The return of the repressed: how the Palin selection brought out the Democrats’ Inner Michael Dukakis

Kirsten Powers is a liberal from cable TV land who with her conventional observations wastes a healthy chunk of space several times a week on the opinion page of the New York Post. But today she had a column worth reading. She writes that the Obama team and its media supporters made a big mistake when they attacked Gov. Palin over her small-town background, as this alienated the white working class voters whose support Obama needs if he is to carry the election:

Obama’s toughest challenge has always been to connect with working-class swing voters. So attacking the poster child for small-town values, Sarah Palin, was a bad strategy.

No, Obama didn’t engage in the mass sneering at Palin—but he did fall into the trap of disrespecting her. When McCain chose her, the Obama campaign’s first response was to ridicule the size of her town. Then the candidate himself began referring to her as a “former mayor” when she is in fact a sitting governor.

When she retaliated (justifiably) by mocking his stint as a organizer, the Obama camp was clearly rattled. Obama himself actually began arguing about the importance of community organizing. His supporters amplified this cry—claiming Palin’s attack was a racist slur and passing around e-mails titled “Jesus was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate was a governor.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the country was probably wondering what being a community organizer has to do with being president.

Lured by the McCain camp, Obama supporters engaged in an argument about who had more overall experience—the top of the Democratic ticket or the bottom of the GOP ticket. This diminished Obama.

Meanwhile, the media lit up in all their cultural-elite splendor….

They claimed that the Palin announcement was some desperate pick that came out of nowhere. Had they been doing their jobs, or even perusing The Weekly Standard or right-wing blogs, they’d have known that she was on the list.

Since they didn’t know anything about her, they started making things up. Anything that fit the caricature of a right-wing hypocrite was thrown up with, seemingly, no fact-checking….

Like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Palin has been deemed one of the GOP’s rising stars. Since it’s national reporters job to cover American politics, their ignorance of about her is distressing.

Most Americans think that the media are cheerleading for Obama, so they’ll punish him for the reporters’ and editors’ sins.

So now he is weighted down with more baggage as he works to convince an important voting bloc that he and his party don’t hold them in contempt.

At Radaronline, Peter Feld, a Democratic strategist, expands on Powers’s theme. Looking at the startling poll numbers of the last couple of days showing McCain ahead for the first time, he writes:

This election just flipped.

It’s not “over,” and Obama is far from doomed. But important dynamics were established over the summer, and especially the past 10 days, that help McCain tremendously.

Panic isn’t helpful, but neither is denial. Actually, a little panic at Obama HQ would be prudent. An absence of panic means no lessons are being learned.

The biggest threat to Democrats winning the presidency—despite an economic agenda much better than the GOP’s for the disengaged, downscale voters who decide elections—is always the decades-old perception by those voters that Democrats aren’t “like them”—that they’re culturally alien….

Race aside—and it’s a huge factor, of course—Obama has struggled all year with looking like he “gets” the lives of those whose votes he needs. By choosing Palin, Republicans set a trap that made that vulnerability critical.

Commiserating with Iowa farmers about the high price of arugula at Whole Foods wasn’t too swift. Much worse were the off-the-record comments about bitter people in small towns clinging to their guns and religion.

Obama’s attempts to establish that he didn’t come from the elite were tone-deaf: Talking about student loans you’ve only recently paid off isn’t the best way to convince non-college-educated voters that you’re one of them. Neither is telling them that your wife is a Brady Bunch fan.

When the Republicans rolled out the real deal, Wal-Mart mom Palin, Democrats took the bait.

First, they opened up a very unhelpful debate over experience. As Kirsten Powers points out in today’s New York Post, “Lured by the McCain camp, Obama supporters engaged in an argument about who had more overall experience—the top of the Democratic ticket or the bottom of the GOP ticket.” Making the obvious attack on Palin’s experience only shifted the battle to McCain’s best territory.

But the main damage was cultural, as Kirsten’s must-read explains. It was so obvious to all the smart people supporting Obama that a small-town mayor is unqualified for leadership! They swapped mocking e-mails, cackled that Palin was a Quayle/Eagleton disaster who’d soon be off the ticket, and argued that the recklessness of her selection demonstrated John McCain’s mental instability.

And instantly, they undid all Obama’s success in winning new consideration in the small towns that resisted him in the primaries, and that had been insulted by his “bitter” remarks.

Palin, of course, was a huge hit at the convention. But so blinded by derision were the Democrats, and the media, that they completely missed the launch of a “new Ronald Reagan,” a family-values superstar cooked up, under the radar, in the Republicans’ Alaskan Frankenlab.

So now, McCain and Palin cast themselves as America’s team, and Obama as the exotic community organizer from Hawaii who bugs people to go to meetings.

When Palin’s background and “redneck” origins were so savagely ridiculed by Democrats, her mockery of “community organizers” came off as admirable gumption. She was fighting back. Soon, Obama was reduced to pleading that his organizing—which he’d made central to his bio—represented only a brief phase after college. You see, he explained, he went on to become a professor of constitutional law and a state Senator.

Barack Obama has never needed to win swing voters. His entire career has been based on appealing to core Democrats—from his organizer days, to his state Senate career, to his 2004 speech to a packed Boston convention hall, and his US Senate race that same year (he had no serious Republican opposition), to his stunning series of primary and caucus victories earlier this year. This results in a certain tin ear when it comes to communicating with the economically anxious, politically disengaged voters who Bill Clinton had such a gift for reaching out to.

But the problem isn’t only Obama himself, it’s those around him who live in the same bubble, who think a good way to connect with average American voters is to stage a mass rally—more than double the size of Obama’s largest U.S. crowd—in a foreign country. Or who think it’s persuasive to argue, as Jacob Weisberg did recently, that if we don’t elect Obama we’ll be shamed before the entire world:

“If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world’s judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn’t put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.”

This is the thinking that loses elections. The new rash of polls is a wake-up call.

[end of Feld article.]

The self-defeating reversion of the Obama supporters and the liberal media into knee-jerk cultural contempt, which in turn seems to have resuscitated the suspicions of ordinary Americans—the very group Obama most needed to win—against Obama in particular and Democrats in general, is a remarkable and unexpected outcome, adding to the coup of the Palin selection. It could not have been planned by the McCain team—just as the success of the surge in Iraq, which has been so much greater than even its most convinced supporters, including McCain, expected, was not planned. When we also remember the extraordinary sequence of events that led to McCain’s victory in the primaries after his candidacy was considered dead last summer, it’s hard to avoid thinking that he is a very lucky man being helped along by the fates. Why this undistinguished mediocrity, this liar for open borders, this hater of conservatives and of the historic American nation, should be the recipient of providential favor, I have no idea. I simply note that it seems to be the case.

- end of initial entry -

John Hagan writes:

One thing that the left and the media did not understand when they savaged Palin was that Americans did not see her as some nobody from nowhere, they saw her as the future first female president of the United States. With McCain’s age and health concerns most Americans instinctively understood that. The left and the media, not so much.

I have no use for John McCain, but whoever is running his campaign is brilliant. The McCain people understand that there is this automatic reflex in the liberal psyche that can be pushed over and over again until their national campaigns collapse.

Once that reflex is set in motion there is no pulling back for the left. As conflicted as I am about the McCain-Palin ticket I’m taking great delight in watching this spectacle unfold.

LA replies:

“…they savaged Palin…”

As I’ve mentioned before, at the very moment that I was starting to pick up on the Democrat’s extraordinary animus toward Palin, on the weekend following the announcement of her selection, my attention was diverted by the Bristol issue, and during the rest of that week I did not follow the liberal media at all. So I have no personal knowledge of this “savaging” to which everyone keeps referring. Did such savaging really occur?

The most requently mentioned “savaging”—the Daily Koss blog entry with the “Sarah is really Trig’s grandmother” theory—did not strike me as savaging at all. While I did not believe the charge could be true, it presented photographs, facts, and arguments that raised reasonable questions that needed to be answered. (I wrote about the Daily Kos charge, but can’t find the entry at the moment.)

The upshot is that I’m at a disadvantage in this debate. I don’t have personal knowledge that the savaging that everyone believes happened really happened.

Of course, there are those who have said that VFR was savaging Palin. But if the criticism of the Palin selection that was posted at VFR was the kind of thing that everyone means by savaging, then the savaging charge against the liberal media is untrue.

September 10

Carol Iannone writes:

I too am a little mystified at the “backlash” against the media and Obama. It is true there was some condescension toward Palin, but condescension is not unknown in politics. McCain insulted evangelical Christians the last time he ran. More recently he insulted people who were against his quasi-amnesty when he said by implication that they had “a distorted view of history and a pessimistic view of the future,” as if they were ignorant Luddites with no legitimate reasons to oppose his plan. Palin’s relatively slim record was a legitimate issue and certainly would have been had she been a man. Long before Palin, Republicans were making a great deal of Obama’s slim record, so what was wrong in bringing it up with Palin? (I felt a little excluded when she implied that all the work of our country is done in small towns and that those of us in big cities spend our time lounging by the fleshpots. My family started out in East Harlem and my father worked as a machinist in a local factory and supported the five of us on what he made. Maybe Republicans shouldn’t have been so eager to send jobs overseas in the name of libertarian free trade or whatever.)

It is true that liberals mentioned that evangelicals might object to seeing a woman so active in politics, especially one with a large, young family, but perhaps that is because they, the liberals, thought the evangelicals actually meant what they have been saying. A recent study of evangelical attitudes toward women revealed that 57 percent of those asked agreed that a woman should tend to the home and leave the running of the world to men. It is true that for younger evangelicals, 18-35, the percentage agreeing shrunk to 33 percent. But given the starkness of that question, even that percentage is surprising. Liberals hadn’t been counting on the ability of evangelicals to overturn what large numbers of their group believed and to make it an insult to think they actually believed it. And, in fact, some evangelicals are opposed to her on these grounds. And, truth to tell, even liberal women may actually have been sincere in wondering how she would manage her family as potential president and leader of the free world when they have enough trouble managing smaller families and much smaller jobs.

Using the terms white trash or trailer park was definitely condescending and insulting, but that certainly did not come from the Obama campaign itself. He even defended her teenager’s pregnancy in light of his own mother’s story, and declared it off limits to his campaign.

By the way, Palin’s stump speeches so far seem to be repeating almost word for word what she said in her acceptance speech. Also, I just saw a Republican campaign event on CNN. Palin’s whole speech was featured and McCain’s was cut off shortly after he had finished saying how great she was.

LA replies:

I used the term “trailer park” once. As I said at the time, it was not intended as a comment on people who live in trailer parks, but rather was the first phrase that came to mind to describe the appearance on the national stage of a family in which the unmarried five-month pregnant 17 year old daughter, with her boyfriend at her side, was holding in her arms her mother’s five month old infant. “White trash” might have been a better choice of words. I’m not saying the Palins are white trash; they are fine people. But the image they conveyed on that occasion was of white trash. And that image was being legitimized and celebrated at the highest level of our national life.

I am not going around looking for people to criticize and condemn in their private lives. But when a white-trashy image is made the symbol of the Republican party, of the conservative movement, and of the nation, and shoved in our faces as the new norm that we must accept, then I object to that very much.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 09, 2008 10:49 PM | Send