What Sarah Palin’s supporters get wrong about the “liberal elite”

AP:

But while huge crowds greet her with roars of “Run Sarah Run!” as she tours the country in a bus, many national Republicans look on nervously, worrying the unparalleled enthusiasm she generates among some conservative voters isn’t enough to power a Republican victory over President Barack Obama in 2012.

“People look at her and see themselves: patriotic, religious, family oriented outsiders looked down on by a liberal elite,” said Jim Broussard, a political science professor at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania.

Let’s be clear: Liberals do look down on Sarah Palin. But not because she’s patriotic, religious or family-oriented. (We could use those same words to describe Barack Obama, after all.)  But because she’s manifestly unqualified to be president.

If there’s one thing worse than Sarah Palin’s book…

…it’s a Maureen Dowd column finding out Sarah Palin’s book is all about Maureen Dowd.

Why Sarah Palin isn’t ready to be president

Conor Friederdorf offers his own theory after watching Palin’s interview on Oprah:

Even were she to repeat her likable Oprah performance on The Daily Show, The View, and the History Channel Retrospective on William Jennings Bryan, she’d still suffer from a flaw that America’s national security requires us to acknowledge: an unprecedented lack of foreign policy qualifications.

Well there is that. But she’s got three years until 2012: She can presumably bone up on this stuff and be much better prepared — politically and substantively — if she wants to run for president. But there’s another reason that Sarah Palin isn’t ready to be president: Her narrative — and the basis for a large part of her popularity among part of the Republican base — is almost entirely one of victimology.

The McCain campaign didn’t handle her well. The media is never fair to her. Katie Couric was rude. David Letterman makes mean jokes. The most prominent features of Sarah Palin’s story — as told by Sarah Palin — is how everybody is mean to her.

She might be a little bit right. It also doesn’t matter. Because who — aside from Palin’s fellow conservatives a;sp laboring under a persecution complex — really wants to see a whiner and a victim as the commander-in-chief? The first woman president is, probably unfairly, going to have to seem to have twice the balls of a man to get elected. Hillary Clinton came awfully close by being as tough as every other candidate out there, revealing human emotions just often enough to give her personality more than one or two (public) dimensions. If Sarah Palin wants to be president, she’ll try to drop this narrative pretty quickly. Nobody likes a whiner.

Sarah Palin on the cover of Newsweek

I know that Sarah Palin actually posed for this photo. But she didn’t do it to appear on the cover of Newsweek — she did it for a Runner’s World article. And while you can argue the pose was … unwise for a politician, there’s still something icky about using it, like Newsweek does, in an apparent attempt to demean Palin.

I’m not a Palin fan. Probably will never be. But I’m trying to imagine a world in which Newsweek uses the famous Obama crashing through the waves photo as a cover image for a story about his political prospects — headline: “The President Has No Clothes!” — and I’m coming up short.

Is Newsweek’s cover sexist? Well, Palin did pose for the photo. But context matters. And in this context, it’s not not sexist. Feminism means something only when we apply it to our opponents as vigorously as we apply it to our friends.