Patriot Update - A Free Press for the Conservative Revolution

When it comes to defeating Barack Obama in the next Presidential election, the best man for the job might just be a woman. And that woman might be Sarah Palin. This is the theme of a new book from PatriotDepot titled Palin Nation. My co-author, Archie Jones, and I wrote this book to answer the following question: What will Sarah Palin have to do to win the presidency in 2012? The book proposes six broad strategies and two additional strategies that are more specific.

Sarah Palin is the most interesting candidate to emerge in presidential politics since Ronald Reagan. She is bright, attractive, articulate, experienced, and quintessentially American. No political candidate since Ronald Reagan has been able to generate more excitement at both ends of the political spectrum than Sarah Palin. The left abhors her and the right adores her.

In fact, the reaction of the left to Sarah Palin is so visceral that it borders on hate. It is no exaggeration to say that she is the personification of everything the left considers objectionable about conservatives, America, and life in general. Sarah Palin is the left’s’ worst nightmare: a conservative, Christian, anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-family woman who, in spite of their best efforts to destroy her, remains a viable presidential candidate with broad popular appeal. The left is so frightened of the prospect of this conservative, Christian, moose-hunting soccer mom occupying the Oval Office that their reaction to her can, at times, be absolutely irrational. It is a reaction based more on fear and paranoia than logic or reason.

Emerging onto the national political stage seemingly out of nowhere, Sarah Palin quickly became the target of choice for venomous attacks from the left, the poster child for everything that separates the right from the left in American culture. It’s as if the left needed one individual who could serve as the focal point for everything they view as being wrong with the world. Hate must have an object and, for the left, that object quickly became Sarah Palin.

Of the left’s various constituent groups, feminists seem to have the most vitriolic reaction to Sarah Palin. “The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear. The response of liberal feminists was in this respect particularly telling, and especially unpleasant.”(1)

Noted feminist, Gloria Steinem, had this to say about Sarah Palin: “Having someone who looks like you and behaves like them, who looks like a friend but behaves like an adversary, is worse than having no one.”(2) “…she does not fit the feminist stereotype. She’s just a high-achieving mom who comes from the common people. Consider every major controversial issue in American politics and culture right now and somehow, they touch her personally. Start with the most obvious: abortion.” (3) Essentially, what feminists dislike about Sarah Palin is that she is a woman who rejects their beliefs, disdains their false claims of victimhood, has a traditional family she loves, and, to add insult to injury, has tremendous popular appeal. Feminists harbor a deep-seated phobia that a woman who does not share their left-leaning outlook on life might actually become America’s first female president.

Running a close second behind feminists in their angry paranoia about Sarah Palin are the intellectual elites—the condescending few who believe that only they are equipped to govern the many. Intellectual elites believe that an Ivy-League credential or, at the very least, a degree from one of America’s more prominent liberal universities is a necessary prerequisite to service in high office. A degree from a state college or university is simply not acceptable in their eyes.

Sarah Palin is a bright, articulate, charismatic, well-educated individual who got that way without the help of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, or any other so-called top-tier institution. She earned a baccalaureate degree in journalism with a minor in political science from the University of Idaho. Her athletic background, love of hunting, and folksy charm appeal to grassroots Americans, people the intellectual elite arrogantly look down their noses at. But Sarah Palin knows and appreciates something the intellectual elite refuse to acknowledge: the grassroots Americans they like to sneer at are the people who do America’s work and fight America’s wars. Without Sarah Palin’s grassroots Americans, this country would never have become what President Reagan called the “shining city on the hill”—a beacon of freedom and liberty to the oppressed peoples of the world.

The greatest fear of the intellectual elite is that grassroots Americans will once again be empowered by a president who respects them and shares their traditional American values—the type of thing that happened during the Reagan administration. They are right to be concerned. Just as Jimmy Carter’s domestic and foreign policy blunders set the stage for a Ronald Reagan victory, Barack Obama’s broken-promises and socialist policies are setting the stage for a Sarah Palin victory. Our book explains what she will have to do replicate the Reagan Revolution and ride the conservative tidal wave it will generate into the White House.

NOTES:

1. “The Meaning of Sarah Palin.” Retrieved from https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-meaning-of-sarah-palin-1467 on August 16, 2008.
2. Gloria Steinem. As quoted in “The meaning of Sarah Palin.” Retrieved from https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-meaning-of-sarah-palin-1467 on August 16, 2008.
3. Joe Hilley. Sarah Palin: A New Kind of Leader (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Zondervan: 2008), 12.