Simply making the rounds of the leftist blogosphere shows just how much hatred and resentment there is out there. Or simply look closer to home. Check out the letters' page of the Melbourne Age for example. There you will find one nasty comment after another about the 44-year-old Republican VP candidate.
Charges of inexperience are among the more hypocritical coming from the left. Palin has had far more experience than Obama in actually running a government. As one Republican leader put it, "The facts are that Sarah Palin has made more executive decisions as a Mayor and Governor than Barack Obama has made in his life." And she is only running for VP. It is Hussein Obama who wants the top job, and has next to zero experience.
The hatred of the left is evident in other ways. Consider the charges being made that Palin is merely a token female. Such accusations are laughable. The simple truth is, if Obama had picked a young female as a running mate, the left would have been gushing all over the place, applauding his inclusivity and non-sexism. But because Palin is a conservative, a mother, a Christian, and a pro-lifer to boot, the left is livid, and is pouring out its hatred.
Columnist Rich Lowry picks up this theme is a recent article: "Palin-hatred is an artifact of who she is rather than anything she's done. Joe Biden famously rose from the working class to the U.S. Senate. Palin became governor of Alaska, but never left the working class - with her old-fashioned beehive hairdo and librarian eyeglasses, with a husband who is a commercial fisherman and works on a North Shore oil field, and with her hobbies of fishing and hunting. As such, she's the object of the cultural disdain of a left that loves the working class in theory, but is mystified or offended by its lifestyle and conservative values in reality. If there's ever been an exemplar of the rural America that, in Barack Obama's telling, 'bitterly' clings to its guns and religion, it's Sarah Palin."
Then we have the hypocrisy of the leftist feminists, who have always argued that the only good woman is a career woman. Now we have a woman who has a career, and they all of a sudden worry that she can't be a good mum! Am I missing something here? The fems have always insisted that women can have it all: work and family simultaneously. Now they seem to be not so sure.
Says Lowry, "In a less-poisonous atmosphere, Palin might have diminished the intensity of the 'mommy wars.' Here were traditionalist conservatives hailing a very busy working mom with five kids, including a handicapped 4-month-old. But the same feminists who ordinarily dismiss stay-at-home moms as benighted betrayers of the sisterhood now question whether Palin can juggle her family and political responsibilities. Washington doyenne Sally Quinn worries about putting 'the mother of young children in a job outside the home that will demand so much of her time and energy'."
The left really does not champion minorities, be they women or blacks or what have you. What they champion are politically correct minorities: "It's her misfortune to be a pioneer with the wrong ideology. So much bile was directed at Clarence Thomas because he was the 'wrong' kind of black man. Pro-life, pro-gun and a down-the-line, if populist, conservative, Palin is a traitor to her gender and thus encounters the sort of fury always directed at apostates."
And the hypocrisy over inexperience just does not cut it. "A lot of Palin-hatred is couched in terms of her lack of experience. Fair enough, but there's a tone of contemptuous dismissiveness about the experience that she does have - fueled no doubt by her career in 'fly-over country' so remote no one really flies over it. The Obama campaign is loath to admit that she's governor of Alaska, pretending instead she's still mayor of tiny Wasilla, and the outraged commentary in the press makes it sound like the vice presidency is an office of such import that it would be better if the newcomer were at the top of the ticket and the wizened pro at the bottom - just like the Democrats."
He concludes, "Is Palin ready to take over on Day One? No. But she's not being asked to be president on Day One, but vice president in what will probably be a post-Cheney, more traditional model of the office. She has no less political experience than John Edwards when he was a one-term senator who had never before held elected office when he was John Kerry's running mate in 2004."
The truth is, the left is enraged because it knows that McCain's choice could well be a winner, and the left may be locked out of high office for another four years. Whether that happens remains to be seen. But the more hatred, bile and nastiness we see coming from the left, the more we must think that Palin has something pretty good going for her.
http://townhall.com/columnists/RichLowry/2008/09/02/hating_sarah