I haven’t posted on politics for a bit, and I thought I needed to jot down just a few things about Sarah Palin. She is a genuinely interesting figure, and so I thought I should mention ten reasons why I believe she is formidable.
1. She makes all the right people on the left go bonkers. This has great entertainment value, of course, but there is substantive political value as well. Lots of people will follow you around just to watch the resultant show.
2. She makes all the establishmentoids on the right make patronizing noises, while they try to damn her with faint praise, working hard not to grimace as they do.
3. She has achieved the near impossible in politics, that zen-like state of being an amiable dunce and an evil genius at the same time. It is always a good idea to keep an eye on that kind of person.
4. She has a remarkable sense of timing, and she has shown up the experts with it repeatedly. She does something, like resign her governorship, her political future gets pronounced le dead, as the French say, and yet it turns out she knows what she is doing, and bunch of other people don’t.
5. She has a gift for really effective sound bytes. Now that the good ship U.S.S. Obamacare is providing the foundation for a new coral reef, we should recall that the first big hole in the side of that thing was Sarah Palin’s torpedo line “death panels.”
6. She clearly has an adroit mastery of the new media. She can make the national news with an understated Facebook post, and she looks like she is going to keep that up.
7. She resigned the governorship, but then stayed in Alaska. This represents a clear failure to recognize that all really important people live in northern Virginia and western Maryland — and this is the kind of failure that almost 300 million people who don’t live there can kind of appreciate.
8. She has a high sense of humor, all while occupying a place where the slightest mis-step could represent disaster, and will represent disaster if the people covering her have their way. Her recent “Hi, mom” response to the hand-writing “scandal” is a case in point. When Obama pronounces corpsmen as corpsemen, this is taken as a sign of a lofty intellect that cannot be troubled with the pronunciation rules of these mortals, but for any formidable conservative, such a blunder would be terminal. She thinks it’s funny.
9. She clearly does not care at all that the people who will never like her don’t like her. This is the essential lesson that fully 95% of all modern conservatives of all stripes — political, theological, social, whatever — never learn.
10. She is a genuinely likeable human being. In an era when fully half the candidates are droids with perfect hair, and the other half are sleezebuckets, this counts for more than just a bit.
Her daughter was pregnant out of wedlock. That doesn’t impact your judgment at all?