George W. Palin

by digby

According to David Brooks, Palin’s “mom next door” schtick last night was just what the doctor ordered. She loathes and despises Washington and that’s the most important qualification for any Vice President. It always amuses me when Washington insiders like Brooks wildly applaud people who hate them.

Last night Palin appeared to have mastered the art of George W. Bush style gibberish — obnoxious, confident and dumb. And the conservative elite are all relieved. They were afraid they had a real problem on their hands — a candidate who was timorous, insecure and dumb and that is a sure loser.

I’m going to start referring to her as George W Palin. She has every one of the characteristics that people thought were so refreshingly “authentic” when he ran in 2000 and which led us to disaster. This arrogant, empty, anti-intellectual faux populism has just proved itself to be inadequate for the presidency and yet they’ve put up another one.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had varying responses to this person. At first I thought she was a professional wingnut politician, well indoctrinated in conservative movement politics. It turns out she isn’t that at all. She is exactly what she says she is, a socially conservative hockey mom, who fell into a job with a big title, but which is obviously done by her staff. She gets by on her folksy demeanor, her massive ego and her prodigious energy (the only thing she doesn’t have in common with Bush.)

She isn’t a politician at all. She’s a caricature of a politician, as he is. They are both figureheads who represent something important to voters who believe that the biggest problem in the world is that pointy headed elites are incompetent because they lack comm on sense. And the funny thing is that it’s the product of one of the harshest conservative criticisms of liberalism over the years —- the self-esteem movement. Both George W. Bush and Sarah Palin are self-esteem symbols, put forth to prove to people who have been convinced that liberal elites are ruining everything, that the world would be better led by someone just like them. It’s the ultimate social promotion. That people like David Brooks would celebrate Palin’s mastery of its aggressive know nothingness, says that the conservative elites, even after Bush, are still committed to using this for their own cynical, Straussian ends.

Ed Rollins just said that Sarah Palin is now the front runner for the GOP nomination in 2012.

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