Pirate's Cove

Will Rogers once said “We elect people to office that we wouldn’t invite over for dinner.” And H.L. Mencken put forth that “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.” For the most part, people in national politics, and not just the politicians, but the handlers, the media, the policy wonks, etc, are truly not the best of people, and, Sarah Palin learned this the hard way. Ross Douthat opiniones on this subject in in op-ed entitled Palin and Her Enemies

She should have said no.

If Sarah Palin’s political career ended last Friday, 10 tumultuous months after she was introduced as the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee, those five words will be its epitaph.

Had she refused John McCain, Palin would still be a popular female governor in a Republican Party starved for future stars. Her scandals would be the stuff of local politics, her daughter’s pregnancy a minor story in the Lower 48, her son Trig’s parentage a nonissue even for conspiracy theorists. There would still be plenty of time to ease into the national spotlight, to bone up on the issues, and to craft a persona more appealing than the Mrs. Spiro Agnew role the McCain campaign assigned to her.

The last part is what happened when she said yes. Sure, she electrified the base, bringing in crowds as big, if not bigger, than Obama did. She turned the ticket in mccain/PALIN. I maintain that if it was not for her, McCain would have been lucky to get 46 million votes, particularly after blowing it with his “I’m going to suspend my campaign” and than vote for TARP foolishness. Be that as it may, Palin and her family learned just how personally cruel the people in national politics are.

Either way, though, her 10 months on the national stage have been a dispiriting period for American democracy.

Too be honest, what happened to Palin was nothing new. This had been going on since George W. Bush was elected, and certainly before then. But, with the continuing innovation and spread of Internet reporting, and the continuing de-evolution of the national media and the American Left, the disgusting attacks reached beyond a fever pitch. Politics from the Left have more in common with Jihadis Muslims, ie, if you aren’t one of us and toe the line, we’ll kill you, metaphorically speaking.

Ross goes on to describe how Palin is very popular with the Average American. The working Joe. The people who didn’t go to exclusive up-scale schools.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

There-in lies much of the problem with national politics. Most of these folks are those meritocratic’s like Obama. They think they are special, entitled, and above the rest of us. They believe we are there for them. Palin was different. I won’t say she is perfect or completely honest, but, she was a breath of fresh air in what has become a pig sty of national politics.

Will she stick around? Will she run in 2012? Will she work in the background to get Conservatives elected? We’ll find out.  Ross ends with

But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don’t even think about it.

And that is why we end up with people like Reid, Pelosi, McCain, Ensign, and so many other terrible national politicians, who, if we did invite to dinner, we’d hide all the silverware and use paper plates and plastic knives and forks.