Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

I find I don’t really have much to say about Sarah Palin. PW covered that well enough. It’s become clear for anyone who wants to see that she’s ludicrously unprepared to be vice president, let alone president. The New York Times has a good editorial about why, if you’re curious about the details. It’s pretty horrific when you step back and take it all in. I mean, if she’s lost Ross Douthat ...

There are two things that I find much more interesting, though. The nomination of Sarah Palin is indicative of two things, one about John McCain and the other about the citizens of the United States. The thing about McCain is simple. For all his vaunted (and largely mythical) maverick status, for all that he prattles on about “honor” and “country first,” picking Palin tells us exactly what he thinks about governing the United States: contempt. The only reason McCain picked Palin was because, in descending order of importance, the core of the Republican Party, evangelical Christians, loves her because she is one of them in a way McCain never was and never can be; McCain desperately needs to shore up that base, because without them the 50 percent plus 1 equation of the Bush years won’t work; and her pick was wacky and unexpected, just what a maverick would do. You’ll notice that “competence” and “ability” are not on that list.

For McCain, those terms, “honor” and “country first,” are just phrases, props to be brought out when he needs to score points. The point for McCain is, and always was, power – being an important man who people fete and fawn over, especially the media. McCain doesn’t have anything else. He doesn’t want to make the world a safer place, or to leave the country in a better state than he found it. I don’t think he’s a sociopath – I’m sure that if those things happen, he’d be pleased about it. But not to such an extent that he’d let them get in the way of the greater glory of John McCain, Maverick. His long tradition of taking stands against his party and against the establishment does not reflect any sort of truth-telling or commitments. This is why those stands have so often been so ideologically inconsistent. There isn’t any ideology underpinning them. He simply goes with what will get the most press coverage.

The second thing that Palin’s pick reflects is the long tradition of anti-intellectualism in the United States. Since the end of the Vietnam War, when the technocrats who got us into that (chronicled in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest) fell from favor in a major way, we’ve seen the rise of Barry Goldwater’s conservatism. David Brooks talked about this aspect of conservatism this week. The current conservative establishment has no use for technocrats. It goes against the conservative belief that all one needs are the right convictions, the right upbringing, the right first principles and everything else flows from that. Ronald Reagan. George W. Bush. John McCain. Sarah Palin. These people don’t value knowledge because their creed has no use or place for it. From mocking of Al Gore in 2000, the contempt for John Kerry’s military service in 2004 and now the criticism that Obama is too cold, too calculating and too much like a scolding teacher. For the life of me I’ve never understood this aspect of the US – from school yard bullies mocking those who do too well in school to Fox News … well, pretty much everything Fox News does. It’s been a frustrating trend to watch. Here’s hoping we’re seeing its apogee.