend to call myself conservative, not Republican, because to me the two haven't been as automatically synonymous as the left likes to believe in a long time.

What? Really? Quick, call the GOP with the newsflash!!!

;)

Sadly, many schools do use a lot of sight words still, and it greatly impairs the students' abilities to later sound out words. It takes a lot of work to undo the bad habits caused by sight words. I find that nonsense words and breaking up words into syllables is helpful for breaking the guessing habits.

We're military, and we've moved 5 times in the last 7 years, I've been a volunteer remedial reading tutor for the last 14. Most public schools push all 220 Dolch Sight words, and that is enough to case 30 - 40% of the kids in a middle class neighborhood to fail--it's much higher in the inner cities where the parents don't have the money to buy products like Leapfrog's "Talking Letter Factory" DVD. ($10, hundreds of positive reviews at Amazon.) The only schools I've seen with no reading problems are the Catholic Schools, some of the Protestant schools--if they use A Beka they're all right, but some use programs that use too many sight words and don't teach enough phonics. There has been only one public school where we lived that had a good program, but the rest of the schools in that district all taught a lot of sight words and had 20 - 30% failures (this was a very high income county, so they fared a bit better.) (These percentages come from my handing out hundreds of reading tests to parents over the last 14 years, they are approximate and also a somewhat biased sample, but I would think, biased on the low side, as most of my friends and the people I meet are military officers and their spouses, and all military officers have a degree.) We recently visited friends in California, and I was appalled to find that the schools there even held speed drills on the sight words.

Leveled readers also exacerbate the sight word problem, they are 70%+ sight words (not to mention horribly boring.) Most public schools have these. They should all be sent to 3rd world countries where they could be really useful to people learning English who wish to start with a small vocabulary and then work their way up.

100 Easy Lessons is good. However, it should be followed up with a more complete phonics program, Phonics Pathways is a good cheap resource, and even better yet is Webster's Blue Backed Speller. It teaches syllables first (ab, eb, ib, ob, ub; ba, be, bi, bo, bu, by) and you learn to sound them out and spell them at the same time. After you memorize the syllabary, you move on to longer words, and then 2, 3, 4, and 5 syllable words divided up for you to show if the vowel is long or short, for example, ba-ker and ab-stract. I taught my daughter with the Speller last year for homeschool K and she can now read out of the KJV. Learning the spelling at the same time really seemed to make the knowledge stick in her brain. I had done a bit of conventional phonics before, and she was reading OK, but Webster's Speller was really amazing. After a few months when she started catching on, she got to where she could read anything except strange ingredients in junk food (Some of them are hard for adults, too!)

When everyone learned to read with Spellers, they had no reading textbooks, they moved immediately from working through the Speller to reading the Psalms, and this was 1826 and before (with some holdouts to 1850 and a sprinkling into the early 1900's) so they were reading out of the KJV or something of equal reading difficulty.

If you know anyone who needs reading or spelling help, Don Potter's page is good, and I also have free online reading and spelling lessons that use the book of Romans. Don has a nice version of Webster's Speller for free.

I don't think Palin will deliver because I haven't seen her tested yet. Until I see otherwise, she's just another politician, policy wise.

As for stealing the party, Reagan did it. Genuine conservatives with solid political skills (not Ron Paul) will always win. The reason Palin is so popular is because finding a conservative with real political appeal is a challenge. Conservatives are by far the majority in the party, the "old guard" merely have the illusion of power, as long as they can serve up Hobson's choice in the primaries.

Palin's circumstances will make it far more difficult to advocate for women (or men, for that matter) to stay home with their children. Women working outside the home will become the "norm", and the concerns of real normal families---the ones where parents actually stay at home to RAISE their children--will be pushed aside.

Traditional values took a major hit with the Palin pick.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

The more important question is how will Sarah Palin change the libertarian movement? It's already happening: an unwritten story, completely overlooked by the MSM. Over the summer Libertarian Presidential candidate Bob Barr was polling as high as 5 to 6% in Zogby, nationwide, and as high as 11% in New Hampshire, and 10% in Nevada.

Now, post-Palin, Libertarians have flocked to the GOP en masse and Barr has dropped down to 1%.

It's been amazing to see libertarians from across the libertarian spectrum saying nice things about Palin. And why not? This is a woman who attended two! Libertarian Party of Alaska meetings in Anchorage in 2005/06, and received their support in the last 3 days of the campaign for Governor.

Of course, the MSM chooses to ignore the libertarian angle, cause highlighting her libertarian support, as they've done with Palin's ties to the Alaska Indepence Party, would actually backfire. Lefties like to pretend their friends of libertarians. It always seems to happen around election time. If Palin gets tagged with the "libertarian" label, they will loose a valuable voting bloc. Thus, the word "libertarian" hardly ever gets used with Palin.