The New Republic

  What's with this meritocratic or democratic ideal? Palin represents the Jacksonian (Michael) ideal. You don't ever have to grow up to be a great success story.

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- michael

July 6, 2009 at 11:50am

-- And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education --

She most certainly did, and Douthat hasn't provided anything to aver otherwise.

-- slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools --

As we all should know (then again, there are some head-in-the-sand GOPers who still don't know that we had bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora yet lost him when the job was outsourced to corrupt Afghanistan warlords), she indeed cut funding for Covenant House Alaska -- a place where unwed and homeless pregnant teens were given shelter and proper education to survive on their own -- by 20%  

- kevincollins

July 6, 2009 at 12:09pm

One more thing: Last I checked, Bush was Ivy League-educated, yet Doutha conveniently ignores this. Figures.

- kevincollins

July 6, 2009 at 12:12pm

that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

please, her being a beauty queen has nothing to do with her success? Her life was a series of incidents where she fell upwards. That is not Democratic.

As to the notion that only the Ivy leagues represent meritocracy, that is ridiculous. Anyway, what success is he talking about? Political? How many southern pols, midwestern, great plains, etc. went to any Ivy?

Wow, what a first class whine from Douthat, I expect better.

- blackton

July 6, 2009 at 12:21pm

Douthart, a graduate of Hamden Hall Country Day School and Harvard College, I suspect, is projecting his own attitudes onto others.

- regitnr

July 6, 2009 at 12:24pm

"One more thing: Last I checked, Bush was Ivy League-educated, yet Doutha conveniently ignores this. "

You betcha!

- kerFuFFler

July 6, 2009 at 12:31pm

  Typos? Not "Sarah Palin, Heroine of Democracy?" but "Sister Tundra, Opiate of The People".

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- michael

July 6, 2009 at 12:37pm

FDR: Harvard

Truman: Truman was the only president who served after 1897 not to earn a college degree

Eisenhower: West Point

Kennedy: Harvard

LBJ: Southwest Texas State Teachers' College

Nixon: Whittier/Duke

Ford: Michigan/Yale

Carter: Georgia Southwestern College/ US Naval Academy

Reagan: Eureka College

Bush I and II, Yale

Clinton: Georgetown/Yale

Obama: Columbia/Harvard

What does this prove? I don't know, but it seems mostly a meritocracy. Harry Truman, of course, had more than enough intelligence to graduate from any University.

However, look at Palin: After graduating from high school in 1982, she enrolled at Hawaii Pacific College in Honolulu. She left after one semester and transferred to North Idaho College, a community college in Coeur d'Alene and spent two semesters as a general studies major in 1983. In 1984, Palin won the Miss Wasilla Pageant, then finished third in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant[ and won a college scholarship and the "Miss Congeniality" award.

In August 1984, she transferred to the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, where her older brother, Charles W. Heath, was majoring in education. After two semesters at UI, Palin returned to Alaska and attended Matanuska-Susitna College, a community college in Palmer, for one term in the fall of 1985. She returned to the University of Idaho in January 1986, where she spent three semesters completing her bachelor's degree in communications-journalism, graduating in May 1987.

That is so bizarre.

- blackton

July 6, 2009 at 12:40pm

That Kristol could be so cynical as to support an empty vessel like Palin isn't surprising, but for Douthat to ignore her utter lack of qualifications for any office, most especially POTUS, reflects how low the right has sunk.  How could a movement pioneered by intellectuals, indeed elitist intellectuals, be transformed into nothing more that a populist mob.  What's left if the populist mob doesn't return them to power.  A military coup?

- raylward

July 6, 2009 at 12:58pm

I get the feeling that commentors like Douthat, who is generally a credit to his ideology, have to mail in a boilerplate POS like this to "check in", so to speak, with the base.  Pure water-carrying drivel.

- csmiller

July 6, 2009 at 1:03pm

I'm not familiar with any "ideal" positing that fatuous, lazy ignoramuses should regard themselves as presidential material.

- jhildner

July 6, 2009 at 1:17pm

The problem with the NY Times is that it feels the need to cheapen the opinion page by printing the likes of Ross Douhat in the name of partisan fairness.  Even though that could be achieved with lots of other well-read conservatives who actually dare to challenge conservative orthodoxy in the name of good old common sense.

Douhat is not a particularly probing or original thinker and, worse, he's utterly predictable.  But what I find interesting is that he's doing the very thing that he claims isn't necessary.  He's trying to give Palin credibility by using his NY Times column, as did Bill Kristol.  It's a clever move, legitimize a candidate in a forum that you claim the candidate doesn't need in the first place.  

Douhat and Kristol, et al, had better be careful.  In a country where more and more are going to college and getting degrees just to be competitive, and more are getting advanced credentials and degrees for the same purpose, this nonsense that you don't need an Ivy League education will start to ring hollow.  True, it doesn't have to be Ivy League, but if you're going to know nothing about world affairs, politics, history, the Constitution, you had better do better than a journalism degree from the University of Idaho.

- shaw-man

July 6, 2009 at 1:33pm

I'm a liberal Democrat, but I really enjoy Douthat's writing. I do think that he and Reihan Salam are in a bit of a quandary. They have been calling out, "Listen to the lower class Sam's Club Republican and his concerns!" Then the Sam's Club Republicans spit up Palin or Huckabee and they have to deal with economics stuck in the era of Huey Long (Huckabee) or unbelievable foreign policy ignorance (Palin).

- mcorey.geo

July 6, 2009 at 2:00pm

But it is possible to have the lowest of opinions of Sarah Palin's qualifications/behavior/etc. and still be repullsed by the dirt that was thrown at her by "respectable" (i.e., non-marginalized) pundits and media figures (see Letterman, who was lauded during the campaign for his commentaries), and I  think elitism did/does play a part in that.  I still don't understand how well-educated progressives can think it's ok to publicly call someone a slut or say they are making a sexual come-on by winking during the debate or the like -- if anything like that had been thrown at Michelle Obama (say for wearing sleeveless dresses) they would have been rightly outraged.  

As for colleges, there's plenty of populism there -- sure, more people today get college degrees, but for every Ivy Leaguer there are dozens more who went to "non-top-tier" schools like Palin's University of Idaho alma mater who think their degree is president-worthy too.

- Lymon1

July 6, 2009 at 2:41pm

This whole narrative that Palin has been dragged through the mud is rather a myth.  She's been dragged through the mud by mainstream media no worse than Barack Obama has been dragged through the mud by conservative media.  

Palin thrust herself and her family into the spotlight, she traded on her wink-and-nod conservative babe persona, she said some truly daft things, came across looking stupid at best and dangerously stupid at worst, and now her defenders cry foul?  The pundits had every right to call her out on all of it.  

Where were all these defenders of modern femininity when Hillary Clinton was being castigated back in the 90's healthcare debacle?  Suddenly everyone is out to defend feminine virtue?

I agree that personal attacks are unfair and inappropriate.  But she got no worse than other have gotten.  And for her conservative male defenders to cry foul over sexism and classism is the height of hypocrisy.

- shaw-man

July 6, 2009 at 3:11pm

Ross's column is outrageous.  As I read it coming into work today, I became one of those people who appears to be muttering to himself on the bus.  He writes, "If Palin were exactly what her critics believe she is -- the distillation of every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualsim to apocalyptic Christianity -- then she wouldn't be a terribly interesting figure.  But this caricature has always missed the point of the Alaska governor's appeal -- one that extends well outside the Republican Party's shrinking base."  Well, Ross's description of my opinion of her -- as a "distillation of every right-wing pathology" -- is pretty much on the mark, and I would only add that she's an egregious exmaple.  But notice that *he doesn't dispute its accuracy*, except to label it a "caricature" -- never mind that it is a caricature brought horrifyingly to life in her person.  He says, rather, that it "misses the point" of her appeal.

No, Ross, it doesn't.  It merely states why we really don't like her, a view you either agree with or can't trouble yourself to dispute.  That she is appealing to some people is obvious.  That that appeal has something to do with her loudly proclaimed ordinariness or one-of-us-ness is also obvious.  The point of her detractors is that, while these are appealing traits in a candidate, they are nowhere near sufficient to justify a run for high office.  Once again, you appear to agree.  So, what's your point?

We are instructed that she was made fun of -- dear God -- and that the main reason she was treated thus was not because she was a "pathological" right-wing nut and demonstrably and embarrasingly clueless besides -- the first Tina Fey sketch basically just lifted a transcript of one of her atrocious interviews -- but because of her "sex" and her "class."  This is horseshit, and I'm pretty sure Ross knows better.  What class does Palin supposedly belong to?  I gather that her life has always been of the comfortable middle class variety.  From the standpoint of sex and class, her life growing up appears indistinguishable from that of Hillary Clinton.  So what does class really mean in this context?

Class is being used here to describe stupidity, ignorance, incompetence, and "every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualsim to apocalyptic Christianity."  Class is being used to describe the excruciating Palinness of Sarah Palin.  This is a grave insult to whatever class Ross purports to defend from the fangs of coastal snobs.

Notice how Palin is contrasted with Obama, who was hardly born with a silver spoon or into the ruling elite, like George Bush.  No, the distinguishing factor is that Obama was smart and worked hard and therefore was able to attend fancy schools.  Unable to tar Obama with an elite background or upbringing, he manages to tar him by saying that he represents the now tedious and/or insidious "meritocratic ideal" -- in other words, the perfect expression of the conservative vision of the way America is and everyone's vision of the way it ought to be.  What does that ideal miss?  The "democratic ideal" whereby, apparently, anyone -- *anyone*, including, I suppose Joe the Plumber -- should have the arrogance to seriously suppose that he's got what it takes to run the country.

*That* is the distillation of the right-wing pathology known as anti-intellectualism, and it's got nothing to do with class, sex, makeup, or whether you like to eat at the Olive Garden, or whether you give your kids stupid names.  I don't care about any of that, and neither should Palin's supporters.  It has to do with not having the required knowledge, skill, intellect, wisdom, or anything that might plausibly be considered a qualification of mind.  Ross's column represents an insistence that pretty much nothing is required in that department, and that to say otherwise is to meanly insult aggressive stupidity.  Well, we need to stop flattering it.

- jhildner

July 6, 2009 at 3:19pm

Lymon, gimme a break.  She was a train wreck in the media, because she was *actually* a train wreck.  Sure, she got made fun of.  So did McCain, so did Clinton, so did Biden.  Mainstream comedians had trouble with Obama, but he certainly got his share of *non*-jokey shit.  I don't know what you're referring to about Letterman.  If you're talking about his commentaries during the campaign that Palin is an idiot and doesn't have the qualifications to be president, well, you know, that's because she appeared to be an idiot who didn't have the qualifications to be president.  I'm sorry, if you have the arrogance and ego to think that you can take on the most powerful and important job in the world today without a brain in your head, then you deserve whatever you've got coming.  If by "elitism" you mean, "She's stupid, so shouldn't be president," then, yeah, I'm guilty of elitism.  If that's what elitism means, we need a lot more of it.

- jhildner

July 6, 2009 at 3:27pm

What jhildner said.

- csmiller

July 6, 2009 at 4:04pm

What kind of a mother has her teenaged-mom-daughter and grandchild in a posed photograph on the cover of People magazine?

- wamintz

July 6, 2009 at 6:47pm