In April 2009, Ross Douthat replaced the bumbling, lackluster Bill Kristol as the “conservative voice” on the New York Times editorial page, but after reading his Sarah Palin resignation column, I wonder if this is really the best the Times could do.

Douthat is making the shakey case that Palin should never have accepted the “Vice Prezzie nominee from the GOP” (to quote Amy Poehler’s still hilarious SNL rap).  According to Douthat:

Had she refused John McCain, Palin would still be a popular female governor in a Republican Party starved for future stars. Her scandals would be the stuff of local politics, her daughter’s pregnancy a minor story in the Lower 48, her son Trig’s parentage a nonissue even for conspiracy theorists. There would still be plenty of time to ease into the national spotlight, to bone up on the issues, and to craft a persona more appealing than the Mrs. Spiro Agnew role the McCain campaign assigned to her.

Most important, nobody would have realized yet how much she looks like Tina Fey.

In other words, had she never run we would never have learned how utterly unprepared this woman was to govern.  Douthat overlooks the mountains of evidence that she had no idea what she was doing, and did not belong in the line for the Presidency.

Comically crippling his argument, Douthat chalks up Palin’s “most important” failure in the campaign to the hapless circumstance that she resembled a popular comedian.  It wasn’t just Fey’s resemblance to Palin that caught on; it was her dead-on impression of a governor who had no idea about the extraordinary problems facing this country.  Palin’s “most important” failure was her Katie Couric interview; Tina Fey’s mockery actually quoted Palin word-for-word in all of its mangled, befuddled glory.

Douthat does cast a few sentences to the idea that Palin tarnished her own image, but he really lays the blame at the feet of the ‘media elites’ that Palin goes around decrying.  According to Douthat, some of the American dream has been lost because of this:

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

That Douthat gets this wrong is fundamental to the problems facing conservatives.  The democratic ideal is not that “anyone” can become a big success without graduating from ivy league schools; it’s that “anyone who is qualified” can.  Douthat completely runs off the rails when he states that a “democratic ideal” is in any way different from a “meritocratic ideal”.  A better example would have been a Barack Obama who graduated from Mississippi State instead of Harvard.  Not someone who fumbles every question into an incoherent series of rambling platitudes. If Sarah Palin represents the American dream, we should really give up any hope that our country will remain the leader of the free world.  That’s unfathomable based upon Douthat’s definition of what is our “democratic ideal”.

There is little idealism in thinking any fool or idiot in the United States can eventually lead the country, or that any of us would find that inspiring or idealistic.

Taking all of this, Douthat wraps up his doe-eyed mourning of the Palin story this way:

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

This may just be journalistic artistry with semantics (I don’t know what Douthat means by “insist” on abstinence only), but Palin definitely “supported” abstinence-only sex education when she was asked by the Eagle Forum:

Eagle Forum: Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?

Palin: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.

Palin opened herself up to mocking about her religion when she continually injected it into the campaign herself:

Whether before an audience of ministry students or on a national stage at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, the 44-year-old Palin speaks fluently about her faith, striking chords with phrases that evoke Christian virtue. Palin has called on people to pray for the cooperation necessary to build a natural gas pipeline across Alaska, labeled the U.S. mission in Iraq a “task that is from God” and argued that students should be taught the creation account from Genesis in public schools.

Of course, it didn’t help that Palin crowed about how a witch-hunting African pastor, Thomas Muthee, blessed her:

In June, Palin told how a visiting pastor from Kenya had foretold she was destined for greater things.

She told other members of the Assembly of God church in her home town of Wasilla, Alaska, that Thomas Muthee had laid his hands on her head and prayed over her when they met in 2005.

After what the 44-year-old described as his “awesome” prayer she went on to become  Alaska’s first governor.

Recalling the event, Palin said “As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he’s so bold.

“And he was praying “Lord make a way, Lord make a way.

“And I’m thinking, this guy’s really bold, he doesn’t even know what I’m going to do, he doesn’t know what my plans are.

“And he’s praying not “oh Lord if it be your will may she become governor,”  no, he just prayed for it.

“He said “Lord make a way and let her do this next step. And that’s exactly  what happened.”

Regarding the teaching of Creationism in school, Charles Johnson of the conservative (but not pro-Creationist) blog Little Green Footballs stated that she appeared to backtrack.  Palin originally had stated in her 2006 gubernatorial run that she advocated the standard Intelligent Design playbook method of “teach the controversy” to legitimize Creationism.  Later, she backpedaled.  Johnson observed, “Looks like Palin made an off-the-cuff statement during a debate on a hot topic, didn’t really expect the criticism she’d get, and then softened her position considerably in a follow-up interview.”

If that’s the best defense that she doesn’t advocate Creationism taught in school, it does little to brandish Douthat’s casual “no she didn’t” response.

Don’t forget that Palin was not talking to the press (because when she did, she looked ridiculous), so it was left up to the media to try to figure out what, exactly, does she believe.  Douthat thought that perfectly fine when it came to Barack Obama and Reverend Jeremiah Wright:

Nobody in the national media was parsing the Reverend Wright’s sermons before the 2008 campaign, and nobody would be parsing them today if he was just one minister among many supporting Barack Obama for President. [...]The distinction here, for the umpteenth time, is that Wright isn’t just Obama’s supporter; he’s his pastor, his friend, and his spiritual mentor, which makes him exactly the kind of person whose views ought to be of interest to a public that’s considering electing Barack Obama President of the United States.

Like the Sarah Palins who thought that Barack Obama was culpable for everything Reverend Wright said, the media looked at what people at Sarah Palin’s church believed:

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” “miraculous healings” and “the gift of tongues.” Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin’s spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of “the final generation,” engaged in “spiritual warfare” to purge the earth of “demonic strongholds.” Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria.

Whereas Obama distanced and repudiated the Reverend Wright, Palin never distanced herself from these fanatical beliefs; instead, she just stopped talking about them.  Because of that, there were legitimate questions raised about the suitability of a person who felt she was enacting God’s will to hold our nuclear codes.

Douthat’s column is an exercise in 2008 Presidential campaign revisionism, as if these charges were simply pulled out of the air and distorted.  He dismisses them, ignores evidence and even does a hypocritical dance (why, oh why, are so many conservatives hypocrites?) about the media focus on her.

I believe that there is a need for a strong conservative movement in this country, and that our democratic institutions can’t be strong until both our yin and our yang get their acts together.  Conservatism is going to continue to fail as long as the cream of their crop continue to defend the foolish Palin VP pick, or the George W. Bush administration (which resembled little that the conservative movement professes to believe).  If Douthat is the best the Times could find to argue the conservative viewpoint, they might have been better off with Bill Kristol.  Er, maybe not.

Possibly related posts

• Sarah Palin’s had it rough? Not compared to Hillary Clinton (3)
• Frank Rich misplaces the blame (2)
• Sarah Palin and Retarded (2)
• Bob Herbert at the Times riled by crazy America (1)
• Death Panels and the continued Republican credibility hemorrhage (9)