This essay is marvelous in its ability to explain something that has puzzled me. Why the irrational hatred of Sarah Palin ? He has found the key.
Noam Scheiber has a particularly grave case.
Scheiber’s attempt to understand Sarah Palin, detailed in the New Republic, took him all the way to Wasilla, as strange to him as Ethiopia to Evelyn Waugh. Scheiber spoke to various people from Palin’s past, all of whom have two things in common: Every one of them is smarter than Palin and none of them has been heard of since their encounter with her. Scheiber’s pet specimen among what he calls “the more urbane members of the community” is a Dartmouth graduate who reads Civil War histories, self-published a book, and not only does but “savors” the New York Times crossword puzzle. This sort of résumé wouldn’t get your niece an unpaid internship on L Street–but for a Rhodes Scholar lost in Alaska, the Dartmouth degree, the Civil War buffery, the Times crossword puzzle all take on huge significance. Unable to comprehend how Palin could have outpaced the Wasilla gentry, poor Scheiber clings for dear life to these sad fragments of class dignity.
While Palin threatens class solidarity, Obama is emollient. The more urbane members of the Hyde Park community are cleverer than their Wasilla counterparts and believe that they have captured Obama for their class–just as Richard Stern persuades himself that the still-radical couple he dines with are merely Unitarians in a hurry. But the man who may be president is cleverer still.
Obama and his surprising choice for vice president have spent most of their career working on their own images, smoothing out the rough edges, trying out devices, rhetorical and cosmetic, to make the nicer sort of people feel comfortable with them. Obama wrote his own life, and then wrote it again; Biden practiced for years in front of a mirror to overcome his childhood stutter. Carefully composed, Obama holds the upper-middle class in his steady hands, and has no need of Stern’s help to assure our anxious electorate that he will not shock their class sensibilities.
Sarah Palin and even John McCain refuse to pay tribute to this would-be aristocracy. Uniforms, to the New York gentry, signify doormen who are servants. No one would consider a military officer as a member of their class.
The Republicans, alas, are stuck with this election’s true and unrepentant revolutionaries. McCain and Palin have each refused, by sheer cussedness, to fulfill the social expectations of others. This may make them poison to undecideds who suffer, more than most, from class anxiety. But do not despise the undecideds. Even conservatives can contract Scheiber Syndrome. Think of David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and George Will. The symptoms? Curiously amplified, obsessively repeated, sometimes elaborately stage-whispered doubts about the Republican ticket.
There is no cure, but there is an etiology. All share a dreadful secret–their writing is driven by an anxiety to be tastemakers to the gentry, not merely thinkers and entertainers. There is nothing more anxious-making than striving to create taste for the classes, not masses, or even to keep up with it.
At last an explanation that makes sense to me.
>>>>All share a dreadful secret–their writing is driven by an anxiety to be tastemakers to the gentry,…
Indeed. Gossip is juicy, but what greater power than to decide what counts as gossip? It dates to the paleolithic: hunting and gathering could be dismissed and left for others, but to arrange the seating for the annual feast let one leapfrog to the leisure class.
[…] Scheiber’s attempt to understand Sarah Palin , detailed in the New Republic, took him all the way to Wasilla, as strange to him as Ethiopia to Evelyn Waugh. Scheiber spoke to various people from Palin ’s past, all of whom have two things …[Continue Reading] […]
If history is predictive, we’ll have a changing of the guard now, in much the same fashion as Clinton rode in as a fresh face to the public at large. Arkansans who were my relatives knew better, and they even being Democrats told me so at the time. Just as the Chicago people know better this time. But reality rarely trumps in cases like these.
The question arises as to whether all these obstreperous, hateful attitudes from the liberals and the left will continue on in such intensity after they clinch victory. The Repubicans when they had the reins seemed to wallow around like happy pigs in a poke, thus losing all the momentum of reducing govt, cleaning up the joint, etc. And worse, the Democrats were appeased with questionable judicial appointments, key committee assignments in a grand sweep of a victor’s largesse.
Will we see the same from the upcoming victors? My instincts tell me just the opposite. There could well be ‘going for the throat’ or ‘final nail in the coffin’ type of responses when the voting is done. From judicial appts to committee assignments. Any reaching across the aisle will be with two hands on a throat. They’ve been scratching and biting for 8 long years, but now they will have the keys to the car. This should really outdo the Carter collapse.
I’m pretty well set up for it, but staying light on my feet. On a different note…wonder if they have any idea of what ODS will be like? How about that? ODS and odious. What a coincidence.
One thing we might see is the Democrats turning on each other after a couple years of Carter redux. Left/Libs are great at intra group rivalry. Republicans will need to keep their powder dry and have some candidates in the wings.
Hey, maybe brainiacs like Nancy Pelosi are right and it is all over. But…just a thought….where was Kerry versus Bush in 2004 at this time?
Again, I’m not saying Obama won’t win. But one thing I know for certain is that his campaign wants Republicans to give up and not bother with voting.
After all the ACORN stuff, and the behavior of the MSM, and the hypocrisy of watching Palin’s every word while shrugging about Biden’s nonsense…well, the elites know what is best for all of us, right? We should just all stay home and let them tell us what to think.
That is the DNC position, I think. And lots and lots of Republicans who don’t like McCain or Palin are playing precisely into their hands. We’ll see how they like three more Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s on the Supreme Court. That is REAL libertarian, isn’t it?
Oh, I’m sorry. All these Country Club Republicans and “It’s not my fault libertarians” loftily have opined that Obama would never, ever be partisan as President.
Despite his voting record as Senator. It’s like inverted telepathy or something: they seem to accept bad things about McCain or Palin without a hiccough, but do the most amazing cognitive limbo for Obama and Biden. No wonder Obama is smirking.
The game’s not over yet. Remember how the MSM messed with the Florida Panhandle in 2000? That’s the goal, again. The NYTs knows best.
My vote will count, even if Obama wins. No third party nonsense for me (which is, after all, just a vote for Obama at this point).
Like Don Henley wrote, we get the government we deserve.
I think it critical that Republicans turn out and vote. The Obama team seems to be trying to convince everyone it is over. I don’t trust the polls and have no idea who will win. I do think that voting is critical now.
We seem to be bucking a theme of “let the Dems win so we can see how REALLY bad they are”. I hope people come to their senses in the voting booth.
I’ll be filling out my mail-in ballot this week. As for the presidential vote, I’ll have this picture in mind, which is provided by Wm. Bonner in his column today. Thus, my vote will not be to the lesser of two evils, but rather to a shorter and less toxic rendition of the described scenario. That choice is rather obvious.
In the US, we don’t get all that concerned about saving face as much as putting off inevitable pain, or worse, trying to dodge the bullet that has already left the muzzle. The results still appear equivalently probable should more deficit spending spread in similar fashion in the next admin.
We’ve already done the ‘saving the banks’ move, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for the other parallels to Japan’s demise. No matter who’s in office, I’m expecting to see similar decisions out of the monetary crowd. No pain sometimes really does lead to no gain.
“…In January, 1990, a spark touched off the Nikkei Dow. Soon, Japan’s miracle economy was in trouble. Bankruptcies rose. Profits fell. Banks teetered. But the Japanese had their economists too. And soon, they were doing what Hoover and Roosevelt had done before them. As to monetary stimulus, the Bank of Japan’s key lending rate was cut from 5% down to “effectively zero.” And there were plenty of fiscal stimuli too. Japan’s government did just what Keynes recommended – it spent money. It went on a spree of what Alan Booth calls “state sponsored vandalism” in the 1990s, taking the budget deficit to a remarkable 5% of GDP in 2002. Roads to nowhere, concrete shorelines, bridges and dams…Japan, per square mile of available territory, covered 30 times as much surface in concrete as in America.
In 1996, the Shumizu Corporation even announced plans to build a hotel on the moon using specially developed techniques for making cement on the lunar surface.
Once again, these heroic efforts produced nothing more than farcical consequences. The Japanese economy is still barely on speaking terms with prosperity. And the Nikkei Dow closed at 8,276 last week… a level last seen (except briefly in 2003) a quarter of a century ago…”
I fear we will see a similar path here if Obama wins. With McCain, it may be no better but he is quirky enough to cast around for a better solution than left wing nostrums that we would see from Obama and company. The only hope with Obama is that Volker is on that team but Carter let things get almost irreversible before he let Volker start to fix it.
I just read a little blurb about Bolivia. It seems the Leftists came to power, the economy came to a halt, and the lefties dug in even deeper. I worry a little about people who like Pyrrhic victories.
The lefty blogs assure me that Obama will be cautious and conservative. Gag.
Again, DB, what about Obama’s background and voting records suggest that he would be “cautious and conservative”? Mind you, these are from the same people who are “certain” that McCain will do all kinds of things that don’t match his own background and voting record.
This is all about race, and “feeling good about yourself.” Look at his bona fides, and at the same time (heck, the same day!), his own people castigated McCain for the Palin selection. Cognitive disconnect. So why the hero worship toward this guy, with his “57 states” and “sharing the wealth” gaffes? Obama is laughing his backside off at us.
Personally, I think that this is all an accident. The original plan, I am pretty sure, was for BO to be VP to HRC. After two terms, he would have been solidly “in” for President: a total of 16 years of Democratic rule.
My guess is that when HRC’s campaign fell apart, no one was more surprised than Obama.
We’ll see….
“The Obama team seems to be trying to convince everyone it is over.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603617.html?sub=AR
James, it looks to me like they are telling themselves there is no ghost in there. The same reason why puppies all pile together. We’ll see what happens.