Examining Just Why, Exactly, Sarah Palin is Electrifying

From the years 1932 until roughly 1964, citizens of the U.S.A. felt positive about their Federal government, and for the most part they invested trust in their elected leaders. But this was only a brief anomaly in the long history of our country, and it ended with Watergate and the Vietnam War before it could take hold and flourish. For most of our national history, the opposite sentiment toward Washington has prevailed and from the earliest years of our Republic, Americans historically viewed their government with suspicion, and even outright contempt. So I guess you could say that the Tea Party movement is really a throwback to another time. What’s new is the emergence of Sarah Palin.

Given this high percentage “anti-government” sentiment, it’s surprising that Sarah Palin hasn’t gained more traction with her message of suspicion and distrust of Washington. Recent polls put her disapproval rating at 55%, with fully 71% of Americans saying that she is unqualified to be the next President. Perhaps the reason for this can be found in the recent Tea Party convention in Nashville.

Never, in my recent memory, has so much adulation and applause been given to such simple utterances about simple-minded solutions to galactically unsolvable problems. Evidently, to be in lockstep with the Tea Party, one needs to believe that a speaker is “electrifying” and “galvanizing” when they observe that the United States Government spends too much, by borrowing too much, in order to deliver too little in the way of problem solutions. Knowing this, Sarah Palin is able to rally her troops by overstating the obvious about Washington. Okay, now we know that the Tea Party “gets it” — the Federal Government is inefficient, and generally doesn’t work as well as it did in the past. The thing is, mainstream Democrats and Republicans “get it” too. The only difference is, Republicans and Dems don’t feel that such self-evident truths are “electrifying.”

My politics are, admittedly, schizophrenic. My objection to Bill Clinton molded me into a rabid Conservative, then eight years of George W. Bush transformed me into a flaming Liberal. And after a year of Barack Obama, I’m now a dejected cynic who believes that America is basically ungovernable, and that even an outwardly decent and intellectual person in the Presidency can have very little positive effect on the problems that face the country today. Sarah Palin, we are told by the Tea Party members, should be elected as our next Chief Executive because she shares a certain folksy commonality with the average person. To this I reply, “Not so fast.” My advice is to go out into the street and talk to a lot of common, average Americans, and then ask yourself if you want your grandchildren to inherit a world that is shaped by the common, average American.

For the record, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and all the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were considered to be aristocratic at that time, and there wasn’t a single man among them who would have qualified today as a common average American. I suspect that none of these founding fathers of our country would fare very well in today’s modern Tea Party, and as the Tea Party goes, so goes Sarah Palin.

Recession Or Depression?

Call it what you will, a depression or a recession, because the economic mess almost defies description. The root cause, however, isn’t very complicated in my opinion. The whole economic meltdown was preordained when our management culture drifted away from the reality of long term consequences, and embraced the Holy Grail of quick results. In his lectures, Stephen Covey uses an analogy that relates to farming, pointing out that farmers can’t use the postponement technique of “cramming”— waiting until late summer to plant their crops and still expecting the harvest to be on time. But there’s another farming analogy. You can’t plant on time, in early spring, and expect to harvest a full crop in May because you’re too eager and impatient to wait until late fall. This latter analogy is beyond the comprehension of almost everyone in a position of management in modern America. Ours is the culture of short term strategy, and the economic mess is the result.

You didn’t need to be a MENSA to know that people who were only minimally qualified for a sub-prime loan would default when their ARM reset to a higher rate. You didn’t need to be a MENSA to know that huge, gas-guzzling vehicles would become hard to sell if gasoline prices went above a certain level. In the pharmaceutical business, you didn’t need to be a MENSA to know that huge armies of lobbyists and salesmen, along with high priced advertising on television, would cost a lot of money without creating a single new drug. The list goes on and on, but the thread that runs through everything is the failure to look beyond the short term. Here’s the scary part. The management culture in China takes the opposite road, and never loses sight of the long term consequences.

WANTED- President. MENSA members need not apply

The message that “intellect is important” has become a tough-sell in the modern United States. Maybe this was always the case. After all, ever since the earliest days of the American Revolution, the new nation saw itself, partly, as a kind of thumb-in-the-eye response to the obnoxious and snooty European aristocracies. “America,” we were told, “celebrated the common man,” although it’s doubtful that anyone ever knew, precisely, just what that phrase meant. What sustained us, however, and what allowed us to prosper beyond anything the world had ever seen was the fact that we selected leaders who were just a little bit smarter than the common man. There was a time, not so long ago, that we actually wanted to be governed by the best and the brightest.

Sometime during the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton or one of his strategists had the bright idea to position candidate Clinton as something of a common man. It worked like magic. Voters were told by pundits that they seemed to rally around Clinton because he was “like them.” He didn’t talk like FDR or Eisenhower or JFK. In fact, he didn’t talk like any previous presidential contender or president. He was the kindly and folksy Sheriff of Mayberry and we were all little Opie Taylors. The ground had shifted, and future presidential aspirants would now be judged on how much they were like the voters—the common man.

It should have come as no surprise, then, that George W. Bush failed to measure up in intellect or performance when faced with 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, and massive Mexican immigration, and skyrocketing oil prices. His election was based in part on the fact that he was like the voters, people who were easily blindsided by adjustable rate mortgages, people who were unlikely to be attending MENSA meetings. In a nation where 25% of high school students drop out before graduation, we need to ask the question, “Do we really want our president to be just like us?”

We are now faced with the candidacy of a man who makes no pretense at being just like the voters. On top of that, he’s black. And because he speaks in complete and eloquent sentences, there is the suspicion that he might be an “uppity” black, with none of the comforting Uncle Remus qualities that made Bill Clinton our honorary first black president. This new black candidate has been labeled (dare I say it?) an “elitist.” For eight years we’ve seen the destruction that defined the presidency of a pseudo cowboy with a room-temperature I.Q. God forbid that we should now raise an “elitist” to the presidency. Is there any possible way that an unvarnished elitist could be worse than a "decider" shooting from the hip like a common man. I have a message for the American voters. The fact that we’ve never been a particularly cerebral populace should not condemn us to be forever governed by nitwits.