The Maverick Tribe

How Sarah Palin's Alaska is leeching off the rest of us.

As the cacophony greeting Sarah Palin's arrival on the national scene settles into a familiar partisan chatter, I'm left with one question:  What will George Bush's nickname for Palin be, given "Turd Blossom" is already taken?

Bush has a well-known habit of giving his associates, friends, and enemies fraternal nicknames (former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is "Speedy", Senator John Cornyn is "Corndog", six-foot-four White House correspondent David Gregory is "Stretch").  Most of these are pretty facile, which makes "Turd Blossom" - for Bush's dark-hearted political strategist Karl Rove - especially wry.  But given the unavailability of "Turd Blossom", I'm hard-pressed to come up with an appellation as apt to describe the circumstance of Sarah Palin, the new lily - all fresh, resplendent, and ovarian - that just sprung up from a manure heap of GOP cynicism.

The cognitive dissonance surrounding the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate gives one a headache.  When it comes to Barack Obama, experience is paramount, but apparently for Palin it is not.  She claims to have said "No thanks" to the notorious "Bridge to Nowhere", except that she previously supported the bridge when it was politically convenient.  Her opposition to earmarks apparently doesn't apply to her own conduct as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, when she hired lobbyists to secure federal pork barrel spending.  Turns out she didn't sell the governor's jet on eBay after all.  And she even has her own wacky pastor!

Even though her views on abortion, gays, and the teaching of evolution and sex education are firmly in the fundamentalist camp, I was prepared to give her a fair hearing - not for my vote (I'm pretty much attached to Obama at this point) -but for my respect.  And indeed her speech at the Republican convention was a masterful performance:  pitch-perfect as political theater and laced with snide digs at Obama (some of them even loosely based in fact!).  But beyond that, I saw in Sarah Palin little more than the political slurry that gave rise to her:  a Republican party that is ideologically pooped and completely motivated by the acquisition of power.

As just an example, there's this:

I guess being a small-town mayor is sort of like being a community organizer, except that it has actual responsibilities.

I have to say that this line got under my skin more than any other.  First off, does the Republican Party really want to belittle community organizing after explicitly celebrating community service just the day before?  And there is another aspect to this that is even more unseemly.  Sarah Palin promoted her "small town values" repeatedly in the speech, an obvious tactic to appeal to swing voters in small Midwestern towns.  But coupled with her dismissal of Obama as a community organizer, the comment exposes a crass racial ploy that, unfortunately, is routine in our politics.

Whether intentional or not, "small town" and "working class" ends up referring to white people, while, as we all should know, Obama's work in the South Side of Chicago principally served African-Americans.  This is the ugly result of the habit of politicians and pundits alike to obsess over the needs of the "working class", the "middle class", "small town America", and "mainstream America".  What they end up doing is promulgating a cultural chauvinism that confuses the political importance of these (mostly white) demographics with their moral importance.  Just ask MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who once contrasted blacks with "regular Americans", or Hillary Clinton, who once inartfully proclaimed herself the candidate for "hard working, white Americans".  These racist comments are blurted out not in the spirit of bigotry, but as the cynicism of politics overwhelms basic decency.  Last I checked, black families in Bronx, New York, are just as important as white families in rural Ohio.  Listening to the political discourse, you'd never guess that.

So here's something you'll never hear from the political professionals - a shout out to big city values.  Dare I say, San Francisco values.  For all those who are people of color, or gay, or for one reason or another don't experience small towns as the cuddly, idyllic places they're constantly made out to be, this one's for you.

And you "mainstream Americans" can keep your turd blossoms.