With Columnists Like These, Palin’s Campaign’s Bound To Be A Winner

Letter to the International Herald Tribune:

Dear Editors

Are you planning to keep subjecting your readers to substantial daily doses of Democratic anti-Palin smugness until the Presidential Elections on Nov 4? One wonders.

 

Just a few examples. Your celebrity columnist Maureen Dowd has dedicated her last six contributions to one and only one topic (Sarah Palin of course). Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame has joined in by pretending to be a liberal roaming around Alaska (“Moose on the loose in Palin Country“, IHT, Sep 18).

 

Even anti-Obamite David Brooks has opined at length about the Governor of Alaska’s preparedness for High Office (“Experience Matters“, IHT, Sep 16).

 

Apparently, the situation for Gov. Palin does not look pretty. Your columnists have described her as a female version of George W Bush for her “inexperience”, “brashness” and “excessive decisiveness”; as a populist, gun-crazied shooter potentially even of a mother and baby moose; as the gay-hating infantile, seductive former mayor of a town smaller than the local Wal-Mart, with intimidation as her preferred political tool; as an anti-intellectual contemporary “My Fair Lady” character hell-bent on getting rid of her enemies.

 

The list could continue for a long long time.

 

Now, am I the only one to think that all the above amounts to (a) free publicity for Palin; and (b) a very good platform to convince “Middle America” to vote for Palin, if only because she’s obviously such a hate figure in the Establishment?

 

In 2008 there are many things pointing towards a success for Barack Obama. However, the Democrats may still lose the Presidential election, for the trivial reason that one will find it very hard to get votes from people one so obviously disdains and look upon condescendingly.

regards

maurizio morabito

A New Way for Politics

Barack Obama is still an empty shell as far as I am concerned…

Still, David Brooks’ recent IHT article on what could make Obama a better President than Hillary Clinton can indicate a more hopeful way for politics to be conducted:

(a) Do not ratchet up hostilities; restrain them.

(b) Do not lash out at perceived enemies, but stay aloof from them.

(c) Learn from the pessimistic optimism of Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln: detest anger as a motivating force, distrust easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, and believe instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual (a Gandhian concept, actually)

(d) As per Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Political Judgment,” don’t think abstractly. Use powers of close observation.

(e) Step outside one’s own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways.

(f) Sympathize with and grasp the motivations of the rivals.