The commenters are right and I'm wrong, largely, about Sarah Palin. She's not fit to lead the country. You're right, all of you. That said, I still find her appealing as a person. I'd like her on my town board.
To explain my prejudice for her, and Pat Buchanan's too, there's populist conviction, anti-elitist sentiment. I think it pleases both of us to see insiders like Andrea Mitchell and Rahm Emanuel annoyed by her selection; she's utterly unfit because they don't know her name–while Obama has at least been kissing insiders' rings for four years. I sometimes give in to that prejudice, and I shouldn't. The commenters are right, I'm wrong, she's unfit.
A lot of my smart friends are saying, It's game over, McCain has lost his marbles. I guess there may be some truth in that, though I want to think better of her and him than that. Also: The commenters who say I revere the two-party system aren't completely right. I have voted for many Alt candidates. I voted for Nader twice for president, and am proud of it. I'm gaga for Obama. My chief joy in McCain-Palin was the pure political spectacle of it.
A year or so back David Brooks said the divide was between populist isolationists and east coast elites. Well his own party has gone in on the populist side of that culture war. That's real interesting to me. I wonder how much Jewishness plays into this. My experience of Jewish life is that it's elite-oriented. We cared deeply about prestige (yiches, in Yiddish) and excellence in my family, and I came to find those values suffocating. It was very achievement-oriented, and valorized conventional prizes, in judging what anyone had done with their life. I find this aspect of the meritocracy nauseating. The thing that bugged me more than just about anything at AIPAC was the ceaseless discussion of Israel's scientific and techno contributions. As though leading the way on water desalination gives you license to rubbish the human rights of Palestinians. The late Israel Shahak said that Jewish law rationalizes doctors not giving treatment to Arabs. The contempt for peasants is something I always found concerning in my own cultural background, that I seek to reform in my own Jewish experience. What I'm getting at is that Sarah Palin scores Zero in an elite/excellence value system. And that in itself is not disqualifying in my book.
That said, I want my president and vice president to be people of achievement with a lot of smarts. Obama is that. I don't think McCain is; he's not that smart, as Shii said, he doesn't know Czechoslovakia is no more. David Brooks says Obama has no achievement, I think he has stupendous achievements already. His book, his writing, the cold conduct of his campaign. I think the intellectual elitists who support Obama because we face extremely challenging issues and they want a president who really knows how to think should own that bias, and communicate it to other Americans.
I'm in that camp. I'm an elitist intellectually–is it Jewish, or the meritocracy, or the information age? I don't know. My contempt for the elites is that there is a caste quality to them, and a smugness about their own election. I'd hope to fashion values of both intelligence and humility that allow for outsiders to get into positions of power. I love David Souter for that reason.
One other thing–she has a bad voice.
