The Economic Nationalist

The pseudonymous Dr.D, well known to the Economic Nationalist’s regular readers, poses an important question when he writes,

You stopped a little too soon, Howard. “… especially in a cycle in which the chief Republican alternatives to her are relatively so strong.” Could you give me three names that excite as much enthusiasm among the grass roots as Sarah Palin does?

No. Mrs. Palin even excites enthusiasm among you and me. Like you, I am temperamentally pro-Palin. Like many others, I am inclined to support the woman. I can relate to her sublimely normal attendance at one or two no-name schools before graduating from the prosaically obscure U. of Idaho. Though her Scandinavian-influenced accent is pretty strong, her speech is clear, which in an indirect way adds to her appeal. How many more pro-Palin things can I say? I like her. I have liked her practically since I first heard of her. Almost the only thing the mad politician John McCain ever has done to endear himself to me was to ask the Republican national convention to nominate her. Go, sister Sarah!

It is traditional for Republicans however to judge their national politicians not quickly but over a span of years in the public eye. In the public eye, Mrs. Palin unfortunately has misstepped repeatedly. I would that it were not so, but this is not up to me. Any one of the missteps would be pardonable, but, well, when the missteps are taken together, a pattern emerges, does it not?

1. As governor, Mrs. Palin allowed extended-family problems involving an apparently violent state trooper married to her sister to become a public issue. Her political opponents vastly exaggerated this misstep, it is true, but she might have handled it better notwithstanding.
2. Just look at Levi Johnston, the famously illegitimate father of Mrs. Palin’s grandchild. What a loser! The Johnston affair cannot, of course, mostly be laid to Mrs. Palin’s account but, well, the state trooper? Levi the loser? What other trailer-park eruptions is this family set to inflict on us? It’s embarrassing. (It is not of course the first time a president has brought an embarrassing family. Consider the behavior of two of Ronald Reagan’s four children, or of Jimmy Carter’s brother. Messrs. Reagan and Carter however successfully kept their embarrassing relatives out of the public’s way. For various reasons, probably especially because she is more or less a normal female, Mrs. Palin has been unable to do this. Her personal life has become a national drama. Some of us have drama in our own extended families, too, which we go to substantial lengths to prevent from distracting the people with and for whom we work and other people who do not need to be involved. Few of us endure scrutiny as intense as Mrs. Palin’s but, then, few of us are prospective candidates to the presidency, are we?)
3. Evidently unlike previous governors of her state, Mrs. Palin could not figure out a way to complete her term of office. I am naturally entirely prepared to believe that Mrs. Palin were substantially or completely innocent of the various ethics-charges formally leveled at her, but I am not prepared to believe that it were impossible for her to complete her term. Previous governors of Alaska completed their terms, after all. Mrs. Palin quit.
4. Though Mrs. Palin was a public supporter of my hero Pat Buchanan in 1996, the year in which Mr. Buchanan was a political meteor, she does not like to talk about that now. Mr. Buchanan is too much the gentleman to complain in the matter, but I do not have to like people who turn coats against my hero.
5. I see no sign that Mrs. Palin understood the issue of U.S. immigration.
6. I see no sign that Mrs. Palin understood the issues of tariffs, trade and economic nationalism.
7. Though she is admirably grounded in authentic American culture, I see no sign that Mrs. Palin has a sense of history. It is not required that she have read Herodotus or Tacitus, that she have studied Gibbon or Mommsen, exactly, nor does she have to be a scholar of the Latin and Greek, but has the woman read anything? The Federalist papers? Washington’s farewell? The Gettysburg Address? Santayana’s famous warning against ignorance of history comes to mind.
8. Not to put too fine, or too heavy, a point on it, but has the presidency ceased to be inherently a masculine role? Though I would gladly vote for a female president under the right circumstance—like the archconservative Ann Coulter, and for the same reason as she, I warmly supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy in 2008—I would vote for a female president despite her sex, never because of it. It helps if the female candidate is—well, how does one say it? It helps if the female candidate is postmenopausal, which Mrs. Palin most obviously is not.
9. One grows increasingly uncomfortable (we shall not say, titillated) with the degree to which Mrs. Palin flaunts her considerable feminine sex appeal. Tina Fey’s unkind, wickedly brilliant parody was brilliant precisely because its premise was partly true. A former pin-up girl in the Oval Office, one might tolerate, but a current one is rather too much. That the woman can pull it off after giving birth to five is incredible but, whatever it may be, it is not a recommendation toward the presidency. We’re not speaking of Snap-On Tools’ nomination to the presidency, after all, but of the party of Lincoln’s. Something is not right, here.
10. That interview with the she-demon Katie Couric revealed inadequacies in Mrs. Palin I did not want to believe. But, there they are. It does no good to imagine that Mrs. Palin possessed a level of intelligence and knowledge she simply does not possess, however much one might wish that she possessed it. The intelligence of advisers only goes so far: smart has to start at the top.
11. Latest but not least, there is the retard affair, in which Mrs. Palin evidently, improperly allowed her personal feelings regarding her unfortunate baby to overwhelm her public judgment; and in which, in the process, she gratuitously insulted tens of millions of Americans like me, tens of millions who were guilty of no offense other than to use the English language in a perfectly normal way. That she practically passed over the blankin’ adverb involved in the affair, while viciously attacking the essentially inoffensive adjective, leaves me incredulous.

There is a pattern here. The lovable Mrs. Palin is the source of a continuous stream of minor public embarrassments. What’s next?

I do not know what embarrassment will come next, but it’s a pretty good guess that, whatever it proves to be, it will call unbidden to mind a rural trailer park.

And that trailer-park mentality is faux frontiersman. It’s not the real thing.

In Mrs. Palin’s favor, her political instincts are outstanding, and I have no doubt that her heart is in the right place, so to speak. She has what is called “the common touch” (a thing I sometimes wish that I myself had, but don’t; so I admire it in others). In the Oval Office, one suspects that Mrs. Palin’s intuition would serve the nation well. Intuition however wants illumination, which Mrs. Palin sadly lacks.

Dr.D continues,

There is almost always someone more knowledgeable than the politician who wins the election, but that person is not the person who is able to win the election and get elected. Getting elected is the necessary first step. After that, any reasonably competent person can find the more competent people to serve as advisors.

Good point. I could not say it better, so let me just subscribe to your words. However, do see point 10 above.

The thing that Sarah Palin is offering that has been virtually unheard of in recent generations of American politicians is INTEGRITY. We simply have not seen this in the land in so long we hardly recognize it or understand it any more. It is a rare and endangered species. And at the same time, it resonates with the American people like nothing else has in the past 35 years.

Maybe I hardly recognize it or understand it any more. Mrs. Palin is an outstanding natural showman—and I do not necessarily mean this in a bad way. John Wayne would have loved to have Sarah Heath Palin as his leading actress: the pair of them would have made a better movie couple even than Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Your premise however, I cordially decline to grant. However popular it may be for cynics to repeat the charge, it is not remotely true that recent generations of American politicians generally lacked integrity. Not remotely. Not when you’re talking about Republicans, it’s not. I will not affirm the false proposition that Sarah Palin’s slightly affected folksiness implied that rivals who lack her stage-touch lacked integrity as well.

When you’re speaking of Mrs. Palin’s integrity, incidentally, you want some caution. The way Mrs. Palin politically dumped Pat Buchanan does not exactly bespeak integrity, nor does the way she cut and run in the middle of her gubernatorial term. One does not blame the woman for supporting the madman John McCain as she did under the circumstance, but an act of integrity her support was not. No politician in this fallen world is going to be perfect, but let us not idealize the woman, shall we?

You stopped a little too soon, Howard. “… especially in a cycle in which the chief Republican alternatives to her are relatively so strong.” Could you give me three names that excite as much enthusiasm among the grass roots as Sarah Palin does?

No, none, other than Ron Paul’s name if you like (I’ll get to that in a moment). When it comes to exciting enthusiasm among the grass roots, Sarah Palin is the champ. It does her great credit.

I get swept up in the enthusiasm as you do, but I cannot consult only my heart. Facts matter, too, which is what my response is all about.

Besides Mrs. Palin, there are exactly four other serious contestants for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 (others will put themselves forward but, realistically, these others’ campaigns will have the purpose of introducing them to the nation toward 2016 or 2020). Of the four, one does not trust Newt Gingrich—and he is a longshot, anyway, so let us speak no further of him here. Dick Cheney is awesome but, despite some judiciously chosen recent speeches and interviews on his part, he does not actually seem to be gearing up for a presidential run (he looks unfortunately as though the rigors of a run would put him in the grave). Mike Huckabee as a political phenomenon is eclipsed only by the phenomenal Mrs. Palin: Mr. Huckabee’s temperament is slightly worrisome, but his intellectual flexibility is outstanding, and he is the only serious contestant that fully grasps the issue of economic nationalism. My clear preference is for Mitt Romney, a salesman and natural executive who does not excite enthusiasm among the grass roots, as you say, but whose intelligence is profoundly obvious and whose temperament is just exactly right—and whose lovely family casts Mrs. Palin’s slightly problematical family in an unfortunate light.

There are those, of course, who say that Mr. Romney cannot win, but this is merely a rude way of saying that they wish that Mr. Romney would not win. He won Massachusetts. He has the backing of the Republican establishment which, whether you and I approve of that establishment or not, is politically worth something. His Mormonism is a clear liability but his Mormonism does not define him as a candidate and, well, if we’re looking for a perfect candidate, we’re not going to find one, as you yourself have observed. The overheated, overrepeated charge of “flip-flopping” against Mr. Romney is exactly as preposterous and precisely as desperate as it sounds: the charge brings only the slightest shred of truth, whereupon his political foes echo it hollowly because they cannot think of anything better to say against him. I do not know if Mr. Romney will be the 2012 nominee but it is clear that he has as strong a chance as anyone. I am pleased to stand foursquare for Romney.

Some readers incidentally will notice that I have passed over Ron Paul. Dr. Paul’s backers have become famous for their furious passion, so let me just say this: I have actually, in fact, voted for Dr. Paul both times I have had the chance to do so—in the primary in 2008 and in the general election in 1988. I gave his small party money before the 1988 election (though not in 2008). Even Dr. Paul’s most ardent, least reasonable supporter will find himself compelled to admit that, unless for some inscrutable reason I were lying about my past actions, my concrete, sustained support for Dr. Paul puts me in a pretty exclusive pro-Paul club. The most conspiracy-minded of Dr. Paul’s supporters cannot possibly accuse me of a shred of anti-Paul sentiment; they can only accuse me of lying, in which case I should have nothing further to say. Otherwise, I have never rationally believed that Dr. Paul could win the presidency, I do not believe so now, and my warm support for Mr. Romney’s actually realistic candidacy is not predicated on opposition to Dr. Paul.

Regarding Mrs. Palin, I would almost surely vote for her in November 2012 were she the Republican nominee, but for the reasons given I cannot bring myself as a Republican to support her nomination, however much genuine public enthusiasm she might stir.

HJH

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Election 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.