Palin: The Conservative View

Daniel Larison, "A World of Hurt There"

If there is another thing that we’re learning from her record it is that she doesn’t respond at all well to criticism, and she has made such a habit of shielding herself from it or ignoring that I suspect she has not learned how to deflect or refute it, which compels her to keep repeating whatever tried and true lines she thinks might be remotely relevant to the question. It cannot help when she is put on network television after being shielded from any and all contact with the media and asked about subjects she hasn’t practiced talking about very much, and it cannot help her that she probably was told early on that she knew nothing and she became aware that her handlers believed that she knew nothing. Still, it seems clear to me that her flubbed interviews were not accidental, but were bound to happen when a politician elevated mainly through the “gut-level connection” had to say something coherent about the pressing issues of the day. Palin’s political style is the logical extreme of the Bushian folksiness-trumps-expertise and McCainesque “authenticity”-trumps-policy approaches. She is a natural product of mass democracy’s ongoing pursuit of charismatic mediocrity, in which voters not only seek someone with whom they can identify but also actively discourage politicians’ cultivation of expertise. Expertise grates against their egalitarianism, and so they try to avoid it in their political leaders.