Palin and the Bush Doctrine: Jon Chait and Atrios. I'm not sure what threshold of basic ideological "getting it" and competence Palin had to cross for people who are considering voting for her (I'm not talking about the decisive group of people who definitely are and the group of people who definitely are not), but not sure she flunked this for them. But was she good enough? The country has been conditioned for almost eight years to listen to Bush stumbling through public statements in a not very articulate way, and perhaps that lowered the bar a bit. And Cheney doesn't often bother to talk to the public. So perhaps she has something going for her in that regard: she's alert, she speaks in sentences, identified the threat from Islamic extremists, and it seems that she's capable of absorbing new material at least at a certain level. But she didn't demonstrate either any context for it all, or world view or consistency. She seemed like she had memorized most of her notes. Many people don't need her to operate at the level of a graduate seminar on the theories of containment and deterrence, although whether they would be nervous about her potentially having control over the nuclear button in a few months, we'll see.

Recent coverage of the Palin phenomenon has focused on the power of a kind of anti-intellectualism in American political life and the hunger for a kind of role model in the form of a high achieving "ordinary person" and hockey mom Palin represents. And no doubt there may be something in the way of resentment of ordinary people for the perceived values and privileges of the elites. But I also wonder, if the electorate did not find a comfort level in choosing Bush as president at some level in that Bush, while "folksy" and faithful, also came from a political dynasty and with a Yale and Harvard Business School education, however much he seemed to reject that Ivy League path. In other words, the electorate chose someone who was a kind of elite, even something in the way of an American aristocrat, packaging himself as folksy. And that Clinton, while coming from Arkansas and uniquely gifted at connecting and communicating with people, also clearly had a ferocious intellectual capacity, and a Yale law school degree and was a former Rhodes Scholar. The American electorate doesn't seem to warm to perceived elitist elites (say, Kerry), but they do seem to have a history of choosing highly intellectually high powered people who are capable at the same time of speaking to and relating to and connecting to ordinary people. Palin clearly has the ability to communicate with ordinary people and relate as one of them, and one would be foolish to doubt her intelligence, but I am genuinely not sure whether she has the demonstrated intellectual achievements or kitchen cabinet or legacy of highly trusted advisors in her circle or demonstrated track record in public life to reassure people at some subconscious level that she would be a capable leader of the free world should something happen to McCain. At the same time, while I guess most voters don't really know his resume, I am not sure Obama's demonstrated intellectual capacities and achievements (Harvard, Harvard Law Review) don't help him at some fundamental level as much as recent coverage of the Palin phenomenon would imply that the American electorate will only vote for people who went to community college and hunt wild game because they prefer to pick someone like them. In other words, I don't think that the American electorate has proved to be nearly as anti-intellectual and hostile to elites in practice as is being ascribed to them in recent weeks.

Posted by Laura at September 11, 2008 10:11 PM