In which the weekly standard has a point

This evening, I went out with my boyfriend ("the Bear") and a couple of friends to see a concert at the Ravinia Festival, a summer-long outdoor concert series north of the city. We had a picnic, and we listened to some great music (although far too short a set), and we sat on the lawn and talked politics. Our talk immediately turned, of course, to Sarah Palin. We were rehashing some of the ten available facts about Palin, including her much-maligned lack of "experience," the population of Wasilla, and the fact that she didn't get a passport until 2007. The Bear had some interesting points to make, and if I thought he'd actually get around to it, I'd make him guest-blog them, but he won't, so I'll give a recap.

1) Experience doesn't matter. I balked at this when I heard it, both when we talked on the phone in Denver about Palin and tonight, but I think he's got a point. My developing opinion about how experience matters is that it's a factor, but it's way less dispositive than we seem to think it is, based on how much we talk about it. For example, I think I would still be an Obama supporter even if he were still just a state senator. Even if he'd only been a state senator for a few years. Why? Because I trust him, intellectually, and I think he's got good character, good judgment, and the right temperament to be a transformative political figure. Whereas Joe Biden has tons of experience, and although I like him as a veep, I wouldn't have preferred him to Obama in the primaries (and, indeed, few did). And Sarah Palin is kinda like Obama: a young, up-and-coming politician who rose quickly and generated a lot of excitement in her home state. She's got less "experience" than Obama, and certainly far less than Joe Biden and John McCain, but to me, this is really secondary to the fact that her ideas and policy positions are odious. I'll be honest: if Sarah Palin was a fiercely pro-choice progressive, mother of five kids, who'd risen from mayor of a small town to democratic governor of her sparsely populated state, I'd be kind of in love with her. Wouldn't you? And wouldn't you, although a little hesitant, be excited about her having been selected as Obama's vice-president?

2) We should treat Palin as a serious candidate. I took little convincing on this point. After all, why isn't she? There's no reason to believe that she isn't smart, and she's clearly politically savvy enough to win contested primaries as an outsider. She's risen very quickly, and given that Alaska's pretty politically corrupt, which means it's no doubt full of cronyism, that says something about her. And this is where I'm going to surprise you a little: I just read this Weekly Standard piece by Dean Barnett, and I think he correctly identifies a pattern in the way liberals react to conservative candidates.

So in order to bring down Palin, her malefactors on the left will have to argue a lack of "readiness," which with the thinly credentialed Obama on the other ticket can only serve as a shorthand for lack of intelligence. Chances are, ink-stained wretches are plumbing Palin's every past public utterance desperately seeking the evidence that proves she too is an amiable dunce. Of course, any misstatement on the campaign trail will serve as prima facie proof of her dim intellect. True, political observers have formed gambling pools wagering on when Joe Biden will make his first hilarious gaffe as Barack Obama's running mate. While that gaffe, inevitable as it is, may do damage to the ticket, no one on the New York Times editorial board will conclude from it that Joe Biden isn't that bright. Sarah Palin will not receive the same benefit of the doubt.

In some ways, being Sarah Palin for the next two months and change doesn't sound like a lot of fun. In spite of her many and notable self-made successes, an entire intellectual industry has already sprouted up with the sole intention of proving that she's a moron. The left wants to Quayle-ize her, and their efforts to do so won't be half-hearted.

Although the rest of the article is filled with implications that there's some kind of media conspiracy to treat Republicans with more scrutiny than Democrats, which is utter horseshit, he's got a point in the quoted portion.

What he doesn't say, and what is true, is that immediate clamoring to dismiss Palin as a substanceless beauty queen are not just part of the left's strategy of calling Republicans dummies, but they are borne of vicious sexism. I've heard it in the words that have come out of my own mouth about Palin, and felt it in the visceral reaction I have to seeing her onscreen. And he's right that we want to dismiss her as dumb. As we often do to many Republican politicians. And though it's fun to feel superior, I'm not sure that all our trumpeting about how George Bush is a dumbass has really gotten us anywhere. Just like being sexist towards a female candidate makes women want to defend her, so too does dismissing a politician as dumb make people who perceive themselves to be of average intelligence want to vote for him.

And here, it's not even apropos. Palin is a more than competent speaker and hasn't really done anything to indicate she's not smart. What she has done is adopt political positions that would be, and are, bad for real Americans both in short and long-term.

Does her support for overturning Roe, and her belief that creationism should be taught in schools, and her denial of global warming mean she's dumb? No. She just cares more about the triumph of her political worldview than she does about the Constitution. Just like a lot of Republicans.

I loved Obama's speech at Invesco, but there's one part where he was wrong:

Now, I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year? How else could he propose hundreds of billions in tax breaks for big corporations and oil companies but not one penny of tax relief to more than one hundred million Americans? How else could he offer a health care plan that would actually tax people's benefits, or an education plan that would do nothing to help families pay for college, or a plan that would privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement?

It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it.

No, actually John McCain doesn't care. He doesn't care that millions of Americans don't have health insurance, or if he does, he cares more about party ideology that the government shouldn't be in the business of making sure people have health care. He cares more about the hollow platform of "individual responsibility" than he does about individuals, more about the political benefits of being pro-life than the moral implications of denying women agency over their own bodies. John McCain and Sarah Palin get it. They know. They just don't give a shit.

Dismissing Palin as insignificant isn't going to help us. She didn't get where she is, so fast and to such acclaim, by being a dummy. We should recognize her for what she is: smart, charismatic, and full of support for policy positions that hurt ordinary Americans.