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Agree to Disagree

Norman Leahy

I was at a conference a couple of weeks back where the heads of center-right, state-level think tanks had gathered for their annual meeting. The talk focused on the usual stuff: fundraising, policy papers, more conferences. And Sarah Palin. She was great, wonderful, fabulous, certain to be at the top of the next Republican presidential ticket.

This gushing from normally restrained and analytical people surprised me.   Had they forgotten that Gov. Palin was just the understudy, and that Sen. McCain -- the man with whom many of them had serious policy disagreements -- was the one people were actually going to vote for in November.

It didn't matter. She was the real deal for them and they were excited about the Republicans for the first time in a very long time.

Well, fine. These are think tank people on a resort retreat. Surely less plugged-in people would have a different view. So I called up a dear old family friend.   We chatted for a while and then she asked the question: "So, what do you think of Palin?"

"I'm agnostic on her. She seems weak on school choice, weak on earmark reform and anyone who calls themselves a conservative can't be wishy-washy on either one and be taken seriously," I said.

"But she hunts. Did you see those pictures? And she's tough, too."

"Yeees, but…"

"She's really changed a lot of people's minds around here about McCain.   Mine too. And he really needed it."

A couple of days before, my Mother – who voted for Jimmy Carter because she thought Reagan was "scary" said the same thing. For whatever it was worth, people (and particularly women) of a certain age and background were taken by Gov. Palin's biography. They didn't care about the policy positions. Sarah is one of them.   They were going to vote for her.

As for John McCain … eh, whatever.   But they love that Sarah.

So what I'd been reading about Palin helping close the enthusiasm gap might be true.   Republicans have done more damage to their party brand over the last eight years than a legion of Democratic operatives could ever hope to achieve.   

But in one fell swoop, Sarah Palin changes all that to such a degree that even some Democrats have begun whining that Obama has lost his edge and could cost the party some close congressional races in November.

At the margins this might be true. But that still doesn't explain the mini-phenomenon that is Sarah Palin. There has to be something else at work.

One obvious place to start looking is the press. They were as taken aback by the Palin choice as the Obama campaign. Who is this …this … person? What has she ever done to deserve a spot on the ticket?

That was the polite first reaction. The rest has become, in a very brief time, the stuff of legend -- from faked pregnancies to strong-arming her ex-brother-in-law to killing the Lindbergh baby, Palin sent portions of the left, and the press, into an epic tizzy from which it has yet to recover.

This is exactly the sort of thing that feeds the Republican base. Back in 1992, while wandering from watering hole to watering hole on Capitol Hill, I spotted more than one large Republican mobile that sported an "Annoy the Media, Vote Bush" bumper sticker.  

Cute, but it didn't work.   However, it accurately captured a mood that the press is out to get Republicans.   It's still very much alive today. But what's different now is that instead of bumper stickers on cars, Republicans have their own internet tools, talk radio shows, social networks and news monitoring sites from which they can immediately and widely hit back.

Such tit-for-tat makes reading blogs entertaining, but it still doesn't explain the Palin phenomenon.

Yes, she's made a career out of tackling her own state's party establishment (and usually winning big). Yes, she's said and even done some budget cutting and she's even against earmarks, at least for now.

She has no foreign policy experience, though if one will recall, neither did John Edwards, and no one balked at his being on the Democratic ticket in 2004.   She doesn't have a long political resume (see Edwards) but it's important to recall that some of our most experienced politicians ended up being utter disasters as president (see Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon).

I guess it comes back to what that old family friend told me. Gov. Palin may not have been a regular on "Meet the Press." She may not have a decades-long political resume studded with postings overseas or even possess a degree from a tony school.

What connects her with people is her story -- the kind of story that, while the particulars may be different, touches on their broader experience (or they think it does).

And this pulls us toward a fundamental reality about politics: Ideas are great and ideas do matter. But they really are contests about personality. If you don't like someone, no matter how much you may agree with them, you won't vote for them.

Why subject yourself to four years of seeing that annoying bozo on television every night? Better to send him or her back to the sticks while you still can.

It's hardly the best way to choose the leader of the free world. But that's how the system works.

We learn a lot about presidential contenders from their vice presidential picks. In Obama, we learned that he had weaknesses he knew had to be fixed. But in Joe Biden, he picked ... wait, he picked Joe Biden? Heck, he's been in office since the Beatles broke up, hasn't he?

In McCain, we learned that he can still surprise. But even more, he showed us that he understands that biography is essential, and likability trumps hope almost every time. At least until the debate.

Thad Williamson

My mother told me if you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all.

Well, I'm about to break momma's advice.

But before turning to Sarah Palin and John McCain, let's review a little Plato. Doing so sheds light both on what is disturbing about McCain's choice of Palin and how far American conservatism has strayed from its best principles.

Plato, in some ways the greatest of all conservative thinkers, was a stern critic of democracy and democratic culture. He thought that democracy was far too permissive and that it would inevitably be ruled not by the wise or the public-spirited but by the ambitious and those who knew how to work a crowd and manipulate the masses.  

The end result of pure democracy, he argued, would be class war, mob rule and finally tyranny.

That critique of democracy is, ironically, foundational to the constitution of the United States. The founders of this country deliberately established the U.S. as a republic in hopes of mitigating or preventing what they saw as the dangers of excess popular rule.

James Madison thought it would be possible to design institutions in such a way as to create a happy overlap between the ambitions of politicians and the public interest. The device of representation would ensure that the wisest, most far-sighted individuals had a greater share in the workings of government than the common man.

Institutions requiring representatives to work with one another and other branches of government would force the ambitious to pursue the public interest if they wished to succeed politically.

The idea that limitations on democracy are needed and welcome is a quintessential conservative idea. It's an idea that commands respect because it captures some obvious truths about the workings of any large-scale government: poorly designed democracy in which the incompetent, the self-serving, and the pandering regularly garner key positions of power can be an ineffectual train wreck.

And it's an idea that is worth taking seriously because it represents a good faith effort to think through how institutional design combined with the right kind of leadership can advance the public interest.

Unfortunately, it's also an idea that the McCain campaign and much of the modern American conservative movement has completely abandoned.

Forget high-minded talk about statesmanship, leadership, prudence, good judgment, wisdom, a world view shaped by broad experience and all the other classic conservative virtues that "serious people" value and that young, foolish liberals supposedly don't understand.

Nominating Sarah Palin to potentially become President of the United States means that the GOP is perfectly prepared to make it Amateur Hour in the White House.

Indeed, no one is even pretending that Palin has well-thought out views about the vast range of world and domestic problems the next president must confront. The McCain campaign has been hiding her from the media in hopes of forestalling any more embarrassing "don't know the Bush doctrine" or "Fannie Mae was funded by taxpayers" moments.  

It does not bode well for the future accountability of a McCain-Palin White House that the vice-presidential (and for that matter the presidential) candidate cannot handle being asked unscripted questions by the media and other members of the public.

From what we've been able to see of Palin so far, however, two outstanding features have emerged.

First, Palin is willing to just make things up to suit her campaign narrative: the plane placed on Ebay, the "bridge to nowhere" opposition, the claim that Barack Obama plans to raise taxes on most Americans and has no significant legislation, the representation of herself as opposed to earmarks and as a fiscal conservative -- all absolutely wrong, and all repeated even after being exposed by multiple media outlets.

(The plane didn't sell, Palin was for the bridge before she was against it, she hired lobbyists to seek pork for Wasilla and she left the town of Wasilla burdened with a huge bond debt upon leaving office.)

Second, Palin is a mean-spirited bully. There is such a thing as small town virtue, but there's also such a thing as small-town small-mindedness. Reporting on Palin's spells as a mayor and government reveal a pattern of personal attacks by the candidate against anyone who stood in her way .

During her convention speech, she launched an ignorant attack on "community organizers," with the obvious intent of portraying Obama as some sort of shiftless urban rabble-rouse -- never mind that it is community organizers and citizen activists who so often been the motors of social progress throughout our national history.

In fact, Palin herself has been charged with lax attention to her own responsibilities as governor: "Where's Sarah" buttons were created in Juneau protest of the governor's penchant for staying in Wasilla even while the legislature was in session .

Then there's the story of the 2007 meeting in which Palin fiddled with her BlackBerries silently while her staff presented her signature plan for a new oil pipeline to state senate leaders .

One could go on, but a good rule of thumb is that the more you learn about Sarah Palin, the more surreal the idea that she might become president in the near future becomes. That's one reason why some serious conservative -- notably David Brooks and George Will -- have openly broken with McCain.

Conservatives who take the old principles seriously see the choice of Palin as an extraordinary act of civic irresponsibility.

McCain doesn't care about that right now. From his point of view, it's not really important that Palin in fact be a careful, judicious thinker and leader ready to take over the ultimate responsibility on a moment's notice, just as it's not really important to him that his various attacks on Barack Obama be accurate.

This is a ploy to win an election.

Will it work?

It's understandable that Palin carries a surface attraction to a certain segment of voters who want politicians who will validate their identity, who are looking for "someone like me."  

But the meltdown on Wall Street has already taken the air out of the Palin phenomenon. I would not be surprised if by Election Day she becomes more of a liability than an asset to McCain.

Obama and Biden don't need to get caught up in Palin-bashing (though I'm here to tell you that Palin's choice has motivated the left just as much as it has motivated the right).

Their job is to expose the fact that McCain and Palin stand for a set of policies that have literally bankrupted this country and caused serious damage to the middle and working class.

A campaign that keeps the focus on the country's true problems, that explains how conservative ideology got us into the messes on Wall Street and in Iraq and that explains why Palin and McCain represent more of the same still has an excellent chance to win -- and also, perhaps, prove Plato wrong.