SARAH’S PLATFORM: SAVE OVER HALF A MILLION

Welcome to the apex of the self-esteem movement in American education: Sarah Palin, hockey mom and lipstick user. Sarah the on and off attendee at Matanuska-Susitana college is equal to anyone. Coming from the Republican Party and its media aparatchniks like Bill O’Reilly, who has been mocking the self-esteem movement in child rearing for years, the glorification of Sarah is even more puzzling.

The not so coded message that the bantamweight Sarah put on display at her convention/homecoming pageant was forget achievement, forget excellence, forget smarts -- those are for Democrats. According to Rudi, who earlier set the theme, those traits are for “cosmopolitans.” In the defiant, angry time zone enabled world of tundra melting Alaska, field dressing a moose equals Harvard Law Review. Let’s be real. If your plane crashed on a caving glacier, could you eat Dred Scott? What I saw on display in the runner-up beauty queen’s speech was the cry of the also-ran against the truly accomplished. The plea of the average to be equal to the intellectually privileged. The small town hick hitting back at the city slicker.

How on earth did this find itself into the GOP platform? One would have to go back to the 1968 Democratic presidential campaign of George Wallace and his Southern strategy to find a manifesto that was so out and out angry at the elitists and the media. By selecting Palin and setting her up to fight against coastal, urban, scientific, and knowledge-based voters (some 80% of the electorate), the GOP has updated the know-nothing voter. And, as they did in the election of 1860, they want this vote incorporated and counted in their electoral column. Chris Mooney should update his book The Republican War on Science to The Republican War on Accomplishment.
Separated at Birth?



In her Barbie-goes-to-a-party hair do, and her well-orchestrated stagecraft, Sarah seemed to be on American Idol, another example of the anyone can do it mania. I half expected to see her start singing “On Broadway”.

Perhaps, there is an economic message in her candidacy, after all. With times tough from eight years of fiscal misrule, families need to conserve money. As we all know, after housing (which is in the toilet), college education is a family’s biggest expense. Sarah’s message from the convention floor, what her mockery of Obama implied, was simply: Forget the Ivy League. Who needs Columbia and Harvard? Pish. Only elitists and media darlings head the Law Review. The same applies to Hillary and Wellesley. Matanuska-Susitna College and North Idaho College are just as good. Without getting into the details, a rough calculation shows that a family could save $360,000 per child by having their kids get an undergrad degree at Matanuska vs. Columbia or Wellesley, and an additional $180,000 by not going to Harvard Law or Yale Law. Multiply that by Sarah’s 5 children and you’re talking real money.

At least it’s a possible explanation for the Governor’s rant against accomplishment and achievement. The others are too dark to contemplate.