Sarah Arrives

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 6/16/09

When Sarah Palin first took the podium with John McCain I was first struck by the quality of “yes.” It is a zen thing that means full and unconditional acceptance of the new dynamic condition; no thinking about it, no doubting; but knowing in your heart and in your full self, not in your head. It is bushido as described by Tsunetomo Yamamoto, the “way of the Samurai.” Charles Gibson asked her about it in her interview and that is pretty much how she described it without the samurai stuff.

He called it arrogance. She was not one of us. She didn’t lunch at Café des Artistes with the network people; she didn’t talk with the full voice of the others that bounces everything of substance off it. She dressed in red and compared to the kind of politicians we had long become acclimated to which might be considered in Jesus’ phrase, neither hot nor cold, as in, “I know you by your works and you are neither hot nor cold,” she was totally hot. She had a husband who drove a hundred miles an hour in a snow machine. She talked with her hands and with her children by her side, all passing the baby from one to the other. A brilliant artist I know said she talks from “Eros” rather than “Logos.” That is, her talk breaks up when she thinks, as she “experiences” thinking from the realms of deeper abstraction and intuition as an artist’s does.

But apart from that perceptive artist’s comment I began receiving pure hate mail. I received the most vicious slanders, some purely in hysteria, about this woman from the woods who dared to challenge us urban types from Boston and New York. Denunciations of the press followed, like those by the most prominent op-ed writers in The New York Times, one comparing her to Hitler and another in the same week mocking her daughter’s pregnancy.

This continued as part of a strange and dark subculture of the rising Obama group. As the press and its mainstream horde built Obama into the “new Kennedy,” the “new Roosevelt,” the “new Lincoln” and has Charles Krauthammer said recently, Obama saw and sees himself as a messiah, it likewise saw its first warrior responsibility was to destroy the woman in the red dress before she raised a challenge in the heartland. And destroy her family as well. The press and its horde had become a bloodthirsty mob.

Letterman’s despicable comments last week brought this sick zeitgeist to a crescendo. He’s not man enough to quit. He should be fired. But his apology today will bring an end to the gibes, mockery, institutionalized hate speech and contempt this astonishing woman, her children and her husband have suffered this past year now.

Today the age shifts. The Palins have arrived.