THE PROBLEM WITH SARAH….James Joyner explains why he soured on Sarah Palin even if she probably does know that Africa is a continent:
Bill’s right that it’s inconceivable that she got elected and re-elected to so many offices over the years, culminating with a state governorship, by being an airhead….I saw little evidence, though, that she’s very interested in foreign policy or most issues of American domestic policy. That doesn’t make her a bad person — she’s in the same boat as most Americans on that score — but it made her a bad choice for the vice presidency.
This is what Palinophiles — and, to be fair, some Palinophobes too — don’t seem to get. Palin’s problem isn’t that she’s a social conservative, or that she’s an airhead, or that she’s inexperienced. Her big problem is that prior to August 29, 2008, she quite plainly didn’t have the slightest interest in national or international policy issues of any sort. And no matter how much prepping she gets over the next four years, no matter how much better she gets at dealing with the press, no matter how much she does or doesn’t smooth off the rough edges of her social views, conservatives have to ask themselves this question: do we really want our standard bearer to be someone who didn’t become seriously interested in either domestic policy or foreign affairs until the age of 44? What does that say about how seriously we ourselves take this stuff?
In the end, I don’t imagine many of them will ask that question. But they should.
UPDATE: Well, Mark Lilla is asking, at least. In the Wall Street Journal this weekend he wonders how conservative intellectuals could “promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against?” It all began in the 80s, he says, when the same conservative intellectuals who had powered the movement for three decades decided to throw in their lot with know-nothingism:
Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders’ intellectual virtues — indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.
For a movement that decided long ago that slogans and shibboleths mattered while serious policy discourse was merely a distraction, a candidate who showed no interest in domestic policy before the age of 44 is the perfect public face. But is that really the face they want to adopt permanently?
