Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist, journalist, and author George F. Will is the kind if Conservative even Liberals have learned to like and respect.
I don’t say that because he sometimes goes against the traditional Conservative grain, such as with his reservations and criticism over the Bush administration Iraq war policies and, more recently, with his proposal for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan and for fighting the war from “offshore.” (Will has also been a critic of “warrantless surveillance” and other Bush war on terror issues)
And I say this in spite of his views on several social issues and of some questionable political campaign practices many years ago.
There is one subject, however, on which both Republicans and Democrats should thank Will for. It is the way in which Will addresses the “Sarah Palin issue” today.
While he was a harsh critic of Sarah Palin—and of her patron, John McCain—during the 2008 elections, Will now paints a frank picture of Sarah Palin’s populism vis-à-vis a Palin 2012 presidential candidacy. A picture that, if closely examined by Republicans, should help them avoid a disaster in 2012. But also a picture that gives Democrats some hope for 2012—provided that Republicans do not pay attention to George F. Will.
In his Washington Post column, “Sarah Palin and the mutual loathing society,” after comparing John McCain’s “impulsive” decision to select Sarah Palin as his running mate to Barry Goldwater’s disastrous pick of Bill Miller in 1964, George Will warns Republicans:
Yet Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska’s governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states.
Will then mentions the latest Post-ABC News poll which shows that “71 percent of Americans — including 52 percent of Republicans — think she is not qualified to be president.”
And, to Palin’s credit:
This is not her fault. She is what she is, and what she is merits no disdain. She is feisty and public-spirited, and millions of people vibrate like tuning forks to her rhetoric. When she was suddenly forced to take a walk on the highest wire in America’s political circus, she showed grit.
She also showed that grit is no substitute for seasoning. She has been subjected to such irrational vituperation — loathing largely born of snobbery — that she can be forgiven for seeking the balm of adulation from friendly audiences.
As to the movement—“the reaction”—that Palin fuels and represents:
That reaction is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. Besides, full-throated populism has not won a national election in 178 years, since Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832.
Will then proceeds to prove his point with names such as William Jennings Bryan, Ross Perot, George Wallace and the accidental exception, Jimmy Carter.
After pointing out that populism, with its “constant ingredient” of resentment, “always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution,” Will concludes:
Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. But today’s saturation journalism, mesmerized by presidential politics and ravenous for material, requires a steady stream of political novelties. In that role, Palin is united with the media in a relationship of mutual loathing. This is not her fault. But neither is it her validation.
