Do journalists overseas have a better understanding of American politics than our own mainstream media?  I certainly think so.  Enjoy this animated video depiction of The Tea Party Express running wild with Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRXu4wna11I

The Year of the GOP Women
by Hugh Hewitt

Analysts across the MSM are still trying to figure out how the GOP comes up not just with Meg Whitman and from a so-called “progressive state” like California, but also Nikki Haley in South Carolina, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Susana Martinez in New Mexico and Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire.

Three of these women are seeking the top jobs in their state –Whitman, Martinez and Haley– while the other three –Fiorina, Angle and Ayotte– want to join the U.S. Senate.

All six mark a sharp break with Republican Party politics of the past.

There have always been high profile Republican women, dating back to 1938, when Gladys Pyle won a special election in South Dakota to become the first GOP woman to be elected to the U.S. (Margaret Chase Smith, whom many wrongly believe was the first elected woman GOPer, won a general election in 1948. Democrat Hattie Wyatt Caraway was the first woman elected to the Senate, in 1932.)

Sarah Palin is of course the highest profile Republican woman of the moment, though if Meg Whitman succeeds in her quest to become the governor of California, she will quickly become as significant in the life of the GOP as Palin.

Palin’s endorsement helped Fiorina and Haley breakout from the packs in their races, and Palin’s “mama grizzlies” movement is a powerful fund-raising tool among the conservative grass roots. The GOP’s 2008 vice presidential nominee’s example of good natured give-and-get-without-flinching on the stump and the trail has set an inspiring example for scores of female conservatives across the country.

There is no sign yet, however, that MSM wants to draw attention to this unique year of the GOP woman. In 1992, when four Democratic women won their high profile races, the lefties in the nation’s newsrooms couldn’t stop proclaiming the sea change under way in the Democratic Party. Now that the GOP is having its banner year of gender breakthroughs, the story is getting nearly as much play.

Part of the reason –the obvious part– is that MSM remains overwhelmingly populated by liberal boosters of the Democrats, and they are never in a hurry to write a script that helps Republicans.

But less obvious is the media’s indifference to the story as a consequence of the enormous hostility found among the media elite to Sarah Palin, who is to them a sort of continuing nightmare in newsrooms across the land. The Manhattan-Beltway media and political elites have never figured out Palin, and they are even more confounded that she continues to draw enormous crowds and sway important races. That Palin is playing an important role in the careers of other women politicians is upsetting to these elites. They have yet to grasp the fact that Governor Palin is immensely popular because of her beliefs, ideals and accomplishments. That popularity isn’t going to decline no matter how often she is insulted on MSNBC or by late night comics.

Palin, unlike many of the analysts and insiders who dismiss her, is a growing force on the American political stage, part of a vast restructuring of American politics occurring before our eyes.

There is a rolling earthquake shaking and remaking American politics. It began as a rejection of Barack Obama’s enormous lurch to the left, but it has gone far beyond that. One consequence is this new cohort of new women, and among November’s biggest headlines will be their collective success.

The Wilding of Sarah Palin
By Robin of Berkeley

When I was in college, I read a book that changed my life. It was Susan Brownmiller’s tome, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which explained rape as an act of power instead of just lust. What I found particularly chilling was the chapter on war — how rape is used to terrorize a population and destroy the enemy’s spirit.

While edifying, the book magnified the vulnerability I already felt as a female. Fear of rape became a constant dread, and I sought a solution that would help shield me from danger.

The answer: seek safe harbor within the Democratic Party. I even became an activist for feminist causes, including violence against women. Liberalism would protect me from the big, bad conservatives who wished me harm.

Like for most feminists, it was a no-brainer for me to become a Democrat. Liberal men, not conservatives, were the ones devoted to women’s issues. They marched at my side in support of abortion rights. They were enthusiastic about women succeeding in the workplace.

As time went on, I had many experiences that should have made me rethink my certainty. But I remained nestled in cognitive dissonance — therapy jargon for not wanting to see what I didn’t want to see.

One clue: the miscreants who were brutalizing me didn’t exactly look Reagan-esque. In middle and high schools, they were minority kids enraged about forced busing. On the streets of New York City and Berkeley, they were derelicts and hoodlums.

Another red flag: while liberal men did indeed hold up those picket signs, they didn’t do anything else to protect me. In fact, their social programs enabled bad behavior and bred chaos in urban America. And when I was accosted by thugs, those leftist men were missing in action.

What else should have tipped me off? Perhaps the fact that so many men in ultra-left Berkeley are sleazebags. Rarely a week goes by that I don’t hear stories from my young female clients about middle-aged men preying on them. With the rationale of moral relativism, these creeps feel they can do anything they please.

What finally woke me up were the utterances of “bitch,” “witch,” and “monster” toward Hillary Clinton and her supporters early last year. I was shocked into reality: the trash-talk wasn’t coming from conservatives, but from male and female liberals.

I finally beheld what my eyes had refused to see: that leftists are Mr. and Ms. Misogyny. Neither the males nor the females care a whit about women.

Women are continually sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. If under radical Islam women are enshrouded and stoned and beheaded, so be it.

My other epiphanies: those ponytailed guys were marching for abortion rights not because they cherished women’s reproductive freedom, but to keep women available for free and easy sex.

And the eagerness for women to make good money? If women work hard, leftist men don’t have to.

Then along came Sarah, and the attacks became particularly heinous. And I realized something even more chilling about the Left. Leftists not only sacrifice and disrespect women, but it’s far worse: many are perpetuators.

The Left’s behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser-focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her.

They are wilding her. And they do this with the full knowledge and complicity of the White House.

The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Liberals need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote Democrat.

A strong, self-sufficient woman, Palin eschews liberal protection. Drop her off in the Alaskan bush and she’ll survive just fine, thank you very much. Palin doesn’t need or want anything from liberals — not hate crimes legislation that coddles her, and not abortion, which she abhors.

Palin is a woman of deep and abiding faith. She takes no marching orders from messiah-like wannabes like Obama.

And so the Left must try to destroy her. And they are doing this in the most malicious of ways: by symbolically raping her.

Just like a perpetuator, they dehumanize her by objectifying her body. They undress her with their eyes.

They turn her into a piece of ass.

Liberals do this by calling her a c__t, ogling her legs, demeaning her with names like “slutty flight attendant” and “Trailer Park Barbie,” and exposing her flesh on the cover of Newsweek.

Nothing is off-limits, not actress Sandra Bernhard’s wish that Palin be gang-raped or the sexualization of Palin’s daughters.

As every woman knows, leering looks, lurid words, and veiled threats are intended to evoke terror. Sexual violence is a form of terrorism.

The American Left has a long history of defiling people to control and break them. The hard core ’60s leftists were masters of guerrilla warfare, like the Symbionese Liberation Army repeatedly raping Patty Hearst. Huey P. Newton sent a male Black Panther to the hospital, bloodied and damaged from a punishment of sodomy.

The extreme Left still consider themselves warriors, righteous soldiers for their Marxist cause. With Palin, they use sexual violence as part of their military arsenal.

Palin is not the only intended victim. As Against Our Will described, the brutality is also aimed at men. By forcing men to witness Palin’s violation, the Left tries to emasculate conservative men and render them powerless.

The wilding of any woman is reprehensible. But defiling a mother of five with a babe in her arms, and a grandmother to boot, is particularly obscene. It is, of course, Palin’s unapologetic motherhood that fuels the leftist fire.

Because as a mother and a fertile woman, Palin is as close to the sacred as a person gets. She is not just politically pro-life. Her whole being emanates life, which is a stark contrast to the darkness of the Left, the life-despoilers.

These “progressives” are so alienated from the sacred that they perceive nothing as sacred. And they will destroy anyone whose goodness shines a mirror on their pathology. The spiritually barren must annihilate the vital and the fertile.

It has been almost two years since I woke up and broke up with liberalism. During these many months, I’ve discovered that everything I believed was wrong.

But the biggest shock of all has been realizing that the Democratic Party is hardly an oasis for women. Now that it has been infiltrated by the hard Left, it’s a dangerous place for women, children, and other living things.

In the wilding of Sarah Palin, the Left shows its true colors. Rather than sheild the vulnerable, leftists will mow down any man, woman, or child who gets in their way. Instead of a movement of hope and change, it is a cauldron of hate.

From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

In these dark times, with spiritually bankrupt people at the helm, thank God we have bright lights like Sarah Palin to illuminate the darkness.

Palin Stays One Step Ahead of the Political Class
by Jillian Bandes

One of the biggest questions for conservatives right now is whether Sarah Palin will run for president in 2012.

Palin just announced that she would speak at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in April – the second-most important GOP political gathering behind the Republican National Convention. While it’s not guaranteed that an appearance at the event means an individual will enter the GOP primary, it’s virtually impossible to enter the primary without having appeared.

Arguing with Idiots By Glenn Beck

“Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s decision to attend — and speak at — the SLRC… transforms that event into the first legitimate cattle-call of the 2012 Republican presidential sweepstakes,” wrote Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post.

Palin’s SLRC speech will happen right after a keynote address at the National Tea Party Convention, which has a goal of consolidating the movement’s “multiple organizations.”

Matthew Continetti, author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin, says that the dual appearances are good news on the heels of Palin’s abrupt exit from the Alaska governorship, and that they could indicate 2012 Presidential aspirations.

“Palin began her rehabilitation with her book launch and media tour. Now, with the SRLC appearance, she’s continuing to lay the groundwork for a presidential run,” he said.

“I happen to think her more important appearance will be at the national Tea Party convention next month — Palin, unlike many prominent Republicans, understands the GOP must capture the Tea Party message, enthusiasm, and supporters if it wants to return to power.”

Continetti’s assessment is right in line with a National Journal poll last month, which put Palin dead last as the “GOP political insider” choice for the Republican nomination – that’s coming from party leaders, political professionals and pundits. Ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was their pick.

But Palin’s tea party appeal can’t be denied among the GOP rank-and-file. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans and forty-one percent of all voters currently see Palin as “representative of a new direction for the Republican Party,” and many put her approval ratings on par with Obama’s. Palin does well in indicators of “shared values” and “trustworthiness” among all voters.

Combine those favorability ratings with her record-breaking book tour, and hopes are pie-in-the-ski for her nomination as the GOP presidential candidate. Her autobiography Going Rogue has sold over a million copies, with record turnout at her book tour events.

“This book tour has been an amazing and inspirational experience for me and my family as we crisscrossed the country and met so many wonderful Americans,” said Palin, via her Facebook page.

The Competing Narratives of Barry and Sarah
By Jack Cashil

In the spring of 1964, Sarah Heath, then just three months old, flew into backwater Skagway, Alaska (population 650) aboard a 1930s-era Grumman Goose to start a new life with her parents, brother, and sister.

At that same time, in America’s other new outlier state, Hawaii, two-year-old Barry Obama was just getting used to a fatherless existence in the otherwise-comfortable world his white grandparents and occasionally his mother would make for him.

At the time, not even Nostradamus could have foretold that the paths of Barry and Sarah would intersect in the “historic” 2008 election, Barry as the first major party presidential nominee of African descent and Sarah as the first woman with a real shot at the vice-presidency.

Each would change names before reaching the national stage. Barry Obama would become Barry Soetero, and then Barack Obama. Sarah Heath would become Sarah Palin after eloping with the formidable Todd Palin. Obama would chronicle his journey in the 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father and the 2006 sequel, The Audacity of Hope. Palin would chronicle hers in the 2009 memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life.

How the literary/media establishment would respond to the respective memoirs of these two political figures would reveal far less about the authenticity, honesty, and literary quality of the tales the authors told than it would about the collective mindset of that establishment.

From a classical perspective, Palin’s is the more compelling narrative. The obstacles that she must overcome to fulfill her destiny are many, varied, and real. Raised in the frozen outback by a schoolteacher father and a school secretary mom, Palin accomplishes nothing without a good deal of work, often under difficult physical circumstances.

Palin takes a semester or two off to pay for college. She works at a diner over the summer. She enters the Miss Alaska contest to help pay tuition and is awarded second runner-up and “Miss Congeniality.” She interns during other summers to become a sports reporter.

After college, Palin joins fiancé Todd on his Bristol Bay salmon boat. During slow salmon runs, she works “messy, obscure seafood jobs” until she can find a job as sports reporter, and even then she keeps returning to Bristol Bay when the salmon are in season.

Throughout this period, despite the hard work and harsh environment, Palin never loses her sense of wonder about the spectacular natural theater in which she is so very much at home. When asked about the state’s best attributes during a Miss Alaska pageant, Palin responds, “its beauty and everything that the great Alaska outdoors has to offer.” Prophetically, she also plugs the state’s “potential in drilling for oil,” which, even then, “Outsiders don’t understand.”

Back in Hawaii, either through his grandparents’ connections or by dint of affirmative action, Obama spends grades five through twelve at Hawaii’s poshest prep school. Like Palin, he plays basketball, but while she is leading her school to the state championship, he is a second stringer on a team whose wins and losses go unremarked. The only scores Obama shares are the imagined racial ones that need to be settled, a working out of his “pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against [his] mother’s race.”

In his recent book Barack and Michelle, Christopher Andersen quotes a black friend who rejected Obama’s claimed reason for being benched in a particular game.

No, Barry, it’s not because you’re black. It’s because you missed two shots in a row.

Obama admits to “marginal report cards” in prep school, but his underperformance does not diminish his dreams. He hits the mainland in the late 1970s with the “diversity” movement in full flower. Diversity’s rationale is that people of varied cultures enrich the educational experience. Obama’s upbringing, however, has been thoroughly white and elitist. The diversity bean-counters couldn’t care less. His skin color improves their “metrics.” Obama will ride this pony far.

After two druggy, uninspired years at Occidental College, Obama transfers to the Ivy League — Columbia, to be precise. In Dreams, Obama dedicates one half of a sentence to a summer job on a construction site. Otherwise, he is silent on how his tuition might have been paid for. As to his grades and SAT scores, it would be easier to pry North Korea’s nuclear secrets out of Kim Jong-Il.

After several years as a low-paid community organizer in Chicago, Obama decides to return to law school. Despite a lack of resources and a mediocre performance at Columbia — he does not graduate with honors — Obama limits his choices to “Harvard, Yale, Stanford.” He had absorbed the diversity zeitgeist deeply enough to see success as an entitlement.

In the spring of 1989, during Obama’s first year at Harvard Law, Palin’s “life truly began” with the birth of her oldest son, Track. That summer, with Todd working a blue-collar job on the North Slope oil fields, Palin, her father, and their Eskimo partner work Todd’s commercial fishing boat in Bristol Bay. Palin’s mother, meanwhile, baby-sits the ten-week-old Track.

In 1992, while an anxious Obama dithers in an office that the University of Chicago has given him to write Dreams, half of his $150,000 advance already cashed, Palin is pulling her babies, Track and Bristol, along on a sled as she goes door-to-door seeking votes in her run for Wasilla city council.

Not yet thirty, Palin settles upon the philosophy that will guide her political career: reducing taxes “and redefining government’s proper role.” Like few Republicans this side of Ronald Reagan, Palin will adhere to these principles throughout her political ascent.

Not surprisingly, Palin’s tenacity makes enemies among those who have cashed in their Republican heritage for the perks and power of office. Palin’s perseverance in the face of this resistance makes for compelling political drama. That she is a woman challenging the good old boys of backroom Alaska heightens that drama.

Yet despite pushing the boundaries of female accomplishment throughout her career — as sports reporter, as commercial fisherman, as councilwoman, as mayor, as oil and gas commissioner, as governor, as vice-presidential candidate — Palin never loses her sense of the feminine. Having five children surely helps. So does living in an environment where manly virtues still matter.

An exchange with the larger-than-life Todd helps clarify Alaskan reality. Todd is a four-time winner of the Iron Dog competition, a 2,200 mile snowmobiling marathon. One night, Sarah expresses interest in competing. Says Todd:

Can you get the back end of a six-hundred-pound machine unstuck by yourself with open water up to your thighs, then change out an engine at forty below in the pitch black on a frozen river and replace thrashed shocks and jury rig a suspension using tree limbs along the trail?

When Sarah answers “Nope,” Todd replies, “Then go back to sleep, Sarah.” Todd lives his Eskimo heritage. He does not just dream about it, let alone exploit it.

While Palin is slugging through Alaska’s political morass like a determined Iditarod musher, Obama is cruising through Illinois politics on skids greased by his Chicago cronies. In his 2004 run for U.S. Senate, both his chief primary opponent and his expected general election opponent are undone by damaging personal information leaked to the media. Obama wins both elections easily.

The combination of his black genes and white upbringing makes the famously “articulate and bright and clean” Obama an irresistible choice to keynote the race-conscious 2004 Democratic convention. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man,” alleges the inimitable Joe Biden.

The story told in Dreams will become a huge bestseller in the wake of the 2004 convention. The lofty, lyrical style of the book will seal the Ivy-educated Obama’s reputation as a genius, and its much-celebrated narrative would serve as a foundational myth for Obama’s ascent to the White House.

Said NEA chairman Rocco Landesman just last month, reiterating the accepted wisdom of the chattering classes, “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.”

The establishment will not be so kind to Palin. In the week of Going Rogue’s release, the New York Times house conservative David Brooks will call her “a joke.” Dick Cavett, the Norma Desmond of TV talk, will dismiss her as a “know-nothing.” Ex-con Dem fundraiser Martha Stewart will brand Palin “a dangerous person.” And literally thousands of lesser liberal lights will deride her as “stupid,” an “idiot,” or a “moron” (8.5 million Google hits and counting for “Palin” “moron”).

In that same week, Chris Matthews was worrying out loud that Obama was “too darned intellectual,” and author Michael Eric Dyson was celebrating Obama’s “sexy brilliance.” But while the Associated Press was sending a platoon of reporters to fact-check Palin’s book, neither the AP nor any other media outlet dared check either Dreams or Audacity of Hope.

They likely feared what they would find — namely that Obama’s genius depends solely on his willingness to lie about it. “I’ve written two books,” Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia last year. “I actually wrote them myself.” He did no such thing. He had massive help with both books.

Although the prose of Dreams is often lyrical, it is not Obama’s. As I have argued in these pages, and as Christopher Andersen has confirmed, Obama’s gifted friend Bill Ayers gussied up the rough outlines of Obama’s life and imposed upon them the mythic dimensions of Homer’s Odyssey. To accomplish this, the authors invented any number of incidents, many of which are easily disproved. For a serious seeker of facts, Dreams is Sutter Creek in 1848.

In Going Rogue, by contrast, Palin does not shy from crediting Lynn Vincent for “her indispensable help in getting the words on paper.” And yet the story is told honestly and sincerely in Palin’s voice. There is no artifice, no postmodern mumbo-jumbo, and not a sentence in the book that Palin could not have written herself. My personal favorite, “I love meat.” I suspect that, unaided, journalism major and former reporter Palin is a better writer than Obama.

Left to their own devices, Palin is clearly the better speaker. In Going Rogue’s climactic moment, the unknown Palin serves up the most dazzling convention speech in modern political history, and she does so in spite of a malfunctioning teleprompter. “I knew the speech well enough that I didn’t need it,” writes Palin.

Had Obama’s teleprompter malfunctioned at the 2004 convention, he would not be president. He has always depended on the eloquence of others. So thoroughly hooked on the teleprompter is Obama that the irrepressible Biden jokes about it. “What am I going to tell the president?” Biden asked the crowd at the Air Force Academy after a teleprompter blew over. “Tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?”

In the final analysis, Going Rogue is a better book than Dreams. No Republican has ever held Palin up as a genius, literary or otherwise, but her narrative is as shrewd, sensitive, and straightforward as its author.

Dreams, on the other hand, is merely a well-crafted fraud.l

The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End
By Sarah Palin

There is no shortage of threats to our economy. America’s unemployment rate recently hit its highest mark in more than 25 years and is expected to continue climbing. Worries are widespread that even when the economy finally rebounds, the recovery won’t bring jobs. Our nation’s debt is unsustainable, and the federal government’s reach into the private sector is unprecedented.

Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges. So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be:

I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.

American prosperity has always been driven by the steady supply of abundant, affordable energy. Particularly in Alaska, we understand the inherent link between energy and prosperity, energy and opportunity, and energy and security. Consequently, many of us in this huge, energy-rich state recognize that the president’s cap-and-trade energy tax would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy.

There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive! Those who understand the issue know we can meet our energy needs and environmental challenges without destroying America’s economy.

Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.

In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan. For example, the cost of farming will certainly increase, driving down farm incomes while driving up grocery prices. The costs of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also increase.

The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.

The Americans hit hardest will be those already struggling to make ends meet. As the president eloquently puts it, their electricity bills will “necessarily skyrocket.” So much for not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

Even Warren Buffett, an ardent Obama supporter, admitted that under the cap-and-tax scheme, “poor people are going to pay a lot more for electricity.”

We must move in a new direction. We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil. Just as important, we have more desire and ability to protect the environment than any foreign nation from which we purchase energy today.

In Alaska, we are progressing on the largest private-sector energy project in history. Our 3,000-mile natural gas pipeline will transport hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of our clean natural gas to hungry markets across America. We can safely drill for U.S. oil offshore and in a tiny, 2,000-acre corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if ever given the go-ahead by Washington bureaucrats.

Of course, Alaska is not the sole source of American energy. Many states have abundant coal, whose technology is continuously making it into a cleaner energy source. Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas, and every state can consider the possibility of nuclear energy.

We have an important choice to make. Do we want to control our energy supply and its environmental impact? Or, do we want to outsource it to China, Russia and Saudi Arabia? Make no mistake: President Obama’s plan will result in the latter.

For so many reasons, we can’t afford to kill responsible domestic energy production or clobber every American consumer with higher prices.

Can America produce more of its own energy through strategic investments that protect the environment, revive our economy and secure our nation?

Yes, we can. Just not with Barack Obama’s energy cap-and-tax plan.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDOykmey7-I

Governor Sarah Palin, mother to a special needs child herself, had this to say.

“I was shocked to learn of the comment made by President Obama about Special Olympics,” Governor Palin said. “This was a degrading remark about our world’s most precious and unique people, coming from the most powerful position in the world.

“These athletes overcome more challenges, discrimination and adversity than most of us ever will. By the way, these athletes can outperform many of us and we should be proud of them. I hope President Obama’s comments do not reflect how he truly feels about the special needs community.”

Palin Bucks the Health Care Establishment
By David Catron

Judging from the number of disrespectful, disingenuous and just plain dumb attacks they have already leveled at her, the Democrats and their media allies are very much afraid of Sarah Palin. And well they should be. John McCain’s VP nominee is the liberal establishment’s worst nightmare. She’s young, smart, successful and female, a combination of virtues that — according to progressive mythology — does not come in a conservative package. But Governor Palin is a conservative, and proud of it, which means that her mere existence refutes that carefully crafted liberal fiction.

Indeed, now that Palin is on the campaign trail unabashedly promoting conservative ideas on family-oriented issues such as marriage, public education and health care, she has the potential to upset the status quo vis-a-vis the Democrat advantage among women voters. And, make no mistake about it, the Governor’s career is a study in gainsaying the status quo. It was this impulse that led her to challenge the Republican old guard in Alaska by running against her own party’s incumbent governor in the 2006 primary, and to continue that challenge after her election victory by opposing Republican Senator Ted Stevens on the infamous “bridge to nowhere.”

A good indicator of how Palin’s buck-the-establishment bent informs her approach to family-oriented policy issues can be found in her recent push to open up Alaska’s health care market to greater transparency and competition. During her gubernatorial campaign, she supported “flexibility in government regulations that allow competition in health care that is needed, and is proven to be good for the consumer…. I also support patients in their rightful demands to have access to full medical billing information.” So, shortly after taking office, Palin established the Alaska Health Care Strategies Planning Council (HCSPC) and tasked it with developing specific policy recommendations.

The recommendations of the HCSPC were decidedly pro-market and emphasized the power of the health care consumer: “With respect to lowering costs, insurance that is portable and consumer-owned plays a central role… consumerism is an essential component of bringing rationality to the health insurance structure in Alaska.” Such a consumer-driven approach assumes, of course, that the patient possesses useful data about hospitals and physicians. Thus, the HCSPC also advocated providing patients with “cost and quality information about health care providers and services.”

Having received HCSPC’s report in December of 2007, Governor Palin subsequently introduced the Alaska Health Care Transparency Act to the state legislature. The bill not only called for the kind of price transparency recommended by her planning council, it also included a provision advocated by many free market health care reformers — repeal of the state’s Certificate of Need (CON) statute. This provision was designed to introduce much needed competition into Alaska’s health care market, and it created trepidation in the state’s health care establishment. As the Juneau Empire phrased it, “Gov. Sarah Palin frightened Alaska hospitals when she proposed repealing Certificate of Need regulations that many say help them stay in business.”

STATE CON LAWS originated, like so many bad health care ideas, with a mandate from the federal government. In 1974, states were effectively told by Washington that no new medical facilities could be built unless a “public need” had been demonstrated. The idea was to reduce costs, but the only measurable effect of this federal decree was a morass of bureaucratic red tape that stifled competition in the health care market. In 1987, the federal statute was finally repealed, but many states inexplicably kept their CON processes in place. Alaska was one of them and, as Governor Palin put it in an editorial for the Anchorage Daily News, “Under our present Certificate of Need process, costs and needs don’t drive health-care choices — bureaucracy does. Our system is broken and expensive.”

Not surprisingly, the health care providers that benefit from the absence of competition are much more enamored of the status quo than the governor. And, for the time being, they have successfully thwarted the governor’s reform effort. An aggressive lobbying campaign by the Alaska Hospital and Nursing Home Association (AHNHA) prevented Palin’s legislative allies from garnering enough votes to pass the measure during this year’s session. Echoing the general relief of the health care establishment, Shawn Morrow of Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau said, “We’re very pleased that repeal of CON didn’t make it through.”

Morrow, the AHNHA and Alaska’s other vested health care interests are probably fighting a losing battle, however. The movement to eliminate burdensome and counterproductive CON statutes is gaining momentum nationally. In Florida, for example, Governor Charlie Crist recently signed a bill that streamlines the CON process for his state, and similar initiatives are underway in a variety of other states. Even the Department of Justice has weighed in against CONs: “CON programs risk entrenching oligopolists and eroding consumer welfare.”

REGARDLESS OF ITS ultimate fate, however, the Alaska Health Care Transparency Act confirmed that Sarah Palin means it when she says she’s in politics to “challenge the status quo and to serve the common good.” Moreover, her push for greater competition also demonstrates that she understands the potential of the free market to cure much of what ails American health care. This combination — the threat she represents to business-as-usual and her affinity for market solutions — cannot but create fear and loathing among liberal elites.

During her first appearance with John McCain, Palin said, “I didn’t get into government to do the safe and easy things. A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not why the ship is built.” It’s good that she realizes this because she’s sailing into very dirty weather. The buffeting she has already endured suggests that the Democrats and their media accomplices are so threatened by her that they plan to hit her with a Category Five hurricane of calumny. If she weathers the storm, she and her new boss will be good for health care.

“Not One of Us”
by Thomas Sowell

If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each– especially by the media and the intelligentsia — go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.

That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.

Anyone familiar with history knows that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic. After years of denouncing each other, they signed the Nazi-Soviet pact under which they became allies for a couple of years before going to war against one another.

Pragmatism tells you nothing about extremism. But the conservative intellectuals who seize upon President Obama’s pragmatism to give him the benefit of the doubt are obviously bending over backward for some reason.

With Governor Palin, it is just the opposite. The conservative intelligentsia who react against her have remarkably little to say that will stand up to scrutiny. People who actually dealt with her, before she became a national figure, have expressed how much they were impressed by her intelligence.

Governor Palin’s “inexperience” is a talking point that might have some plausibility if it were not for the fact that Barack Obama has far less experience in actually making policies than Sarah Palin has. Joe Biden has had decades of experience in being both consistently wrong and consistently a source of asinine statements.

Governor Palin’s candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.

Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, “He’s not one of us.”

The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was “one of us.” As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.

The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today.

Before the first trial of Alger Hiss began, reporters who gathered at the courthouse informally sounded each other out as to which of them they believed, before any evidence had been presented. Most believed that Hiss was telling the truth and that it was Chambers who was lying.

More important, those reporters who believed that Chambers was telling the truth were immediately ostracized. None of this could have been based on the evidence for either side, for that evidence had not yet been presented in court.

For decades after Hiss was convicted and sent to federal prison, much of the media and the intelligentsia defended him. To this day, there is an Alger Hiss chair at Bard College.

Why did it matter so much to so many people which of two previously little-known men was telling the truth? Because what was on trial was not one man but a whole vision of the world and a way of life.

Governor Sarah Palin is both a challenge and an affront to that vision and that way of life– an overdue challenge, much as Chambers’ challenge was overdue.

Whether Governor Palin runs for national office again is something that only time will tell. But the Republicans need some candidate who is neither one of the country club Republicans nor– worse yet– the sort of person who appeals to the intelligentsia.