Advice to Sarah Palin

[fpb]

Ever since Sarah Palin announced her resignation as Governor of Alaska, a new literary genre has arisen: the "Advice to Sarah Palin". American Thinker alone sprouted at least half a dozen in a few days, and no doubt other conservative magazines are equally fertile with the things. (Similar items from left-wing publications do not count; most of them will in effect belong to established literary genres, such as "flyting," "invective," and "satire.")

So far, every one of those I have seen has given Mrs.Palin the same kind of suggestion: move to the national stage, promote conservative policies, play up her experience in energy matters, rally the troops and cultivate specifically conservative legislative programs. This is easy advice to give, since Mrs.Palin is already doing most of it with great success (whe is reputed to be more successful at raising and enthusing crowds than any Republican). The adviser to a powerful person who advises that person to do exactly what that person is already doing certainly runs no risks.

I, on the other hand, intend to. Having read her op-ed for the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/13/AR2009071302852.html), my advice to her is: if you want to fulfil your potential - which is presidential - you have to do all the things that you have not so far had to do. This article tells us why.

To begin with, it is not an article: it is the text for a speech. This is not in itself an important fault - plenty of politicians have reached high office without being able to write or speak well - but it is symptomatic of her limited experience. Mrs.Palin is a self-taught politician. So far, she has learned to speak in public. Her career has taught her how to motivate, involve and enthuse crowds. Evidently, however - every line of her op-ed informs us - she has not yet learned how to address individual persons in the privacy of their living rooms. And while the fact that this is evidently not ghosted is a compliment to her authenticity (or perhaps she has had enough of ghosts and advisers in the McCain campaign), the unsuitability of her style makes her a target for satire.

Much more serious, however, is that she does not even seem to understand that not everyone will agree with her. She speaks of "cheap and abundant energy" as if that were an obvious and unmixed good; to a generation that has grown up with the notion of pollution as an evil, with the vision of smoke-belching chimneys and particulates from car engines as a daily horror, with the memories of killer smogs in London before the Clean Air Act and of East European industrial towns covered in soot from Communist experiments in "cheap and abundant energy". She has grown up in the country in one of the most underpopulated states of the USA; she never had the experience of being told - as I was when I was ten - that the white marble of our beloved and ancient Cathedral, the symbol of the city of Milan, was being not just blackened but literally devoured by the acidic pollution from millions of cars that drove around it every day. She is, therefore, not just out of sympathy with much of her fellow countrymen and the rest of the advanced world - that would be inevitable in a party politician - but, more importantly, quite unconsciuos that people disagree with her. And this may be a part of the extraordinary hatred that she draws - although most of it, I am sure, is due to things that she neither could nor should change.

Let us not mince words. When John McCain picked her as running mate, he discovered a star. Even the rage with which she is attacked by the majority party only goes to show that she is a personality who cannot possibly be ignored. She stands effortlessly tall among a number of facile, dubious or controversial pint-sized figures in her party, and casts a shadow that reaches from Alaska across all 50 states. And therefore to compare her with the incumbent is neither excessive nor wishful. There is every chance that, in a few years, she will be running against him - or against a Democrat who will carry his inheritance. And to anyone who read my last paragraph, the obvious thought will have been: "That is not how Obama does things." The current President has left everywhere an impression of balance and openness, not because his views are necessarily balanced - on several matters, in fact, he is widely out of sympathy even with the bulk of his own party - but because he is always able to give a sensible and not overly biased account of opposing views. One has the impression that even where he disagrees with someone, he at least understands what he disagrees with.

This is the one, vast, gaping void in Sarah Palin's political education. And without it, without being able to speak even to the people who hate her, she will not reach her full potential. She must not listen to the people who tell her that, as conservatives are of course naturally right, all she has to do is to follow her and their current path; she must become able to understand the concerns and needs of others - even if she rejects them.

Comments

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Excellent advise in the abstract -- but how is a 45 year old person who has not yet learned to understand or respect other points of view supposed to learn that skill or attitude, in 4 or 8 years, and convince people she has genuinely done so? (And, perhaps, do so without alienating her own base.)

It is indeed a key understanding, all too rare on both left and right but not, I think, easily chosen or acquired. One needs the right experiences, perhaps, or at least the right reading, or the right temperament, to even see this as desirable.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You evidently understood nothing of what I said. Or else you ignored it. I said that Palin had no experience of the way most people who live in big cities have thought and felt for decades. I said, that is, that she had a lack of experience. You said that she was incapable of understanding. That is, you said she was stupid with the particular kind of stupidity known as narrow-mindedness. Now I would never have written this post if I had thought so. You are welcome to your opinions so long as you do not try to read yours in mine.