Obama Inspires; Palin Connects
Nov 23rd, 2009 by David Anderson
The objectivity of the foreign press allows them to understand some aspects of American political reality that our press misses. This article says what I have been thinking but could not find the right words to express it.
Her speech, in fact, was the rhetorical equivalent of Mr. Obama’s crucial one. They do not as speakers, it is obvious, share the same idiom. Mr. Obama is utterly composed, deliberate down to gesture and word, very conscious that he is a “figure” on a stage. Mr. Obama “bestows” himself on an audience. Ms. Palin has none of that. She will never speak in front of faux Greek columns. She walks on the stage much the same way she’d go into a gas station. But she’s shrewd in her choice of themes, has a marvellous feel for her audience, and a confidence that will never be confused with arrogance.
They are, in the way fate or the mysteries of politics sometimes offers such things, curiously equivalent or parallel figures, polar opposites but equals. Ms. Palin connects: Mr. Obama inspires. She’s a latter-day frontier figure, impulsive, instinctive; he’s pure urban cool, highly deliberate, even detached. Both have real charisma.
It will make Obama fans perspire to hear this, but Ms. Palin has a more forceful bond with her supporters than he with his. Mr. Obama offers a kind of self-flattery to his worshippers. They feel exalted that they have the intelligence or sensibility to see how remarkable their man is. But he remains remote. Ms. Palin works close up. She offers those much invoked, but actually neglected figures, “the ordinary Joe or Josephine,” a real sense that she does represent them.
Ms. Palin is in the hurricane’s eye again with the publication of Going Rogue. The Associated Press assigned no fewer than 11 reporters to “fact check” Ms. Palin’s memoir, a concentration of scrutiny AP would never presume to exert over the man who’s actually in the White House. Elements of the press mock and scorn her with a fury that is near inexplicable. Rather fewer extol her gifts. But pro or con, the media cannot get enough of her.
I consider myself to be pretty “ordinary”, and Palin in NO WAY represents me. I beleive I can find a large audience to stand with me on this - namely the voting public from the last election.
You would have to go far, far out of the country, perhaps to another reality, to dig up this perspective.
And, for the record, I found McCain to be a interesting presidential candidate, maybe even compelling, until just after Palin was announced as his running mate. At that point I was truly intrigued. Then Palin began to talk - without saying anything.
Then my nightmare began: Palin as President. And that lasted up until the point that Obama was declared the winner. Frankly, I’ll take cool, urbane and inspriational over gas station, any day.
No it is the majority point of view whether or not she should be President is another case. Her popularity shows the guy is right.
Palin would be a dream come true. It was the only motivation for voting for John McCain. I told myself that I was voting for Palin as VP. After all, I would have loved to say that I voted for the first Black President. The problem that I had is that he really wasn’t that different. He was just a garden variety socialist democrat cross dressing as a moderate. That didn’t merit my vote.
Well, that was one way to think and vote.
America in action, a “big tent” with room for all kinds of views.