It is official now. With Peggy Noonan’s dismissal of Sarah Palin the entrenched conservative elites have built their little bulwark against any Obama landslide. This is not standing against the vulgar as Noonan, David Brooks, David Frum, Chris Buckley, and Bill Kristol imagine it to be. Instead it is editorializing with one eye on your future marketability and influence.
When your chief qualification is the unshakable belief that you are smarter than everyone else, backing a losing candidate is somewhat awkward. Hence the 11th hour move to distance themselves from John McCain and especially Palin, who represents a kind of unwashed populism that values an ITT Tech skillset as much as — maybe more than — an Ivy League classring. Very scary.
Still, should McCain-Palin prevail, all will be forgiven and the recently touted negatives spun by elites as an aspect the campaign had to “overcome.” An Obama Administration however will trigger rounds of self-congratulatory I-told-you-sos as the battle for the soul of the GOP is engaged with full force.
The primary aim will be to discredit Palin going forward precisely because her appeal does not turn on handlers or op-ed writers or staff or blood relations or think tanks. Hers is a cut-out-the-middleman approach to politics and the middlemen — and women — are scared. And their fear has caused them to jump too soon.
The best analogy might come from the Red Sox-Rays game last night, sports being a foreign language to the effete likes of Kristol, Frum, Brooks et al. Like the Sox fans who bailed from Fenway with their team down 7-0 and missed a stirring comeback, these supposed conservative elites reveal themselves not as core supporters of any particular cause, but as mere opportunists and bandwagoneers along for a happy joyride. When things go south, they head for the hills. Fast. And blast the players and coaches all along the way.
Given this elitist reaction, 2008 has already proven to be a watershed election. Just as the financial meltdown has unmasked hollow and fraudulent practices among Wall Street traders certain they were so much smarter than everyone else, a self-appointed cadre of professional jaw-flappers has revealed itself to be utterly superfluous to modern American politics.
