People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany. ~David Brooks

Actually, they might think of her as parochial because her first trip overseas was in the last two years, before which she had never left the country.  They might think of her as parochial because most of her life has been spent, reasonably enough, in the same few places in Alaska.  The point, of course, is that if there is something wrong about urbanites disdaining small-town America–if they are so provincial and limited in their “cosmopolitanism”–there is nothing the matter with identifying Palin as parochial when she clearly is that.  For that matter, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with being parochial, so it should not matter whether urbanites think that someone is that. 

The response to condescension towards Palin has been something like, “How dare you think that she is a normal, small-town person!  She lives next to Russia!  So there!”  At least half of the jibes at coastal and urban elites are premised on the idea that the provincials can be all the things urbanites are while still retaining their authenticity, but urbanites are supposedly forever doomed to empty, rootless existence.  At the heart of outraged defenses of Palin is a keen desire to cover up for something that the apologists know are glaring flaws for a Vice Presidential candidate, as if they all feel compelled to make excuses for her and pretend that she is a globalist-in-waiting.  Hence the strained references to proximity to Russia, the insistence that coming from an oil-rich state provides insights into national energy policy and the notion that she instinctively understood the Bush Doctrine better than Gibson in her Zen-like avoidance of defining something that must always be in flux.  It is not enough that Palin is who she is, and it is not enough to praise her small-town lifestyle, but we must also endure lectures telling us that she is some sort of a globetrotter because she once went to Kuwait. 

Update: At C11, Phoebe Maltz makes some good points about why most urbanites wouldn’t be acquianted with Wal-Mart.

It is a measure of how completely scripted and captive Palin has become that there are now people offering counterintuitive theories that she is cunningly lulling her captors into a false sense of security before taking over the entire operation herself:

Her few genuine words on foreign policy indicate her positions are hardly the modern Republican norm.  She is “unusual” on pot smoking and benefits for gays and juror nullification.  The Republicans are underestimating her role as a Hegelian agent of world-historical change [bold mine-DL], just as the Democrats did at first.

Which narrative do you find more plausible?:

“Lovely Sarah, she’s saying and doing everything we want her to.  What a quick learner.  How pliable she is.  Remember Descartes on tabula rasa?”

“Once John and I are elected, they’ll need me more than I need them.”

The people who are right now the happiest may end up the most concerned.  For better or worse, they’re about to lose control of their movement.

Hegelian agent of world-historical change?  Frankly, this is even crazier than the “she’s a secret Buchananite secessionist” notion that briefly enchanted some of my colleagues.  Let’s be very clear about this: she will either become a predictable vessel of everything that is wrong with the GOP today, or she will be marginalized and steadily undermined from within by those who support everything that is wrong with the GOP today.  You can hope that she will be a champion of Republican transformation, or you can hope that she will be influential and will become the heir apparent leader of both movement and party, but it has become simply ridiculous to expect both at the same time–they are mutually exclusive.  To respond to Rod’s question, “Might Sarah Palin steal the conservative movement out from under the noses of the old guard?” I’m afraid the answer is no.

Ta-Nehisi Coates asks if Vince Young is a bust.  As a longtime Oilers/Titans fan, I can say with some confidence: yes.  As a Titans fan, I can also say that this was probably the best thing that could have happened to the team this year.  Kerry Collins simply runs the offense more effectively and makes fewer mistakes.  It was a mistake, albeit an understandable one, to draft him instead of Leinart (who, truth be told, has hardly acquitted himself well in the pre-season), but then it was also mistake to run off both Steve McNair and Billy Volek in the first place.  As always, the owner of the team blunders and the team pays for it for years afterwards.

Lott: I don’t understand what Clark Stooksbury said, but I’m going to mock him anyway.

Deep down, political contests are about picking symbolic champions. ~Steve Sailer

Precisely right.  The idea of having a symbolic champion is powerful and can overwhelm pretty much everyone.  Even though Ron Paul supporters were, are, drawn to the man largely on the basis of his policy views there is no doubt that many of us also see in him an embodiment of the decent Middle America whose interests we think he also champions.  What I find so troubling about symbolic champions among the major party nominees is that the desire to identify with them simply overrides critical thought.  Voters stop asking whether or not a certain candidate actually represents their interests and settle instead for someone whom they regard as coming from them.  This is usually defined by the expression, “He shares my values.” 

These “values”-sharing candidates are granted a tremendous amount of freedom in terms of what their voters will allow them to do because of the trust engendered by these common “values.”  More often than not, the “values”-sharing politicians in the GOP do not deliver on any of the social and cultural issues that matter most to their voters, and the clever thing about this racket is that they never need to deliver.  “Values”-sharing is not something that can be quantified, so it is difficult to fall short.  So long as these politicians continue to recite the right lines and occasionally take highly symbolic public stands to prove themselves worthy, no substantive changes in law or policy are ever expected and failure to bring them about becomes more or less irrelevant. 

This is one reason why social conservatives, who seem to be more inclined to vote on the basis of shared “values” than other conservatives, are such a large constituency that gets so little in exchange for their support.  Economic and national security conservative demands are much more concrete and specific, and failure to meet them is punished accordingly.  Even on judicial appointments, the area where voters can at least see some kind of real action, social conservatives must be satisfied with appointments that have marginally higher probabilities of yielding the desired results at some undetermined, future time.  Should they not yield the right results, the relevant rulings are usually years after appointment and are virtually cost-free for the politicians who made and confirmed the appointments.  Despite the complete unreliability of “values”-sharing politicians on this score, social conservatives routinely line up behind them every cycle with the stubbornness of compulsive gamblers.

This does make it more or less useless to argue with committed supporters of such a champion, with whom they have identified and bonded, on the basis of that person’s record, and it also significantly raises expectations about what that champion will be able to do for you and yours.  This inevitably sets up the supporters for disillusionment when the champion “betrays” them by doing things they dislike, even though the candidate may have made it very clear that he was going to do these things during the campaign.  At the time of the election, the agenda did not matter–the feeling of “sharing values” mattered.  By the time the specific parts of the agenda are enacted, which may very well directly harm their interests, these voters have no recourse but to sulk and look for another symbolic champion who will really be one of them. 

I don’t know how many times in the last week or two I have seen quotes from voters to the effect that Palin “gets” what ordinary (or is that exceptional?) people experience or that her background is just like theirs.  The implication is that it means something that she “gets” their experience and shares a similar background, as if it will have some effect on how she functions once in office.  Of course, there is no necessary connection between her passion for hunting big game, fishing. going to an evangelical church or living in a small town and her political agenda.  Peter Suderman writes at C11 on these cultural cues:

Though these preferences correlate to some extent to one’s political beliefs, they don’t actually determine them.  So it’s pretty silly to carry out debates about ideology by proxy. If we’re going to have these debates, let’s have them about the issues, not the signals.

It is doubly silly to take the signals or cues as the definitive evidence that a politician will represent your interests in the absence of knowing anything about his (or, in this case, her) record.  However, if there is one thing that this election has reminded us, it is that democracy is very, very silly.

She may have fired the governor’s chef and sold the state jet, but Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska has also presided over a dramatic increase in state spending in the last two years.

Still, she can accurately claim that her state is in good fiscal health, thanks to an explosion of revenues from state taxes on oil industry profits.

Indeed, in her 20 months in office, Palin’s toughest financial decisions involved dickering with the Legislature on creative ways to spend and salt away the billions of dollars in oil revenues pouring into the state treasury.

At times, Palin has been more economic populist than small-government conservative, partly because of Alaska’s unique government financing system.

With no statewide income or sales tax, Alaska funds about 90 percent of the state budget from royalties and taxes on oil producers. Soaring oil prices and a higher windfall oil profits tax – an increase pushed through by Palin, now the Republican vice presidential nominee – have state coffers overflowing with petrodollars. The Alaska oil industry calculates that its annual payments to the state doubled in a single year to $10.2 billion.

Until a few years ago, the state government struggled financially for years because of low oil prices. But that’s all changed. In the first two budget years under Palin, the state government has stashed almost $6 billion of surplus revenues in various reserve and savings accounts in anticipation of future drops in the price of oil. And the state has allocated another $4 billion over two years for a laundry list of new capital projects, mostly small grants initiated in budget requests by legislators for their districts. ~The Boston Globe

Thank goodness that McCain will have Palin to help him battle out-of-control spending in Washington!  This is the record of the governor some people wanted to anoint the future leader of the conservative movement and the GOP.  The more we are acquainted with what she has done in office, the more it should be clear that the problem with choosing her was not simply a case of promoting her too quickly but of promoting her at all.

Remarkably, she has, in those two weeks, single-handedly re-assembled the decisive Reagan coalition. ~John Brummett

While it must be reassuring to believe that Palin has such magical powers, she has not reassembled anything of the kind.  The Reagan coalition disappeared, or to be more accurate the Republican Party has changed significantly over the last 20 years just as the country has changed.  Today’s GOP is not even the Republican coalition of the ’90s.  What she has done is to excite members of the Bush coalition to send money, volunteer and turn out in November in larger numbers than they would have done otherwise.  She has most excited the Republican core of the Bush coalition that largely turned out in the same numbers for Republican candidates in 2006 as they did in previous cycles.  She is the attractive face of what has been called the “new fusionism,” the neoconservative-led marriage of pro-life social conservatives with interventionists.  As I have said before, she is the would-be future heir to the legacy of Bushism, an ideology that is effectively indistinguishable from this “new fusionism.”

I know the CW–Palin has locked in the base, freeing McCain to move left. But jeez, McCain isn’t moving to the left just on immigration, and he isn’t moving subtly. Listen to this new radio ad, which might as well be titled “Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Research.” That’s how often the phrase is repeated. How much more Screw-You-I’m-Taking-You-for-Granted can McCain get?  Are conservatives complete suckers? ~Mickey Kaus

I suspect this is a rhetorical question, since the come-to-Palin revival has made clear once and for all that there are no policies so offensive or objectionable to conservatives that they cannot be erased from memory by political stunts and symbolism.  McCain/Palin will endorse ESCR, but because Palin has “walked the walk,” as they say, it will not matter that McCain is still compromising a principle that pro-lifers believe is non-negotiable.  (Notice how during the Gibson interview she very carefully avoided committing a McCain administration to opposition to ESCR and kept emphasizing that she was talking about her personal opinion.)  Instead of seeing through the Palin selection as a ruse and understanding that she is being used as little more than a prop to lure social conservatives to the polls to elect an administration that will ignore them entirely, most conservatives are now completely on board with the GOP ticket.

This election is a struggle between the followers of American exceptionalism and the supporters of global universalism. ~Gerard Baker

At first glance, this sounds plausible, and then you realize that it is not possible to identify which party is exceptionalist and which is universalist.  Obama endorses virtually every aspect of U.S. hegemony and has repeatedly expressed his acceptance of American exceptionalism.  It doesn’t matter if it is true whether his personal story was possible only in America–he accepts the mythology that tells him so.  Who are the supporters of global universalism if not advocates of the “freedom agenda” who say such stupid things as, “We are all Georgians now”?  There is a bipartisan consensus in favor of the marriage of American exceptionalism and global universalism, according to which American values are at stake whenever another “democracy” is threatened, which is how our nationalists can spout drivel about the universal rights of man and our universalists can wax poetic about the “idea” that is America.  Meanwhile, both of them are fundamentally at odds with the real national interest and the common good of this country.  But Baker’s interpretation here is mistaken for another reason–the electorate does not divide along these lines, but along entirely different cultural fault lines largely unrelated to foreign policy.  Foreign policy simply becomes another area where these other divisions are expressed.