Going Rogue - an American Life by Sarah Palin

While reading 'Going Rogue' by Sarah Palin, I was struck with the feeling more than once that went like this: "I've met this woman before." That's not to be meant literally, of course, I have not been anywhere near Alaska.

But the early chapters, the ones about Sarah Palin's early life that are not being talked about in the mainstream media, bespeaks of the growth of a woman most people will recognized. You probably went to High School or College with someone much like Sarah Palin. Someone like Sarah Palin lives on your block, might even carpool the neighborhood kids to baseball practice (yeah, I know she's a hockey mom, but baseball and football are played in Texas.) You might even have worked in the same office or other business with her.

In other words, Sarah Palin is us and we are Sarah Palin. There lays her appeal, something which the mainstream media will never understand.

One way to understand Sarah Palin is to understand Alaska, which even today is something of a frontier, but was even more so in the 1960s and 1970s. Alaska is isolated, to some extent, from the rest of the country, and is a place where physical conditions are often very harsh. Alaska breeds people who value self reliance and are suspicious of nanny state government. All of America was once like that.

There is one part of the book that illustrates how Earth's final frontier might cause a greater appreciation for another frontier entirely. As I stated in my blog, Curmudgeons Corner.

"'My first clear memory of school was when our kindergarten teacher wheeled a black and white television into the classroom so we could watch American astronauts land on the Moon. The lunar landing had happened on July, 1969, before school started, but even watching taped images of an American walking on the Moon stirred in me an overwhelming pride in our country--that we could achieve something so magnificent.'

"To be sure, even Barack Obama, the most anti space President in a while, is compelled to give us fond memories of the Moon landing. But Palin also relates how exploration of Alaska was crucial in uncovering the resources, such as gold and oil, which made that place so rich in the decades after it was called "Seward's Folly." It may be reading too much, but it would seem possible that a President Palin might understand more than most how the exploration of space can discover resources of worth in this century.

"It also seems to me that Sarah Palin might have an understanding about what it would be like to live on a space settlement. Staples that we in the lower 48 take for granted at the super market can only be had in Alaska in two ways, either transported at great cost, or grown, raised, or hunted by ones self. Apparently Alaskans grow things like lettuce and carrots in heated green houses as well as raise their own chickens. Moose and caribou are their red meat.

"There won't be a lot of hunting on the Moon or Mars, but one suspects a lot of agriculture in the way Sarah Palin describes, undertaken even by town dwellers, would take place on future space settlements."

The great paradox, though, is that Sarah Palin is not only ordinary, but also exceptional. Her journey on the modern version of the cursus honorum from city council member, to Mayor of Wassila, to oil regulator, to Governor, to Vice Presidential candidate seems natural when one notes that Sarah Palin has two things that are necessary in a successful politician. She has the drive to try to make a place better for her being in it. She has the ability to make deals, knock heads together, and do what it takes to make things happen.

It should be noted that as Governor, Sarah Palin accomplished three major pieces of legislation. They were an ethics reform bill, a reform of oil taxes, and the start of a huge, multi-billion dollar natural gas pipeline. Sarah Palin also left the State of Alaska solvent, which better than can be said for governors of some other states; California and New York come to mind.

And yet Sarah Palin is considered "a joke" by the inside the beltway, East Coast literati. It goes beyond the usual slam by the left against conservatives as being too dim to be properly liberal. It is also irrational. No one reading Going Rouge could honestly consider Sarah Palin stupid or even uneducated. One also might make the observation that Sarah Palin, the daughter of a science teacher, likely knows what the temperature of the Earth's core is, unlike the man often put forward as the paragon of intelligence and scientific knowledge, Al Gore.

A lot of the animus toward Sarah Palin seems to be cultural. People like Sarah Palin did not go to an Ivy League school or socialize with the proper sort of people. They eat at places like Red Lobster and the Salt Grass Steakhouse and not at a trendy five star restaurant where they serve continental elf food on porcelain platters. They drink beer instead of Chardonnay. Worse of all, they go to Church and actually take that God thing seriously. Barack Obama may be a disaster as President, but at least he went to Harvard, eats Kobe beef and arugula salad, and probably knows how to choose a good vintage for a formal dinner.

The animus can be seen coming from certain portions of the right as well as the left. David Brooks, the token conservative at the New York Times, has not been the only righty pundit to drip disdain at Sarah Palin.

The irritation of some people in the 2008 McCain Campaign is a little more understandable. The McCain Campaign was incompetently run and while the economic crisis didn't help, the McCain campaign staff pretty much ensured the election of Barack Obama. Sarah Palin, who was hand-picked by John McCain to be his running mate, was the only person to provide a glimmer of energy and hope to the campaign. Naturally the people who mishandled the McCain Campaign had to shift the blame and Sarah Palin was available.

There is another thread running through punditry that is somewhat mind boggling. It goes something like this, "I like Sarah. She is certainly a force to be reckoned with. But she will never be President."

That kind of confident prediction is somewhat puzzling. Sarah Palin does not have any alarming (to most people) opinions. The policy suggestions, more like principles at this stage, at the end of Going Rogue are for the most part standard, conservative fare; low taxes, small government, hammer the terrorists, with a little added spice of reforming the mess in Washington. Ronald Reagan, of blessed memory, would have been happy to run on that kind of platform, were he alive in 2012.

And if not Sarah Palin, whom? There are a lot of fine Republican candidates in waiting, but next to the blazing sun that is Sarah Palin, they are but dim candles. Can one imagine Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, or Mike Huckabee filling up a football stadium with fifty thousand delirious fans chanting their names? Fine fellows that they are, one thinks not.

Even the one real knock against Sarah Palin, that she polls badly, is beginning to change. As Barack Obama's poll numbers have declined, Sarah Palin's have risen steadily. Very soon they pass somewhere in the 40s. According to some polls, they already have.

It may be too soon, about two years before the 2012 Campaign begins in earnest, to commit to a candidate. But there is nothing in 'Going Rogue' that would suggest that Sarah Palin could not run and win. Indeed, one gets the warm feeling that the country would be in good hands if it was led by a hockey mom from Wasilla, Alaska, a woman for whom common sense is all.

Source: Going Rogue - An American Life by Sarah Palin, HarperCollins, 2009

Sarah Palin Post, Mark R. Whittington, Curmudgeons Corner, November 19th, 2009