The left's mistake

The more savage the left are about someone, the more you can be sure that they feel profoundly threatened by that person. Their vicious reaction to John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate is deeply revealing -- but about themselves rather than her. They have hurled smears, contempt, condescension, ridicule and every other rhetorical missile her way. You can get a sense of the stuff being spread about her from this rebuttal by the McCain camp to this story in the New York Times, which appears to have plucked rumours circulating about Mrs Palin and published them without a qualm. (How anyone continues to take the NYT seriously beats me.)

Why do the left feel so threatened by Sarah Palin? Clearly, they see her place on the McCain ticket as a major threat to Obama and thus know they have to destroy her. The more venomous their onslaught, therefore, the greater the compliment they are paying her. But just why does she present such a danger to the Obama campaign?

On one level it’s obvious enough: she presses many of Obama’s own buttons, being young, fresh, attractive, embodying active opposition to machine politics (you surely can’t get much further away from the Beltway than Alaska) and with a compelling and poignant personal history; and she is also a woman and a mother and a successful politician, thus potentially exciting and attracting female voters. She therefore embodies youth, dynamism, change, excitement and hope – the very qualities identified with Obama and which the Democrats assumed would present such a cruel comparison with McCain.

As for her most obvious drawback -- her lack of political experience -- the Obama camp cannot use that against her without it boomeranging straight back. Their instant jibe that the neophyte Mrs Palin would be ‘merely a heartbeat away from the presidency’ loses its bite somewhat given that Obama, with even less experience than her, will not be a heartbeat away from becoming the President: he will be the President.

But there’s a deeper reason for the foaming vituperation of the left at Mrs Palin’s candidacy. It is the same reason that they lash out at all those who are not on the left: their profound lack of confidence in their own belief system. At some subterranean level, they know they are wrong and that they cannot defend their own position. Which they simply cannot bear. This is because the left is always correct, everyone else is a conservative and therefore if they are wrong about anything they will also be -- a conservative! They'd rather pull out all their fingernails. Which is why they are so vicious: instead of reasoned argument with their opponents they resort to demonisation, intimidating and browbeating any opposition or dissent to shut them up altogether.

Central to this aggressive defensiveness is their feverish characterisation of all dissent as conservatism, of conservatism as evil, fossilised, stupid and selfish, and all conservatives as hateful, decaying, cretinous and corrupt. The idea that a conservative may be an attractive, youthful, smart and principled, funky grizzly bear-hunting beauty queen doubling up as Elliot Ness doesn’t just rip apart the Democrats’ electoral strategy but the core belief of the left that they are uniquely good and everyone else is universally bad.

But they have made a bad mistake with Sarah Palin, and not just because she seems to have something of Obama’s own great assets – a high level of articulacy and political adroitness. It is because in spreading the appalling lie that she was not the mother but the grandmother of her own Down’s Syndrome baby, and then claiming that she was a lousy choice because her 17 year-old schoolgirl daughter Bristol is pregnant (thus proving the ‘grandmother’ charge to be a grotesque smear), they will have sickened many decent people -- not just because of the smear, but also because of the implication that it would have been better for Bristol to have had an abortion.

But Bristol is to marry the father of her unborn child; Sarah Palin and her husband have declared their unwavering support and love for their daughter; and whenever the decision was reached that Bristol would marry the baby’s father, the fact is that for many people that is an entirely proper response to a behavioural lapse by two people that creates a third individual to whom a duty of responsibility is owed. Indeed, the Christian, socially conservative constituency to whom McCain judged Palin would appeal are precisely the kind of people who would seek to respond to individual failings with just such a mixture of personal compassion -- ‘everyone is frail and many families experience such problems’ -- and responsibility to an unborn child.

What the left see as a killer revelation, therefore, will be seen instead by this important constituency as a significant plus; and if they are not very careful indeed (and Obama appears to have well grasped this danger) the Democrats will be seen as amoral and heartless creeps who prefer dead foetuses to live babies, who condemn personal duty and responsibility and who will even stoop to using a Down’s Syndrome child to produce a baseless and vicious smear.

Maybe the selection of Sarah Palin will go pear-shaped. Maybe she’ll be found to have presided over a mafia cartel of illegal moose-slayers while in a polygamous marriage to a creationist abortionist who raped his mother. But for the moment it seems to me that her selection is a political masterstroke. Which is why the left is in such a terrible rage.