I’m surprised that the obvious classical tag isn’t already on the lips (virtually speaking) of every right-wing blogger. Maybe nobody reads the Aeneid any more. Certainly Sarah Palin has led Republicans out of their two-year-long slough of despond, and in a fashion worthy of an Allen Drury novel.
Who wouldn’t roll is eyes at this plot? An underdog Presidential candidate picks the little known, female governor of a three-electoral-vote state as his Vice Presidential running mate. Scarcely has he introduced her to the world but the media resound with unflattering rumors. Amid the clamor, she reveals that her unmarried daughter is in a family way. (Babies, Lies and Scandal screams one tabloid.) In a trice, wagers are laid on when she will be dumped from the ticket à la Tom Eagleton. The conventional wisdom is that her selection was a desperate maneuver undertaken with only cursory vetting.
Then she delivers her acceptance speech. The publicity draws one of the largest television audiences that has ever watched an hour of a political convention. She starts a bit nervously but soon swings into a fluent precis of her background and career, interwoven with deft jabs at “our opponent”. It is by far the best speech of the convention. The first subsequent poll gives her the highest favorable rating of any candidate of either party.
We aren’t allowed to read ahead, so we don’t know how this story ends. Does the hockey mom from Wasilla go from triumph to triumph, take the oath of office beside President McCain, and look forward on the last page to becoming President herself? Or is this a tragedy, in which the pressures of a relentless campaign overwhelm the young and naïve aspirant?
We know what ending the great majority of reporters and pundits hope for and will do their utmost to bring about. Governor Palin is getting the kind of scrutiny that Barack Obama dreams of only in his nightmares. Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ have already faded away, but you can bet that every provocative sentence ever spoken from the pulpit of Wasilla Bible Church will be broadcast on MSNBC. No need to say what will happen if a counterpart to Bill Ayers or Tony Rezko turns up, at however great a remove, in Sarah Palin’s past.
On whether Governor Palin is the next Margaret Thatcher, as her more enthusiastic admirers aver, I’ll reserve judgement. Lady Thatcher was a thinker as well as a doer. We don’t yet know a great deal about Mrs. Palin’s political thought. For the time being, it’s enough that her candidacy has had the delightful effect of compelling Senator Obama to explain why his experience (a few years each as a “community organizer”, a minor league lawyer, a state legislator and a Senator running for President) is more impressive than hers (city councilman and mayor of an Anchorage suburb, member of the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission, governor).
The only way to keep the comparison from being an embarrassment is to adopt the recursive position that campaigning for President is itself good preparation for the Presidency. No candidate has ever made such a case before. That fact by itself gives sufficient insight into its validity. (The ghost of William Jennings Bryan may wish that he had thought of it.)
Barack Obama has the sort of record that traditionally would fit a Vice Presidential nominee: an up and coming figure with talent and potential in lieu of a long list of accomplishments. If the Democrats were presenting Clinton-Obama this year, no one would quibble with the second banana’s qualifications for the number two job. Their denigration of Governor Palin only emphasizes the emptiness at the top of their actual slate.
Mrs. Palin’s presence in the race also plays havoc with Slick Barry’s pretense of being a great reformer. She overthrew an entrenched, corrupt party establishment. He sedulously cooperated with one many times more entrenched and corrupt. As David Freddoso acidly observes,
There must be someone out there who remembers the 2006 election, in which [Senator Dick] Durbin and Obama together thwarted the efforts of bipartisan reformers who had reached across party lines to clean up their city’s politics. In thatelection, . . . the two senators endorsed, as a “good, progressive Democrat,” a man named Todd Stroger. Both Obama and Durbin knew well that Stroger would continue to use the Cook County payroll as a private fund to support the politically connected — they just didn’t care.
Stroger, a man described by liberal Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn as “an unimaginative legislative drone” and a “machine hack candidate,” won his race with Durbin and Obama’s help. As expected, he went on to shutter health clinics, lay off hundreds of nurses and dozens of prosecutors, and raise taxes — all in order to pay for the hundreds of unqualified but politically connected patronage workers that he and various politicians had “sponsored” for county jobs. John Stroger, his father and predecessor, had even taken the wise step of putting Tony Rezko’s wife on the county payroll.
Obama notes that his opponent, Senator John McCain, voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time. Obama sides with Mayor Richard M. Daley 100 percent of the time, whether in regards to Stroger’s election or anything else that helps keep Chicago politics dirty. That is the real Barack Obama — not the smooth-talking Greek god who plays a reformer on television, but the man who has never met a Daley-backed Chicago pol he could not support. He doesn’t work against politicians for whom Tony Rezko raises money.
If Barack Obama had fetched up in Juneau instead of Hyde Park, and had subsequently been elected governor of Alaska, the Bridge to Nowhere would be adorned with Greek columns and perhaps a mega-sized statue of The One. If Sarah Palin were a Chicagoan, I’m quite sure she wouldn’t be the friend and ally of Richard M. Daley, Todd Stroger and Tony Rezko.
It’s strange how this already strange election has become at least transitorily chiastic: Obama vs. Palin instead of Obama vs. McCain. Stranger still, the man whom the media have treated for months as semi-divine, ever since he upended the “inevitable” Hillary, is struggling to stay in the lead.
Addendum: The Weekly Standard [link for subscribers only] notes an historical parallel between Governor Palin and another governor who was plagued by a scandal more consequential than the pregnancy of an unmarried daughter:
As every schoolboy knows, Grover Cleveland was the Democratic candidate for president in 1884, and in the course of the campaign, a Republican newspaper reported that Cleveland (who was not married) had once fathered a child. Naturally, his campaign was caught flat-footed by the story, but Governor Cleveland wired some famous instructions to his staff: “Whatever you say, tell the truth.”
The truth was that Cleveland had once formed an “illicit connection” with a widow named Maria Halpin, and a baby had been born. The evidence was not conclusive that Cleveland was the father, but he had assumed responsibility for the child and refused to dissemble about the matter when running for president. Americans were impressed. Holier-than-thou Republicans were made to look silly, Cleveland came across as brave and honorable, and he won the election.
Cleveland, by the way, had been just another lawyer in Buffalo when he became the “Veto Mayor” in 1882, cleaning up political graft, and was elected the reform governor of New York later that year, taking on the powers within his own political party. Sound familiar? On election night 1884 his supporters gathered at polling places and sang the following tune:
Hurrah for Maria,
Hurrah for the kid;
We voted for Grover,
And we’re damned glad we did!
THE SCRAPBOOK wonders if this famous quatrain might be adapted for Election Night 2008.
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