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September 05, 2008 04:39 PM

An endorsement to die for, or: Obama wins in Iran

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

Yesterday, the indispensable Middle East Research Institute published a transcript of a TV interview with Mohammad-Ali Fardanesh, an Iraniam political science professor an “expert” on the United States. Bottom line: he likes Obama and Joe Biden, doesn’t like John McCain or Sarah Palin. What a surprise!. Americans “Don’t Understand That [Obama’s] Education Would Enable [...]

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September 05, 2008 02:58 PM

The Boston Phone Book, “Harvard,” and Sarah Palin

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bill, a Yale man, was not singling out the Harvard faculty for [...]

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Sep 04, 2008 04:43 PM

Scandal Machine in a Ditch

by James Bowman

I don’t know about you, but I’m having a hard time keeping up. The swirl of rumor and counter-rumor about poor Sarah Palin means that the media’s scandal machine has been put into overdrive. But now I’m beginning to think that the machine may have been overloaded and is now beginning to choke and sputter and overheat and perhaps — a fellow can dream, can’t he? — will break down entirely. The problem is that the media panicked. Doubtless because of their fear that Governor Palin will prove too popular and therefore cause the defeat of their darling, Barack Obama, they threw her private life and character open to every wild internet rumor or journalistic speculation so precipitately that we had scarcely met her before finding ourselves forced to choose between regarding her as a sort of boreal Lucrezia Borgia or rejecting the whole scandal narrative completely.

That’s clearly going to be a problem for the scandal mongers. When, as she did last night at the convention, Mrs Palin appears in public as herself, her obviously decent and engaging personality simply makes the media uproar, which yesterday reached fortissimo, fall silent. Her popularity with the people who know her best appears so genuine and her record in office so unassailable that all the scandal talk is bound to appear what it is: just media chatter. Not that the scandal machine is irretrievably broken, of course. Its importance to the media and the way the media see themselves — and us — is too great for that. They may have to take it in for an overhaul, but it will soon be back on the road again and running at a less frenetic pace to build a scandal narrative for McCain-Palin in the same way it did for Bush-Cheney.

In that case, you may remember, it conjured up out of nothing — or nothing but paranoiac and hate-filled conjecture — the "lies" of the Bush administration which, once they were established as truth, even though they were themselves the only lies, became the instrument by which the administration had taken us to war in Iraq and therefore caused the needless deaths of 4000-odd Americans and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. A scandal, I think you’ll agree — and so scandalous a scandal that the fact that it was an entirely bogus one with no foundation in fact seems never to have troubled the conscience (if any) of the media whose interest has always been best served by scandal, wherever it can be found or, if not found, manufactured.

The longer-running and possibly more effective choice of scandal narrative for McCain-Palin — and one that has also had a good workout with Bush-Cheney — is likely to concern brain-power. She will be portrayed as a ditz and he an incompetent for choosing her without proper "vetting." That’s already the direction the attempted sex-scandals are taking. Without getting into the sex part, E.J. Dionne in The New Republic led the way by essaying a ludicrous comparison between the Alaska hockey mom and Harriet Miers. "Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than Miers was for the [Supreme] court," he wrote. "But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests, which means she is unlikely to suffer Miers’ fate." Is it possible that Mr Dionne really doesn’t know that the law is a learned profession and that, therefore, "experience" and competence there mean something quite different from what they do in politics? A judge, and particularly a Supreme Court justice, must be a scholar; a politician need not be and, if he or she occupies an executive office, is probably better off not being. Legal scholarship is essential to what Supreme Court justices do, but it is of little help can be a hindrance to those who spend their days making executive decisions about what must and must not be done now to keep the government functioning, to safeguard the nation’s security and to pursue the national interest.

That’s why all those who were chanting "Zero" at last night’s convention had a point. That’s why Rudy Giuliani was right to note that "she already has more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket." The relevant experience for a leader is leadership, not the kind of lucubration and second-guessing that lawyers and journalists and academics, like Mr Dionne, are so practised at. But Barack Obama has, for lack of anything else to recommend him, fallen back upon the professorial view that sheer cognitive megawattage — or, as he keeps modestly putting it, "judgment" — is the only thing that matters in politics, as in life. It sure has got the intellectual élites on his side, but they would have been on his side in any case. And, in the words of Paul Begala — a man who now affects to wonder if Senator McCain is "out of his mind" for picking Governor Palin — "we cannot win with egg-heads and African-Americans." Oh yeah, I think they’re scared of Sarah Palin.

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Sep 04, 2008 04:15 PM

They Palin comparison

by Stefan Beck

Initially, I was inclined to agree with Heather Mac Donald that John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin for Vice President represented identity politics at its worst, that his pick “ensured that the diversity racket will be an essential component of presidential politics forever more.” But I was struck by the conclusion of another recent piece by Mac Donald, this one about the role of “family bathos” in politics: “There is nothing to be done, I guess, but give in to the spirit of the age. I’m already looking forward to hearing how second wife Cindy McCain describes her first date with John during next week’s Republican convention.”

I can only assume Mac Donald wrote this in a spirit of irony, but there’s truth to it. In a political climate that has made the “diversity racket” an “essential component,” is it possible to win without playing the game? And if you have to play, why not pick an impressive female running mate? Why not have the best of both worlds?

In the wake of Palin’s speech, I have to give McCain the benefit of the doubt—and not only because, by and large, the media are doing the same. Of course, they are. Slate writes that “Democrats should worry.” The New Republic calls her speech “disrespectful, angry, and effective.” (If anything was disrespectful this evening, it was the prolonged laughter about Obama’s record as a “community organizer”—perhaps not a very convincing illustration of “experience,” but worthy of respect all the same, as another Slate contributor noted.)

The more we hear about “experience,” the more it sounds like a sinister euphemism for “reverence for The System.” Palin has none of that. Her “news flash” to the media, that she is “not going to Washington to seek their good opinion,” but rather “to serve the people of this country,” was one of the most stinging lines of the evening, and the evening’s only acknowledgment of the harsh treatment the Palin family has received from the media.

But that treatment should be an issue. Living on a college campus, I’ve been privy to some very deluded opinions about how conservatives view the issues raised by the Palin family. I’ve heard, for instance, that Republicans don’t want a woman in a position of power. I think the audience response tonight shows that for the fantasy it is. I’ve also seen intelligent people tie themselves in knots trying to figure out how Bristol Palin’s pregnancy can be construed as a liability or embarrassment. On a friend’s blog, one commenter allowed:

I have this feeling that this is only helping the GOP ticket. They get to tout that they live the rhetoric of choosing life again, in addition to Palin’s decision to knowingly go through with a Down Syndrome pregnancy. The right-wingers can still support them, advocating forgiveness and understanding for the imperfect of their fold.

They “get to” tout this because it’s a fact, and one demanding a sacrifice. And arguing that something—in this case, teenage pregnancy—isn’t ideal doesn’t mean that it’s unpardonable. Bristol’s pregnancy is a scandal only if one believes that conservatives secretly pine for the scarlet letter and are eschewing it as a political expedient. What I’ve seen in the gleeful reactions of my peers is a suspicion that no one would dare espouse a principle if they thought it might inconvenience or embarrass them down the road. To quote Peggy Noonan, “Bullshit.”

Meanwhile, on The Daily Show, things seemed a bit more frantic, desperate, and unfunny than usual. Jon Stewart grilled Newt Gingrich about Palin’s comment that Bristol had chosen to “keep” her baby. The “gotcha” was that Palin, a pro-lifer, would give her daughter a choice she’d deny everyone else. Stewart didn’t pause to consider that “keep” might refer to adoption, not abortion, but that’s beside the point. Palin governs a state where abortion without parental consent is legal. All her statement reveals is that she didn’t seek to deprive her daughter of her legal entitlement, that she understands her wishes and the law of the land to be distinct things. Some “gotcha.”

Expect a lot more Gotcha Lite in the coming weeks. The Obama camp’s limp response to the Palin speech—something about being “divisive” and “partisan”—is another example. Every decision or position is “divisive” in the sense that it rules out something else. And the prospect of a drippy, quasi-one-party rule is enough to make anybody wonder: What’s so funny about “divisiveness” and “partisanship,” anyway?

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September 04, 2008 02:19 PM

Two varieties of enthusiasm: the case of Palin vs. Obama

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

In his great book Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, the British theologian, satirist, and mystery writer Ronald Knox notes that “these days,” America “is the last refugge of the enthusiast,” i.e., one who is convinced of his personal possession by the divine. I thought about Knox’s book–which focuses primarily on the 17th and [...]

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September 03, 2008 01:49 PM

The Kael Syndrome Returns: Why Democrats are in for a Big Surprise come November

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

I am beginning to worry about the sanity of the Left. Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad enough. Could any human being so thoroughly epitomize the quintessence of evil that the Bush of the Left’s imagination conjured up? But watching BDS suddenly displaced by an epidemic of Palin Hysteria Syndrome has left me positively alarmed. [...]

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Sep 02, 2008 03:48 PM

On "tumbrel remarks"

by Stefan Beck

According to a New Yorker profile of Christopher Hitchens, “Many guests can report seeing [him] step out of the room after dinner, write a column, then step back almost before the topic of conversation has changed.” Pretty speedy—and yet not even he can keep up with the rapid succession of pseudo-scandals setting up camp in the popular imagination. With coverage like this of the newest member of the Palin family, does he really think anyone wants to revisit McCain’s condominium conundrum?

Probably not, but they ought to. Hitchens’s piece offers a few examples of what the great Joyce Cary called “tumbrel remarks,” which are “unguarded comment[s] by an uncontrollably rich person, of such crass insensitivity that it makes the workers and peasants think of lampposts and guillotines.”

The late queen mother, being driven in a Rolls-Royce through a stricken district of Manchester, England, said as she winced at the view, “I see no point at all in being poor.” The Duke of St. Albans once told an interviewer that an ancestor of his had lost about 50 million pounds in a foolish speculation in South African goldfields, adding after a pause, “That was a lot of money in those days.” The Duke of Devonshire, having been criticized in the London Times, announced in an annoyed and plaintive tone that he would no longer have the newspaper “in any of my houses.”

See what I mean? It’s easier for some reason to imagine this in the tones of the English upper class, though you do get examples of it in American accents as well. A Bostonian donor to my old college at Oxford was named Coolidge, and when I asked him if he was related to the president of the same name, he acted offended, and said: “Why, no. I believe he was one of the working Coolidges.”

Hitchens offers these examples in order to show why McCain’s ignorance of “how many houses he owns” was (a) not a “tumbrel remark” at all and (b) completely irrelevant, anyway. “Every four years,” he writes, “we suddenly discover that the only people worth noticing or mentioning in the United States are those who are ill, or unemployed, or uninsured, or underpaid, or homeless, or some combination of the above.” Whatever one thinks of McCain, it can only be a service to American politics to reject this dishonest (or is it honestly resentful?) approach to success. Topsy-turvy as it sounds, it just may be that those best equipped to solve a problem for the nation are those who have solved it first for themselves.

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September 02, 2008 10:38 AM

Talent vs. experience

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

From the mailbag: John Frary (who by the way is running for Congress in Maine) provided this thoughtful comment (# 138) on my post of a couple days ago about Sarah Palin: Frederick the Great on the value of experience: “A mule who has carried a pack for ten campaigns under Prince Eugene will be [...]

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September 01, 2008 11:25 AM

Committee for an informed electorate, B.H. Obama division: preliminary disclosure

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

Are you favor of an informed electorate? Of course you are. You want people to know about the candidates and the issues so that when they vote they know what they are voting for. I hope some public spirited Democrat will come along and provide a precis of the McCain-Palin ticket, pointing out, for [...]

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August 31, 2008 12:41 PM

Sarah Palin and Howdy Doody, Or, why Joe Biden is losing sleep.

by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules

Don’t be fooled: the left is terrified of Sarah Palin. Just savor, if your stomach is strong enough, Gail Collins’s sophomoric effort yesterday in The New York Times, “McCain’s Baked Alaska” (Get it?). “The idea,” sniffs Collins, “that women are going to race off to vote for any candidate with the same internal plumbing [...]

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