Friday, April 23, 2010
National Journal Magazine - Palin Is No Puppet
As long as the media is biased, certain personae will always be belittled and disrespected.
Fortunately, as history clearly shows, the majority of Americans have always been able to overcome that bias...
Fortunately, as history clearly shows, the majority of Americans have always been able to overcome that bias...
At NationalJournal.com, Paul Starobin reminds us of the past, and cautions us about judging Sarah Palin:
"Evidently, there is something about Palin that drives her critics crazy. But if they can pause for breath, they might take a lesson from history as to the wisdom of mocking a political figure for a supposed lack of intelligence. The caricature of Eisenhower as Donald Duck did not stop him from twice defeating, in Electoral College landslides, the cerebral Adlai Stevenson, the darling of the intellectual crowd. The Georgetown set's view of Reagan as 'an amiable dunce' did not keep voters from giving the Gipper landslide wins over Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer known for his propensity to micromanage, in 1980, and Walter Mondale in 1984. And Bush won re-election over John Kerry in 2004 despite being pilloried as Cheney's puppet.
Whereas Democrats tend to criticize GOP figures as dolts, Republicans tend to criticize prominent Democratic politicians, from Gore to Kerry to Obama, not as dummies but as reincarnated Stevensons -- elite, egghead types out of touch with mainstream America."
