Vote '08

Here’s part two of our point today about “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes,” & how it leads you down the path to greater wisdom.

Maybe you’re a rabid Sarah Palin supporter who is not willing to listen to anyone on the left argue why Palin isn’t the best choice for McCain.

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Well, the entire GOP is not smitten with her. Here’s what some voices (sure to be branded “ELITISTS” by some) are saying:

I don’t always agree with him, but David Brooks’ column in the New York Times today pretty much hits the nail on the head for me:

Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t.

Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without long experience and prudence is not good. As George Will pointed out, the founders used the word “experience” 91 times in the Federalist Papers. Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

Next up, David Frum, former speechwriter for President Bush, who argues that it would have served the nation - not to mention Palin - well to let her wait for another election year:

Here’s my reading of the Times’ big story on Sarah Palin’s record in Alaska:

Anyone who has ever covered a school board or worked in municipal politics will recognize the pattern.

A network of long-term incumbents settles into comfortable patterns of self-dealing and nest-feathering.

Periodically there is an eruption of reform. The leaders of these eruptions have to be brave and charismatic. They excite intense loyalty among their followers - and provoke keen resentment among those who have enjoyed the old ways of doing business.

But it also often happens that this same bold leader has a strong messianic streak. They see no difference between themselves and their movement. They draw fierce lines between friends and enemies. They intensely resent criticism. They see no contradiction between their demand for total openness from others - and secrecy for themselves. They can be paranoid and vindictive - because after all, their enemies are enemies of the great cause.

Ralph Nader fits this profile. So did Robert Moses. So did a friend of mine who did heroic work cleaning up the Toronto school board. These people can accomplish important things. And if they have sufficient largeness of spirit and understanding of politics, they put their reforms into enduring institutional form - and truly enhance the public welfare before they burn out.

If not … their careers can end very destructively for all concerned.

John McCain caught Sarah Palin at the rising part of her career arc. She had been governor for not two years. She dusted away a lot of incumbents who needed to be dusted. Her original proposals for revising Alaska’s severance tax look reasonable and prudent. (What emerged from the legislative process on the other hand looks dangerously confiscatory - and also exposes Alaska to greater downside risk in the event of an oil price drop.)

What comes next for her? How would she deal with adversity - and the criticism that accompanies adversity? How strong are those dark aspects of the reformer personality that the Times‘ article depicted?
It might have been better to wait to learn the answers to those questions before putting her at the top of a party ticket. But the decision is made - and the answers will come.

Next up, Ross Douthat of the Atlantic., who weighs in on the now infamous Charlie Gibson interview. Again, this is a conservative speaking:

The most that can be said in her defense is that she kept her cool and avoided any brutal gaffes; other than that, she seemed about an inch deep on every issue outside her comfort zone. Yes, the questions were tougher than the ones that a Tim Kaine or Tim Pawlenty probably would have been handed, but they were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be able to answer. And there’s no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy - that it’s just too much, too soon - and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage.

& finally, Rich Lowry of the National Review, also on the Palin-Gibson interview:

My take (and I didn’t see the bits that aired on 20/20 or Nightline last night, although I read the transcript) was that she survived. That’s all she had to do. Politically, everyone was grading her on a pass/fail, and she passed. No gaffes, not that much to fuel damaging follow-on conversation. She’s likable even when she’s at her least authoritative. Most people, I believe, are rooting for her, and she was helped in the post-game by the incredible scorn directed at her by Charlie Gibson. But this was a merely adequate performance. The foreign-policy session was a white-knuckle affair. She barely got through it and showed no knowledge more than an inch deep. What she did demonstrate was amazing self-possession. She somehow bluffed her way through the Bush doctrine question. Gibson apparently didn’t want to go into full “gotcha” territory by asking flat-out if she knew what it is. And then he muddled things further with his dubious definition of it, so she was never truly nailed and there was enough ambiguity there for conservatives to defend her. The fact still remains that she very likely didn’t know any of the possible definitions of the Bush doctrine. I can’t imagine if Obama had picked Gov. Tim Kaine and he had had a similar moment, conservatives would have rushed to say that the Bush doctrine is just too amorphous and complicated for him to know anything about it. Palin seemed weak on economic and budgetary policy too, talking in the vaguest generalities. She was much better, and positively good, on the social issues—which are dear to her and she’s thought about—and anything having to do with her personally or with her record in Alaska. She was magnificent on the Iraq-prayer question. This tends to suggest she’ll be as strong on the national issues, once she’s truly conversant with them. I hope she got up from the foreign policy session and said to her aides, “Dammit. That wasn’t good enough and I’m not letting it happen again. I’m not going to allow myself to be so under-prepared for another high-profile interview again.” Of course, she has a tremendous amount of material to master in a short period of time. What she has to do is the equivalent of Charlie Gibson or any of the rest of us having to answer questions about pipeline policy in Alaska on a moment’s notice. I understand how we all want to be protective of her—I feel the same impulse—but let’s not be patronizing. I believe the truly pro-Palin position is to think she can, should, and will do better than this.

So ponder all this, conservatives! Where do you think these men have good points to make, & where are they off base? I’d love to hear from you! (all other viewpoints are welcome too). Post a comment!

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