Mark Steyn on Sarah Palin

Many members of the Republican chattering class seem anxious to lose this election and are therefore helping the Democrats by pointing out all the weaknesses they can find or make up in the Sarah Palin story. Republicans have a history of eating their own, which is something I've never understood. You don't see that from Democrats (well, maybe a little bit this year).

However, Mark Steyn, columnist to the world and great conservative, isn't going down that road:

The hostess with the moosest

Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am - for several reasons.

First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

Second, it can't be in Senator Obama's interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans' vice-presidential pick is "even more" inexperienced than the Democrats' presidential one.

Third, real people don't define "experience" as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign's thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).

Fourth, Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a "hinterland" - a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn't just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won't need the usual stage-managed "hunting" trip to reassure gun owners: she's lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we're often told it's easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child? Been there, done that.

Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she's been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.

Sixth (see Kathleen's link to Craig Ferguson below), I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.

To the chattering class intent on finding fault with this pick, let me just ask you something: Were the Democrats as happy about the Joe Biden pick as most Republicans seem to be about Sarah Palin? Were the Republicans excited at all about voting for John McCain before Palin came along?

Get off your high horses and join the party. As I said in this post, this pick was not made to make the Beltway B.S. crowd happy, it was a shot right over them and right at the voters, and I think it's going to work.

Although completely unscientific, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit is running a poll asking his many readers their opinion of what the Palin pick will do for the McCain campaign. The possible responses range from "It's a game-changer" to "It's a disaster". So far 78% of respondents have answered "It's a game-changer". Glenn is not a right-winger and I suspect his readers come from a wide array of political pursuasions which makes the results even more interesting. Glenn's wife, who is part of am important demographic in this election, is elated with the pick.

Pessimistic pundits need to wake-up and realize this pick was for the people, and not for them.