Sarah Palin, steel magnolia

Rod's right on the money here.

My background is similar to his (and Sarah Palin's) and I understand exactly what he's talking about.

If you've never seen a beauty shop like this, and if you've never had a mother, grandmother, sister, girlfriend, or wife who's gone to one -- and if you've never visited let alone lived in the world that a beauty shop like this is a synecdoche for and among the people that someone like Sarah Palin represents in an incredibly powerful way, then you just can't understand how radical, how revolutionary it is to think that someone like her could be Vice-President someday soon.

One never even *sees* someone like Sarah Palin in public life.

What one sees is her big-city liberal "betters" talking down to her.

What one sees is Barack Obama talking down to her in San Francisco like Kurtz in *Heart of Darkness* -- "Anthropologize all the brutes!"

What one never, ever gets to see is someone like Sarah Palin being permitted to speak for herself, and what one *really* never, ever gets to see are her big-city liberal "betters" being forced to listen to her.

If you believe -- as I do -- that Palin would, at the very least, be no worse a President than Barack Obama would be, and if you are troubled by Obama's character and policies, then it is hard not to give Palin the benefit of the doubt.

And if you have a daughter, it is even harder still.

Thanks Rod. As a lifelong small town American, one of the things I have noticed is that I can identify with her. And while this is surely not a reason in itself to vote for the GOP ticket, the performance of "elite" politicians in the past also proves to me that it is not a reason NOT to vote for the ticket either.

Trust me, I totally 'got' not only her but you. After she spoke that night at the convention ended your live blog with absolute euphoria: "She's from a small town!"

What impresses me most about Palin more than where she comes from...although that matters of course...is how her friends...women...all spoke about her when they were interviewed recently. The 'Magnificent 6'. And how she was LOYAL when her status elevated. This is a woman ...a person...I appreciate. You learn a lot more about a person by listening to their friends than to their 'handlers'.

That said, I think Palin ultimately may cost McCain the election because she was not yet ready. But hey, when she works as long and hard as Hillary did against Obama,,,, when she runs against Bobby Jindal for the nomination, hey...... I've got two hands that applaud.

Good point about identification with a candidate, but the category is what I wonder about -- how many Americans really are familiar with that small town experience? It feels like an archetypal American experience, but what percent of Americans live in (or remember) such communities? If that's the only demographic Palin is going to grab, her nomination wouldn't have made such a splash. Either people who live in anonymous exurbs are over-identifying with a rural past they barely know (like the ostentatious Irish-Americans whose last ancestor left Eire a hundred years ago or more), or her experience is more generalizable than the specifics of that kind of community.

I remember my grandmother (Irish Catholic off the boat) explaining to me the joy of finally voting for one of her own (Kennedy) and how the historic discrimination against Catholics justified voting for such a loser.

I was disgusted. In a flash I knew it was folk like her who voted in one of the first real bad Democrats, setting the stage for the evil that would follow. It was actually people like her who started the whole Culture of Death. I remember shaking my head later how mad she was watching Bill Clinton on TV, angry that America had come to this. I just smiled.

Palin is the same thing, and thus I won't vote for her. Don't get me wrong: she would be a joy to vote for in a burst of identity politics. But the truth is she's a poor choice - a feminist, a woman who has left her family behind for career, looking mighty good doing it...her family, not so much (check out her kid's mixup with drugs, sex, etc.). The very last thing I would do is run for political office if it were my family. Truth be told, it's people like the Palin's who are the frontrunners of the decline of our culture. We so much want to identify with her as Palin gives us all hope we can continue to live the way we've been living without paying the piper (no pun intended).

I found this line in the article to the point: Mrs. Steele started the salon in 1997 when she, a recently separated mother of two..."We're all really strong Christians in this shop."

One more thing for conservatives to think about before pulling the lever, anyway: you don't want your dude in office the next four years! The economic fallout coming our way will be frightening.

"But if you are going to extend your empathy to the African-American who votes for Barack Obama because he sees in Obama something deep and important about himself, and finds that makes Obama trustworthy, you have to extend your empathy to the small-town, rural folks who see the same in Sarah Palin, and have confidence in her. Her experiences have given her a certain place from which she judges the world, and it's a place shared by tens of millions of Americans -- men and women whose views and values are scarcely represented in American newsrooms."

Rod, personally I do have a lot of empathy for folks who support Palin, and thus McCain, for this reason. But I hope they all realize that good people as well as bad, and all shades in between, can come from any society - including one's own. I believe that for the most part those whose support for Obama began with cultural empathy subsequently discovered that he was a man of good character and striking leadership skills worthy of their continued support. I think even you would have less empathy for these black voters whose votes are race-driven if the Democratic candidate was Jesse Jackson. I hope you and others supporting Palin realize that for many of us opposed to her, we would

Either people who live in anonymous exurbs are over-identifying with a rural past they barely know (like the ostentatious Irish-Americans whose last ancestor left Eire a hundred years ago or more), or her experience is more generalizable than the specifics of that kind of community.

This is a good point. I have direct memories of it, which is why it makes sense to me. I was talking the other day with a guy on my block, a working-class guy who owns a small business that just went belly up. He's in a bad way. I knew he cared something for politics because he put a sign up for the Libertarian candidate for president in 2004. I asked him when I saw him in his yard last week what he thought of Sarah Palin. He was really enthusiastic about her. He said he and "the wife" were Hillary Clinton voters in the primary, but this Palin, wow...

I don't know where he comes from, but he's lived in the city for a long time. There are a lot of people who live in suburbs who have a lot in common with Sarah Palin in terms of class and attitude. NASCAR, for example, does nothing for me, but it can't be such a huge sport based only on rural and small-town enthusiasm. You know?

"But if you are going to extend your empathy to the African-American who votes for Barack Obama because he sees in Obama something deep and important about himself, and finds that makes Obama trustworthy, you have to extend your empathy to the small-town, rural folks who see the same in Sarah Palin, and have confidence in her. Her experiences have given her a certain place from which she judges the world, and it's a place shared by tens of millions of Americans -- men and women whose views and values are scarcely represented in American newsrooms."

Rod, personally I do have a lot of empathy for folks who support Palin, and thus McCain, for this reason. But I hope they all realize that good people as well as bad, and all shades in between, can come from any society - including one's own. I believe that for the most part those whose support for Obama began with cultural empathy subsequently discovered that he was a man of good character and striking leadership skills worthy of their continued support. I think even you would have less empathy for these black voters whose votes are race-driven if the Democratic candidate was Jesse Jackson. I hope you and others supporting Palin realize that for many of us opposed to her, we would be much more understanding of your support if she was - in our eyes - more like Obama and less like Jackson.

Tangentially, though, let me say that you yourself are not "small-town, rural folk"; you're an editor at a major metropolitan newspaper, and I believe obligated to look for more in a candidate than small-town roots.

Bless,
Doug

"But if you are going to extend your empathy to the African-American who votes for Barack Obama because he sees in Obama something deep and important about himself, and finds that makes Obama trustworthy, you have to extend your empathy to the small-town, rural folks who see the same in Sarah Palin, and have confidence in her."

What gets me Rod is that before Palin was selected, you used to criticize this kind of behavior by the "followers of the Messiah," which have been derisively called "Obamaniacs" by many in the conservative blogosphere.

Then comes the Palin nomination, and you act like you are in the middle of a wet dream. Not because of issues, but because of image and perception. In short, you have become EXACTLY that which you made fun of just a few short weeks ago.

"CNN said today that both McCain and Obama spent the day campaigning on their biographies and personalities, because that's what seems to move the crowds more than discussing the issues."

Yep...and if it was a problem with the Obama crowd a month ago, it's just as much a problem with the Palin crowd today.

What I would like to see is for you to go back and read what you wrote about the cult surrounding Obama and tell me how it is any bit different from the cult surrounding Palin.

Sig: Yes, Hathor's plan seems to be going just as planned. Where's Samatha Carter when we need her? :-)

On my list of things I'd rather be talking about than frakkin' beauty parlors is Gov. Palin's position on torture:

"A new poll released Thursday (Sept. 11) finds that nearly six in 10 white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified, but their views can shift when they consider the Christian principle of the golden rule."

"The poll, commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, found that 57 percent of respondents said torture can be often or sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. Thirty-eight percent said it was never or rarely justified."

http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/blog/torture/2008/09/southern-evangelicals-less-likely-to.html

Call me an eccentric over-educated elitist, but as a Christian I find this a wee bit more important than Palin's frakkin' hair.

Bless,
Doug

For every reason one can say that Palin shouldn't be VP (and hence one shouldn't vote for McCain for President), there is an equally-valid reason that Obama shouldn't be President. (No one seems to care or talk about Joe Biden, so his qualifications or lack thereof for VP are a non-issue.) I.e., I suspect it's really hard to convince a Palinite to vote for the Big 0. So why waste the effort?

Well, she isn't like me, she isn't like my mother. Hell, she isn't even like my grandmother!

Actually she reminds of a joke we had during the "Farm Crisis" of the mid 80s that went something like this. "This is a small town. This is a bulldozer." Then someone would ask "What about the people in the town?" to which the answer was, "This is a bulldozer."

And why, pray tell, is it the President's job to fix the U.S. economy? As I read the Constitution, addressing this problem seems to lie more with the legislative branch than the executive branch, as well as with the Federal Reserve Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

I wonder, the appalling Paling keeps bringing her Down Sydrome baby on to these meeting and speeches, sometimes late at night, does she even think if it is OK to bring such a kid into such a noisy environment filled with glaring lights and cameras flashing? Sometimes the kid looks down right stressed out and frightened. I guess all that matters is the image that she can portray of herself as a loving mother and try to get votes with that image.

She is truly a user! Even of her own family! Even of her Down Syndrome kid!

And she is just using the women vote to get herself elected!

Palin is truly Appaling!

I haven't read all the comments. Has someone made a John Edwards joke. If not, then insert one here.

I don't identify with any of this in the slightest, but I still admire Palin. I think we're overthinking her appeal a bit. People generally like her because she agrees with them about stuff (which, btw, is a perfectly fine reason to like someone).

This idea of personal identification has been overplayed in light of two Bush administrations. In an effort to retroactively explain two consecutive victories by someone who now seems not to have done very well, we meditate on personality issues.

People just tended to agree with Bush's proposed way of doing things more than they agreed with his opponents. This, more than the likability factor (which does play a role, don't get me wrong) has more to do with his electoral victories.

Palin is likable, but so is Obama. People found resonance between their ideas and Palin's.

Sarah Palin and John McCain have been sent by a mischivious god as a test of the intellectual honesty of conservatives. Not having the experience to do the job, playing the gender card, cult of personality, victimology, group identity politics, greivance politics (those mean old city folk make fun of us), teenaged pregnancy, working mothers.... All the things conservatives love to complain about are laid out right ther on the plate for them to gobble down. Will you swallow all this? You bet! All those fervantly professed outrages are traded in in a second because Sarah is "one of us." That's all it takes. Someone from a small town, and conservatives are willing to throw all their pricipals out the window. But it makes sense. Those principals were all built on petty resentment of "elites." It's jelousy and rightiousness as a political platfom.

This kind of weak-mindedness childishness is why our politics are so messed up, and it explains the current state of our country

"Ain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"

That reminds me of the story about when Adlai Stevenson was running (I forget in which campaign, '52 or '56, this was supposed to have occurred). Someone said to Stevenson, "You have the votes of all thinking people". To which Stevenson replied, "Yes, but I need a majority."

HL Mencken: Democracy is the doctrine that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Y'all who are upset that we're "talking about beauty parlors" instead of critical issues are totally missing the point. This is not about beauty parlors. The beauty parlor is a metaphor for this politician's authenticity. I believe it was in the book Applebee's America a year or two ago that the GOP consultant Matthew Dowd and the Democratic consultant Doug Sosnik talked about how "authenticity" is the most important thing a candidate for office in the US today can have. If y'all keep yelling about beauty parlors and permanents, you are going to miss why people like Palin, and have no idea how to counter her appeal.

Anyway, why do you think both Obama and McCain have been (per CNN) running on their personalities in the last few days, and not the issues? As the liberal blogger Ezra Klein noted, when McCain did run on issues earlier this summer, the media said ho-hum.

LOL

Where should Palin get her haircut? Should she have kept the governor's jet and held up traffic at the airport while she paid her personal hairdresser $400 to give her hair a quick trim before jetting off to some luncheon with big oil people??

Maybe if she had 'turned down a job offer at Wall Street' all her detractors would think better of her, you know, because she has a family and everything.

Rod hit the nail on the head (that's another one of those colloquialisms big city folks may not get) when he said the beauty parlor is a metaphor for her authenticity.

Just like Jimmy Carter- without the niceness.

I dare to suggest that Gov. Palin is reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln whose only qualification for office was a SINGLE TERM in the House of Representatives. A huge part of his success was his ability to reach ordinary people with his genuineness and humor. I'll also point out that there are interesting parallels between Lincoln's time and today if you look at the slavery and abortion issues.

Oh please. The reason she didn't start going to a salon in Juneau is that (as has been well-documented in the MSM) Palin has been telecommuting from Wasilla for much of her term as governor. As for "identity politics," it is one thing for black people to vote for a self-made, Ivy-league-educated former law professor, and current US Senator who has now served for four years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and quite another for small-town regular folks to vote for a woman who went to five colleges in six years to earn a sport journalism degree, and who spent her entire career as a public employee, most of them in a backwoods town where she hired a town manager to actually run the place. Who the heck cares where she gets her hair done? We should be worried about what is inside her head (and judging from the Gibson interview, the answer is "not much".)

Right now, looking at the mess the geniuses and experts at Lehman and the Fannies & Freddies with their golden resumes and their deep experience have made, I'll take Sarah. Unlike them, she has good horse sense and she has character, the qualities that built this country. The beauty parlor just seals the deal for me because it shows a spirit of what used to be called "republican simplicity." Obama would find this notion something from Bizarro planet, which is OK. I find him from Bizarro planet so we're even.

I had no intention of voting for John McCain, my wife and I were going for Bob Barr, until Palin was picked for Veep.

To see McCain pick a person with common sense and executive branch experience, plus core conservative beliefs, changed my mind. I recall a newspaper interview Joe Biden gave to the Wilmington, Delaware (his true hometown as opposed to Scranton, PA) News-Journal early in his first term. He stated that instead of running against the popular long-time Delaware politican J. Caleb Boggs, his father had wanted him to run for Governor of Delaware. But in true Biden fashion, he said "I didn't want to be a damn administrator." Now he is running to be the number two "administrator" in the world. Palin rose through the ranks of mayor then governor to earn the experience needed to be chief exectutive. Neither Obama nor Biden can match that.

Sarah Palin is a turning out to be a Teflon candidate. All the mud that the media and 0bamans are throwing at her is mostly going to slide right off. In fact, in a form of that well-known childhood mantra, "I'm rubber, you're glue; whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks on you!" many of the charges they throw at her are so much more true of Obama and Biden that they can't afford to be too precise with their aim, because it will bite them where they sit.

I saw my first "The Maverick and The Barracuda in '08" bumper sticker yesterday. The man who sported it on his car was gushing about Sarah. "I just love her," he said. "I just really, really love her." This was an older good ol' Texas boy, and I suspect there are lots and lots and lots of them around the country, and will be come November 4.