There are a number of links on Instapundit today about a political run by Sarah Palin. Daily Pundit has a list of suggestions to get her campaign ready. Mark Steyn laments the inability of ordinary people from ordinary states to be accepted rather than scorned among the DC elite. Cynthia Yockey offers advice on how to get David Letterman fired.
Sarah Palin got a raw deal, both from the McCain campaign and the press who savagely attacked her for her ordinariness. Despite that, and Palin's national stage newbie foibles, she continues to click with a large number of conservative voters. Palin, to many, feels like one of us. Many people could relate to her simply because she was more like one of us than more like one of them. She had that tough-broad freshness that many of us know among our circle of friends.
Palin is the real deal. She is the dedicated mother and wife who responded to the call to do something in Alaska. And do something she has done, having considerable support among the Alaskans she represents.
Palin is the every man we know from Frank Capra films. She tugged at our emotions in the same way that Mr. Smith did when he went to Washington.
Americans have always been sympathetic to the every man and the romantic idea that it is one of us who will slay the dragons and demons in Washington to set things to rights.
Not to put too narrow a slant on it, but all of that is a fantasy, but more importantly, it is wrong headed. Conservatives are supposed to be the ones that set idle fantasies aside, dealing with the real world, with logical heads and tested facts. We're not the ones who think that the windmills of our minds, or in our gardens, will end the Left's fabricated-fantasy of global warming. Fantasy and utopia are supposed to be the realm of the Left, not the Right, but with Sarah, we forget ourselves.
One of us is not fit to be the President of the United States, and, I believe, in our heads and not not our hearts, we know the truth of that. What we may want idealistically, and what we know to be what's best, are not always in sync.
This has only been made worse by the egregious attacks against Palin, the unwarranted attacks against her family and her way of life. She wasn't given a fair deal and there is something about the American psyche that wants justice for Sarah and all the Ordinary Joes who were symbolically attacked when Sarah was. That justice, for many, is to back her unquestionably for a run at the White House.
The Washington Elite haven't done too well on Main Street. The Left and the Right have coddled us, taxed us, and are oozing with corruptible ideologies and behavior. It is not surprising then that many believe, in addition to the above, that it's time to throw the bastards out, and replace them with someone just like us. Qualifications, background, political resume, fitness for office are to be dumped along with the bath water. A Madame LaForge political philosophy does not bode well for anyone, especially in an America faced with enemies on all sides, and while we are engaged in a war against terrorism.
Sarah Palin isn't Ronald Reagan. She isn't Harry Truman either. She does share the every man qualities of those men, but this is another time, and time has changed things.
Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman seemed to appear out of nowhere, just like overnight success celebrities. Except, like overnight celebrities, we then notice that they had small parts in small and big films, and worked for a decade or more, paying their dues and working their craft to get to that success point. They weren't overnight successes. It was overnight that we recognized them, but they were always there.
Ronald Reagan was head of a large union (the Screen Actors Guide) before he ran for Governor in California. He'd always been political and for more than two decades bored his actor celebrity friends and acquaintances with talk of little else. He then went on to run one of the largest states in union, with an economy equal to the 5th largest country in the world. When he entered the governor's mansion (if you could call it that) he inherited a huge debt, a state in near financial collapse, and with a corrupt and embittered political machine. When he left office, two terms later, California had a budget surplus, all the politically corrupt had been chased away, and trust in the government had been restored.
Harry Truman was no flash in the pan either. From his offical biography:
From 1905 to 1911, Truman served in the Missouri National Guard. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he helped organize the 2nd Regiment of Missouri Field Artillery, which was quickly called into Federal service as the 129th Field Artillery and sent to France. Truman was promoted to Captain and given command of the regiment's Battery D. He and his unit saw action in the Vosges, Saint Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne campaigns. Truman joined the reserves after the war, rising eventually to the rank of colonel. He sought to return to active duty at the outbreak of World War II, but Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall declined his offer to serve.
Truman was elected in 1922, to be one of three judges of the Jackson County Court. Judge Truman whose duties were in fact administrative rather than judicial, built a reputation for honesty and efficiency in the management of county affairs. He was defeated for reelection in 1924, but won election as presiding judge in the Jackson County Court in 1926. He won reelection in 1930.
In 1934, Truman was elected to the United States Senate. He had significant roles in the passage into law of the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 and the Transportation Act of 1940. After being reelected in 1940, Truman gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. This committee, which came to be called the Truman Committee, sought with considerable success to ensure that defense contractors delivered to the nation quality goods at fair prices.
In July 1944, Truman was nominated to run for Vice President with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On January 20, 1945, he took the vice-presidential oath, and after President Roosevelt's unexpected death only eighty-two days later on April 12, 1945, he was sworn in as the nations' thirty-third President.
In summary, he spent 9 years in the military rising to the rank of Colonel. He spent 2 years in Jackson county court. He spent 10 years in the Senate before being tapped to run for Vice President in 1944. All in all, a 21 year career of military and public service before he served for 82 days as Vice President, before becoming the President of the United States, as a war president.
Truman didn't have a college degree (he spent two years in law school), but he did have a battlefield education:
Captain Harry S. Truman was 34 years old when he was put in charge of Battery D, 129th Field Infantry, a rowdy band of undisciplined young soldiers. Truman's mission was to transform the group into a combat-ready unit capable of taking on the German army. The odds were not in Harry's favor. Battery D had a reputation for being tough on commanders, and up to that point Truman had experienced considerable failure in his life.
In 1917, when Truman joined the Second Missouri Field Artillery Regiment to fight in World War I, his luck began to change. Truman adapted well to the discipline of military life. He trained at Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma, where he organized a profitable camp commissary with a fellow soldier named Eddie Jacobson. In 1918, Truman received a captain's commission and shipped out to France.
On July 5, Truman took command of Battery D. The rowdy Kansas City Irishmen of the battery specialized in wearing out commanding officers. Many predicted the bespectacled captain would crumble quickly.
On August 29, 1918, Battery D fired 500 rounds of artillery at a German position. When the Germans returned fire, some of Truman's men panicked and ran. "My greatest satisfaction is that my legs didn't succeed in carrying me away, although they were very anxious to do it," Harry wrote Bess later. Cursing and yelling, Truman drove his men back to their positions, and successfully repositioned two of his four guns. For the remainder of the war, Truman led Battery D across the French countryside, hammering German positions and never losing a man. On the battlefields of Europe, he experienced the success that had long eluded him.
Truman returned from the war as a hero.
While we could apply the label "hero" generically to all men who serve their country, Harry Truman was a real war hero. He wasn't one of us. He was forged on the field of battle to be the great, yet humble, man that he was.
These men spent at least 20 years in dedicated public service, on the battlefield and on the national stage, long before they ever considered a run for the presidency, or any public office. When the time came, there was no doubt about their fitness for office.
Now compare the above with Sarah Palin. Can she lead men? It has nothing to do with her being a woman. Maybe she can, but we don't know that, and we must know that. She certainly hasn't made us proud in her public interviews. We might blame the press for trickery, but a tested and experienced individual wouldn't have made those same mistakes.
Great statesmen aren't born. They are developed through education and experience. They're very different from one of us, exactly because they're able to differentiate themselves from us by their superior leadership abilities, their fortitude, their educations, and their gifts. Both Truman and Reagan were gifted men, with superior intellects, and also gifted with the common touch. We should not confuse that ability to relate to us with that common touch with them being common.
"Laws will be wisely formed and honestly administered in proportion as those who form and administer them are wise and honest; whence it becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that those persons whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens; and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance. But the indigence of the greater number disabling them from so educating at their own expense those of their children whom nature has fitly formed and disposed to become useful instruments for the public, it is better that such should be sought for and educated at the common expense of all, than that the happiness of all should be confined to the weak or wicked."
- Thomas Jefferson, 1779
Great Statesmen appear from a culled herd, and we need to get over the fantasy that one of us is just like one of them, capable of being seated as President of the United States. The simple fact is that we are not qualified, and we need to face that, quickly, if we are to allow a real hero, a forged statesmen, to appear from the crowd and lead us to victory in 2012.
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