Palin Ascends

Governor Sarah Palin seen below arriving at the Alfalfa Club dinner.



Not quite right, Governor. For your next sortie, you have to learn how to milk a staircase.

Spanky And Darla

Governor Sarah Palin has made it known she's attending, and in fact, speaking at this weekend's Alfalfa Club dinner expressly to meet new President, Barack Obama.

"The Alfalfa dinner, yes, in fact that's because President Obama is scheduled to be there," Palin said. "And how often will I have an opportunity to have dinner with the president? I will take up that offer to do so."

According to Politico, both Obama and Palin will address the crowd.

This photo-op will have the Washington crowd in a lather, given Governor Palin's repeated body blows of the then Democratic candidate during her RNC speech. I counted 15 references to him in that Scully ghosted speech, delivered in a brutal tone of derision about Obama's 'journey of self-discovery' as presidential candidate.

The over-200 members of this extremely select, powerful club include General Colin Powell, and since he had a few choice words to say about her, that might be an interesting meeting too, if he does attend.

What is certain is that the Georgetown cocktail set which Senator John McCain half-heartedly chastised for their refusal to be wowed by the Alaskan's accomplishments, will be looking for any miscue so Sally Quinn can milk it in commentary op-eds for weeks to come.

I actually think Governor Palin may not make it on Saturday, largely because of Anchorage's equivalent of Vesuvius, Mt. Redoubt, might erupt in the next few days. Here it is, with a scary mushroom cloud shape, doing just that in 1991.



If she leaves now, she will be accused by salivating Mudflatters that she is heartless, power-grabbing, and not doing her job as Governor (it would be curious to know their take on the AWOL Senate career of Barack Obama, who started campaigning for President the moment he swore, sans mistake that time, his senatorial Oath).

This despite the fact that her reason for going to Washington is precisely to get the ear of the President, or at least, to initiate contact on her State's behalf. Can't win with some, Guv'nor.

If you want a friend in Washington, said President Truman, get a dog. But it strikes me that huskies will not be needed this time. As they suspect all too well, her bite is far worse than her bark.

Caroline Kennedy Is Good Enough

I have been following the "Caroline Kennedy to the Senate in place of Hillary" saga as long as everyone else, and I confess -- I still do not get it.

Why is Liberal America in such a tizzy of distaste at the prospect?

Of course, not just liberals veer from astonished to annoyed about this matter, but it's understood that conservatives would be in opposition. Being anti-Kennedy is a Republican birthright.

No. It's evident that as the Left blog about Governor Paterson's forthcoming decision, they are each day less and less amused that the choice should fall on the demure shoulders of this 51 year-old woman, one of the earliest to break with the Clintons and back Obama, at that.



It's just really fascinating to watch this unfold with such thinly disguised animosity towards Caroline's candidacy. And here I must say this -- I use her Christian name not as an intimate, obviously, but as recognition that she's been a part of American life since she was 3 years old. If her late brother was "America's Prince", she was his princess foil.

But hers is a life touched by endless tragedy, a story all of us could recite by rote from her father's assassination to her brother's disappearance off of Martha's Vineyard.

Such characters in a novel or in a film are usually hateable (due to the curse of human jealousy), unless their elevated social status is tinged with tragedy, or they redeem themselves by liking the poor. That has been the hook of almost every story dealing with the high and mighty since Aeschylus all the way to wayward Rose's love of the impoverished Jack in that dismal "Titanic". Only Proust could write about aristocrats with such approval, and still make people like them.

Could it be Kennedy herself that causes such a backlash?

I have heard liberal bloggers say she is a bad speaker. Yes, she's stilted. But have you heard Nancy Pelosi in action? Eye-crossingly boring.

I have heard some refer to her "debutante" New York status. Yes, but she's done an impressive amount of charity work, a legacy she took over when her mother died.

I have heard people say she is a dilettante. Then so was Obama when he ran for the Senate. They are both Harvard grads, both lawyers, and both published authors.

Unlike Barack Obama, her first book was a well-received co-authored one about the Bill of Rights, called The Right To Privacy. In fact, had this been an Obama book instead of a Kennedy book, I would've considered him less of an empty suit.

Having mentioned privacy, I think we are getting closer to the reason why 'Caroline Kennedy for the Senate' is off to such a rocky start.

This woman is notoriously, almost morbidly private, or as much as she can be as the fabled daughter of that political dynasty -- the Kennedys.

You can see her doing the entertainment rounds in New York, but rarely for the exclusive benefit of social diarists. It's always a cause, a benefit, or an awards ceremony, not a movie premiere preening in front of paparazzi.

Also, by all accounts, she is an involved and caring wife/mother.

She is certainly taking her mother's famous dictum to heart that it doesn't matter what else you do in life, if you fail as a mother first, the other stuff is almost meaningless.

(That must've been a zinger to the heart of Ethel Kennedy)

I have heard it say that Democrats don't want families becoming political dynasties with a sense of entitlement, which is real funny coming about the lady who would succeed Hillary Clinton. Honestly, do people even think out their objections? Dear God.

I could go on and on about this, including re-emphasising the fact that Caroline backed Obama for President over Hillary Clinton in such a way, as to make his dedicated followers proud of her sound political instincts.

But it's almost as naught.

For them, she intrudes in some strange way into their fantasy that the Democratic Party is for the working-class, or for those who rose up by their talent or grit -- and no one else need apply.

Kids, I got news for you: You guys have more millionaires and celebrities who back you publicly than we Rethuglicans do. It's long been the Party of Moët and private jets, not of Pabst Blue Ribbon and F-150s. Wake up and smell the Prada.

What do we have so far as points against her becoming a Senator?

- She has nil political experience.

Except for the fact that she's actively breathed politics since she was in her cradle.

I'm sorry; it counts. I know Americans don't like to hear this, but one's background really does give you a leg up in certain matters, and politics is definitely one of them. It may not appeal to the democratic nature of American culture, but to discount it totally smacks of a lack of sophistication, and not knowing how life works.

- She has never given a political speech in her life and was "scrambling" in Syracuse yesterday, putting herself forward as Senate candidate.

Really? Did I imagine all those interviews and discourses on politics not just in 2008, including at the DNC, but throughout her adult life?

- She is just a celebrity.

Riiight. Because we all know New Yorkers do not like famous people to horn in unto their political caste...

At the end of the day, she would be a caretaker Senator from New York, who would at worst have to run again in two years.

This isn't a life-time appointment, and if she's not up to snuff, there are other Democrats who I am certain would gladly run against her in 2010. In fact, she may decide the Senate gig isn't for her (it is really an intrusive proposition for a woman disinclined to be a public figure), and decline to run altogether.

You know, 2008 revealed itself to be a year where two women battled for two of the highest positions in the land, and for their bothers, they had to endure incredibly embarrassing levels of abuse, not from Republicans, mind you. But from Democrats.

Today, as I read the oft-insipid Jane Hamsher making her mealy-minded points about Caroline Kennedy on Huffington Post, I am reminded yet again that women do not support women. Worse yet, we make sexist points when referring to them (sometimes even in an otherwise positive piece), which in Hamsher's case was her original post about the topic, which included this lovely line:

Really? She's "making calls this morning to alert political figures to her interest?" I guess it was either that or get her nails done.

I have it on good authority Jane was making this moue when she wrote this.



(Was that really necessary? It's so petty, Jane. Since you don't mind petty, I am repaying you in kind with that comment above. You like?)

And how else is she going to inform the political establishment of casting her hat into the ring, but to actually go out and place some calls -- does HuffPo provide its writers with telepathic lessons that we do not know about? Because you know, maybe Caroline could've closed her eyes, and transmitted her thoughts to Paterson like Uri Geller.

(Don't believe it for a minute that if Kennedy-Schlossberg had called a press conference to formally announce this, that the Left would have given her less of a hard time. They would've probably had said she was being a prima donna. Also, I am reminded of people moaning about the cost of rescuing the remains of her late brother from the bottom of the sea, and those moaning the most seemed to be Democrats...)

By now, you are wondering if this makes me her champion. Not really. I respect her though.

I respect her tenacity and respect her political courage to break with a sure thing, as Hillary Clinton looked to be in January.

I think Caroline Kennedy should be given the same consideration, without the snark and reverse class-snobbery, same as any other candidate.

The point is not that there are better choices out there to fill the Senate vacancy left by Hillary Clinton -- but that Caroline Kennedy is not so bad herself.

Green, Ohio Rally

The city is called "Green", eh? Should make environmentalists happy.

Here are the videos from Wednesday's McCain-Palin rally, which featured Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Woman" (one of my favourite songs, remember?).









I don't know about you, but I can't get enough of these rallies. They perk me up during the day, no end.

Iranian Caviar Story Pulled

The New York Post had a story of Michelle Obama ordering room service recently. This arugula-eating family seems to have very fancy tastes in food in general.

So do I, actually.

I love Blinis, and order Ossetian caviare via my local speciality shop. But you know, I'm not running on a "spread the wealth" platform for the Presidency of the United States, or to be its First Lady in a time of economic turmoil.

Even Oliver Stone's dummy, Dubya, gave up golf pro-tem, so as not to be seen enjoying himself as people died.

Here is how one blog reported it:

Though he's battling GOP accusations that he's an Ivy League elitist, Barack Obama has a lifestyle of the rich and famous, like TV show host Robin Leach, who always signed off, "Champagne wishes and caviar dreams!" While he was at a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Michelle Obama called room service and ordered lobster hors d'oeuvres, two whole steamed lobsters, Iranian caviar and champagne, a tipster told Page Six.

But now, the story seems to have been pulled from the Post's gossip pages.



Either the story was just not true.

Or Senator Obama's camp threatened the newspaper in some way to retract the story.

Or the story is true, but proving embarrassing to Senator and Mrs. Obama, they played hardball and had it pulled anyway.

I'm going with scenario number one because the other two are just too scary to think about. It would mean that we literally cannot say anything negative about The One.

Who knows. Hopefully, the Post is just reordering its archives...

Palin Should Take The Pig By The Snoot

"[I]n Wasilla, a town of strip-mall sprawl and eccentric backwoods dwellers, people still talk about the time in 2004 when an irate resident contacted Ben Stevens, state Senate president, to question his vague explanations for taking consulting fees from an oil field-services company.

“Your [sic] just more valley trash,” the senator wrote back. The grammar was wrong, but the name stuck."

So, how did Sarah Palin react when she and others were slimed as Valley Trash?



(Via Jdeeripper)

Not exactly sure what it is about ex-State Senators, that they think they're entitled to insult others they feel is beneath them. But for the sake of American public discourse, it has got to stop.

The Unspoken Reasons

(Scroll down for the National Review's hysterical new "cover")

If you listened to NPR on Monday, poor David Remnick was raked over the coals over his editorial position regarding the now infamous New Yorker-BHO/MO cover.

Michelle Norris, the "All Things Considered" host, asked him to take the viewers through a behind-the-scenes look at how the cover actually came to be. Listen to it, because it's fascinating.

But there's a moment where he mentions the emails he's been getting (around minute 3:00):

"The kind of email I get is telling me, I get it, but I don't think so-and-so is going to get it. I don't think so-and-so in W. Virginia, or out there in the Middle West, and that to me is a false argument -- that if you can get it, why can't other people get it?

I don't think this notion that, you know, only Upper West Side Manhattan elitists can get satire. I don't think that's the case at all."

In Friendly Fire, my post on the fallout, I mentioned a Time magazine forum member mentioning precisely this State -- W. Virginia. If you were to read the left-leaning blogs, W. Virginia is mentioned over and over again, precisely this way. "I get it, but W. Virginians won't."

W. Virginia symbolises a very powerful combination in American politics: Rural. Undereducated. Blue-collar. White.

Hillbilly.

The most positive thing I can say about this, is at least they are not claiming W. Virginians are too unsophisticated as actually not to subscribe to or read the New Yorker. You'd think by their reactions, that a large chunk who paid attention to the magazine hailed from the State -- which is, of course, nonsense given their dim view of their sophistication.

No, this reaction is code for "other Americans", but W. Virginia gets to be the target of their slams because they overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary.

The irony is that the W. Virginia leans heavily Democratic. Here are the April 2008 figures:

665234 Democrats, 347760 Republicans and 156199 who are unaffiliated.

The Democratic Party is like the Republican Party, in that it is comprised of people from all sides of the economic spectrum.

But the phenomenon you are seeing here, with this handwringing worry about "W. Virginians" believing the New Yorker cover to be true ("Hey, if a Liberal magazine puts it on their cover, it must be true!"), is really not about ignorant W. Virginians.

It's about the Left of America not comfortable in acknowledging that their Party contains people who are white, and yet don't think like them.

In their ideal world, where minorities are king, and intellectual elitism is something positive, rural blue-collar white folk are akin to Martians.

Here is a demographic they cannot control, because they cannot relate to them.

In turn, the W. Virginians (who are actually stand-ins at large for this phenomenon, and can live anywhere in the US) feel this, and react accordingly by not toeing the Party line come election time.

Protein Wisdom's Jeff Goldstein wrote about this just today (Via Bitmaelstrom):

What the progressive handwringers should be doing is gleefully and full-throatedly noting the satire, then preparing to laugh at anyone who sees this as an accurate depiction of Obama. What they should be doing is enjoying a wry smile at their next cocktail party over the (presumed) idiocy of the rightwingers who might take this cover at face value, so shallow is their understanding of the literary arts.

But the real irony here is they can’t do that — and that’s precisely because their worldview is predicated on being able to control “meaning” by consensus. And one of the problems with such an incoherent method for determining meaning (by way of reliance on a given interpretive community’s ability to shout down competing interpretations), is that, at least in theory, another interpretive community can come along and claim another, diametrically opposed meaning, and — if their will to power is stronger — control the narrative by way of severing any ties to original intent.

One can't analyse it any better than that.

On the one hand, they are playing a defensive game, in what was intended to be going on the offense. By all rights, they should be laughing and cheering about the cover, which is brilliant in its satirical intent, but they cannot do that.

They are literally outraged that someone has painted the devil on the wall, because they fear and misunderstsand not the intent of the cartoon -- but a section of their own Party members and their fellow Americans at large.

It is this sense of superiority twinned with suspicion of some of their own tribe that makes the Democrats liable to these contradictions, and weaker on the topic than most Republicans.

Republicans today, and for the past 30 years, constantly poke fun at political correctness, and its sacred cows -- feminism and women, race and blacks, class and the wealthy, intelligentsia or foreigners, etc.

The Democrats are constrained to keep to rather tame topics, fearing to say the wrong thing to the wrong people, unless of course they are Republicans, white, males, the rich, the religious, patriotic, or sometimes all six.

(Unsurprisingly, President Bush is their number one target, because amongst other things he just happens to be a walking Bingo card)

Althouse asked yesterday if Obama was funny (he is not -- he's unusually ill-at-ease in speeches; not just serious from the podium, but also elegantly stiff in private), and today she queried "Why Can't We Joke About Obama?".

And the answer is:

Because the field for satire is extremely narrow for Leftists, especially for one of their own who is a minority. The New Yorker cover incident is but a harbinger of what will happen if Obama is elected.

The stinging caricatures will lose their edge, the editorials will avoid deeper insight than is warranted, and everyone will give him a pass lest the dread word "racist" raise its ugly head again.



She put it best about the current climate:

"The real explanation for the lack of jokes is some combination of the desire for Obama to win and the fear of seeming racist."

Americans are not famous for self-censorship. That is often cited as a British cultural trait, with Americans being known for their frankness, to the point of being rather gauche in speaking their mind.

If President Obama becomes fact, you can bet that Americans, no doubt led by those backwards "W. Virginians" of their worst imaginings, will tire of this need to tread carefully.

4 years is a long time to put a lid on the American lip, let alone 8.

Or is the lesson of this incident is that not just Upper West Side Manhattan elitists can project and predict about their fellow Americans?

UPDATE: Ruth Anne hits the commentary jackpot again. Here's the National Review's counterpoint cover.

"For all the irony-challenged literalists who were upset by the New Yorker's Obama-as-A-Muslim magazine cover"

BRILLIANT!



So...why doesn't it hurt us as much as the New Yorker cover hurt Obama supporters?

I guess because being old and having been a pill-popping junkie, the most obvious negatives of John and Cindy McCain, are not nearly as egregious to America as being perceived a Muslim, and anti-American.

The possible realities projected by Obama and his wife are infinitely more damaging to them, and that's why you can slam McCain all you want -- the Obama slams will always be much more hurtful.

EDIT: To pre-empt the rebuttals, I realise that the NYer was pointing to the untruths about Obama being Muslim and that they hate America, whereas McCain IS old and Mrs. McCain DID have an addiction problem.

But his age doesn't prevent him from having run a vigourous campaign for 2 years, and Mrs. McCain long ago conquered her problem. If you think these are not being peddled as current facts by their opponents, though, you've clearly not been paying attention.

Both sides are doing their level best to slander the other.

But Senator Obama has a greater perception problem because his background is much more muddled.