By George F. Will
Washington Post, February 18, 2010

The Republican presidential nominee, an Arizona senator, was a maverick, which was part of his charm. He spoke and acted impulsively, which was part of his problem. Voters thought his entertaining dimensions might be incompatible with presidential responsibilities. For example, he selected a running mate most Americans had never heard of and who had negligible experience pertinent to the presidency. This was 1964.

Barry Goldwater, whose seat John McCain occupies, chose to run with Bill Miller, a congressman from Lockport, N.Y., near Buffalo. Miller, Goldwater cheerfully explained, annoyed Lyndon Johnson. After the Goldwater-Miller ticket lost 44 states, Miller retired to Lockport, where he practiced law and lived in dignified anonymity until his death in 1983. Although he had served as an assistant prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and spent seven terms in Congress, no one suggested he should be considered for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.

Yet Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska’s governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states.

Conservatives, who rightly respect markets as generally reliable gauges of consumer preferences, should notice that the political market is speaking clearly: The more attention Palin receives, the fewer Americans consider her presidential timber. The latest Post-ABC News poll shows that 71 percent of Americans — including 52 percent of Republicans — think she is not qualified to be president.

This is not her fault. She is what she is, and what she is merits no disdain. She is feisty and public-spirited, and millions of people vibrate like tuning forks to her rhetoric. When she was suddenly forced to take a walk on the highest wire in America’s political circus, she showed grit.

She also showed that grit is no substitute for seasoning. She has been subjected to such irrational vituperation — loathing largely born of snobbery — that she can be forgiven for seeking the balm of adulation from friendly audiences.

America, its luck exhausted, at last has a president from the academic culture, that grating blend of knowingness and unrealism. But the reaction against this must somewhat please him. That reaction is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. Besides, full-throated populism has not won a national election in 178 years, since Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832.

After William Jennings Bryan’s defeat in 1908, his third as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, this prototypical populist said he felt like the man who, thrown out of a bar for a third time, dusted himself off and said, “I’m beginning to think those fellows don’t want me in there.” In 1992, Ross Perot, an only-in-America phenomenon — a billionaire populist — won 19 percent of the popular vote. But because of the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes, he won none of those. In 1976, Jimmy Carter — peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that — somewhat tapped America’s durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.

In 1968, George Wallace, promising to toss the briefcases of pointy-headed intellectuals into the Potomac, won 46 electoral votes with 13.5 percent of the popular vote. He had the populist’s trifecta — a vivid personality, a regional base and a burning issue. Actually, he had three such issues — backlash against the civil rights revolution, social disintegration (urban riots, rising crime) and resentment of the progressive projects of Great Society social engineers (e.g., forced busing of other people’s children).

Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. But today’s saturation journalism, mesmerized by presidential politics and ravenous for material, requires a steady stream of political novelties. In that role, Palin is united with the media in a relationship of mutual loathing. This is not her fault. But neither is it her validation.

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Washington Diarist
The People’s People

by Leon Wieseltier
The New Republic, February 18, 2010

I should not speak ill of the dead, but what of the dead who spoke ill of the dead? Many years ago an acquaintance of mine applied for a position at the Museum of the City of New York, over which Louis Auchincloss presided. The search committee met in the writer’s apartment on Park Avenue. When the candidate was asked to describe what he would do to improve the institution, he replied that too many people were not represented in its galleries, and noted in particular the inadequacy of the museum’s portrayal of African Americans. “What would you have us do,” Auchincloss sneered, “create a period room with a hovel in it?” I was reminded of that sickening remark when I read Auchincloss’s obituary in the Times a few weeks ago. It was one of those death notices that make me chuckle. How’s this for immortality? “I knew perfectly well what it meant to be rich in New York. If you were rich, you lived in a house with a pompous beaux-arts façade and kept a butler and gave children’s parties with spun sugar on the ice cream and little cups of real silver as game prizes. If you were not rich you lived in a brownstone with Irish maids who never called you Master Louis and parents who hollered up and down the stairs instead of ringing bells.” This was Auchincloss’s bathetic reminiscence of his boyhood, though it also anticipates the shrunken epicene standpoint of the Manhattan of Bloomberg and Blankfein–except for one glaring difference, one deliciously American usurpation. Master Louis never knew what it meant to be poor in New York, of course; and when critics accused him of Park Avenue provincialism, he accused them of “class prejudice,” and protested grumpily that “nobody holds it against” James and Wharton and Thackeray and Proust. That is because their subject was not money, even if they wrote about the rich; but never mind, snobbery is a hurtful thing. It pleases me to think of Auchincloss’s white-shoe resentment. A country in which he whined about class prejudice is a hopeful place. We are not a solid but a fluid. In America, elitists cannot sleep.

And certainly not if Sarah Palin has her way. “I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person,” she recently told Chris Wallace, which is just as well. And she added: “I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist, because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America feel like we just don’t get it.” At the Tea Party convention in Nashville, Palin made a similar claim for the moral superiority of ordinariness, twangily championing “real people, not politicos, not inside-the-Beltway professionals,” and “everyday Americans,” and finally “the people.” Palin is packaging herself as the perfect image of the American mean. It is an affront to the heartland. But since the pitch is working–“the lady is good,” the sobersides David Broder exclaimed–a few clarifications are in order. For a start, there are no unreal people. Even Mitch McConnell is real. Even Frank Rich is real. The invocation of “the people” sounds inclusive, but it is a technique of exclusion. (This was also the case in the preamble to the Constitution.) It is based upon a particular definition of “the people.” How do Palin and the partiers know who the real Americans are? The mystical certainty of her divisive intuition reminds me of what intellectual historians used to call the “epistemological privilege” of Marx’s proletariat, his reprehensible old idea that access to truth is a feature of class position. Palin, too, is idealizing the proletariat for the uniqueness of its understanding, though her economics is starkly indifferent to its tribulations. And if you throw in Palin’s views on the “social issues,” on the questions by which we measure the decency of our society, then it is clear that this is an anti-elitism that is not an egalitarianism, a common touch without genuine commonality, which is quite an accomplishment.