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It's Her Party: The Brilliance of Sarah Palin

"How's that hopey-changey stuff workin' out for ya?" Sarah Palin asked the anti-élitist Tea Party élites — those who could pay $549 for a ticket — gathered in suffocating self-righteousness at the Opryland Hotel on the first weekend of February. It was classic Palin, a brilliant line, brilliantly delivered: she does folksy far better than George W. Bush or any of the other Republican focus-group populists ever did. It was the signature line of her speech, which rocked the joint — and then, slowly, began to rock the national political community. The speech was inspired drivel, a series of distortions and oversimplifications, totally bereft of nourishing policy proposals — the sort of thing calculated, carefully calculated, to drive lamestream media types like me frothing to their keyboards. Palin is a big fat target, eminently available for derision. But I will not deride. Because brilliance must be respected, especially when it involves marketing in an era when image almost always passes for substance. (See the top 10 unfortunate political one-liners.)

I have a theory about Bill Clinton: his philandering worked in his favor politically, especially with a demographic chunk that usually shies away from liberalism: American working guys. It made him more accessible. Here was a fellow who got it on with faded lounge singers and then celebrated with a Double Quarter Pounder and fries at the local McDonald's. If that ain't pickup-truck nirvana, what is? Democrats haven't produced many such men of the people; they produce law-professor presidents, a theme Palin launched in Nashville that we will be hearing a lot more frequently in the future.

Palin hits the same mystic chords as Clinton. A woman who goes to war against the 19-year-old boy who knocked up her daughter and then posed for Playgirl is far more comprehensible to most Americans than deficit spending is. In her Fox interview with Chris Wallace the day after her Nashville speech, Palin said she'd been focusing more on "current events" since she quit as governor of Alaska. She quickly corrected herself and said "national issues," but she probably shouldn't have: current events is American for "policy." It is the high school term of art for the hour each week when students are forced to study the state of the world. Palin's great strength is that the vernacular, rather than focus-group language, is her default position. At the end of the interview, Wallace asked what role she wanted to play in the country's future. "Well, first and foremost, I want to be a good mom," she replied. And then, in closing, Wallace asked, "Can I get a 'You betcha' out of you?"

Are you kidding me? "Oh, you betcha," she said — and one might even argue that you betcha is American for "Yes, we can." At least, in a certain sort of America: the land of simple truths, where nothing Barack Obama does makes sense. I mean, why bail out the big banks when they're the ones that caused all the troubles in the first place? And why spend more money when you're already running a deficit? That's not what Americans do: they sit — inevitably — around the kitchen table and tighten their belts. And what's all this about global warming? The White House is up to its Truman Balcony in snow. And why not just whack the Iranians before they get the bomb? These questions were the essence of Palin's Nashville speech and Fox interview. They are the essence of the tea party movement.

I suppose we need a paragraph here about why all this simplicity is extremely dangerous. Most economists agree that if it hadn't been for the bank bailouts and the Obama stimulus package, the country would have slid into a deep recession that might have prevented a lot of Tea Partyers from buying their $549 tickets to ride. Then again, any sentence that begins with "Most economists" is a license to snore in tea party nation. And Palin will, quite often, veer from simplicity to duplicity. She was the inventor of the mythic, noxious "death panels." In Nashville, she retailed nonsense about stimulus funds going to nonexistent districts. (A spokesman for Vice President Joe Biden, who is monitoring the stimulus package, told me that all funds went to actual places — but recipients occasionally didn't write down their correct congressional districts.) And her support for bombing Iran was, no doubt, the work of her new Washington-insider neoconservative policy advisers, Randy Scheunemann and Michael Goldfarb, who had John McCain singing from the same warmongering songbook in 2008.

So how's that hopey-changey stuff working out for you? The Obama presidency certainly hasn't ushered in an era of comity and prosperity. In the end, though, Palin is offering the opposite of hope and change: despair and stasis. The despair is histrionic and purposefully distorted; the stasis proved disastrous during the Bush Administration. But is Sarah Palin the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination and therefore someone to be taken absolutely seriously? You betcha.

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