Voters: The Left Hates Her? Oh, She Must Be Okay Then

Via Little Green Footballs, we learn of the latest Rasmussen:

A week ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following a Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters.
:
The new data also shows significant increases in the number who say McCain made the right choice and the number who say Palin is ready to be President. Generally, John McCain’s choice of Palin earns slightly better reviews than Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden.

Perhaps most stunning is the fact that Palin’s favorable ratings are now a point higher than either man at the top of the Presidential tickets this year. As of Friday morning, Obama and McCain are each viewed favorably by 57% of voters. Biden is viewed favorably by 48%.

What methods have been used by the “leftist attack squads” to achieve such stellar levels of ineffectuality? Blogger friend Phil has a great round-up. Traitor…holy warrior…connected to Jack Abramoff…pregnant daughter…and a lot of others.

Alaska's Hottest GovernorHe forgot one, though. Palin is inexperienced. You’ve heard that one, right? It just goes to show how desperate John McCain is, because if he wants to pander to the female vote there are a whole lot of other women he could have named who are far more experienced.

A couple days after hearing this, I noticed this is one of the few anti-Palin talking-points on which the left is not being sexist. Or creative. It’s the “Dan Quayle” rule, twenty years old this year, and it goes something like this: Born after Pearl Habor, got it goin’ on upstairs, conservative — you may have two out of those three. No baby-boomer Republican who achieves national importance is allowed to be smart.

This particular talking point crashed and burned with Palin, because experience counts in just two different ways: It suggests you learned how to do your job by doing it; and it suggests others have had the opportunity to learn something about you. Neither one of those can be pondered, with regard to Gov. Palin, and diverted toward a conclusion about her that is negative. Therefore, in all the ways that matter, she’s as experienced as any balanced aribiter would wish for her to be.

It would appear that this “The People” of whom the pollsters and power-brokers are constantly speaking, has figured this out. And I don’t think they did it by listening to rhetoric from one side or the other. They done it all by themselves. But there is something far more significant happening here. This time, the message came through starkly, clearly, and within a relatively short period of time; just a little over a week. The dialog was something like this.

The Left: We hate her! She’s inexperienced and incapable!
The People: Huh. She seems to be pretty capable. And besides, those guys hate her. Cool.

In these post-Carter years, The People have repudiated The Left fairly often in our national elections. Seven out of the last ten presidential elections have gone that way; so have five of the last seven. A couple of years ago The Left managed to take Congress. From listening to them crow about it, it would seem they’d have no qualms at all with the election of 2006 being held aloft as the template for the narrative in which The People grow weary of Republican leadership, and decide to entrust the workings of government to those better, nobler guys. The problem that comes up, though, is that this is the “Mark Foley” Congress; it wasn’t elected on the issues, or on the superior innate goodness of the democrat slate of humans. What happened was, the elections were right around the corner, and in late September the Los Angeles Times dropped a Babe Ruth bar in the punch bowl. That’s it. Hello democrat Congress — manifestation of The People’s modern and passionate desire for progressive government.

So The People have had their shot at showing their support for progressive ideology. Here and there they nibble at it. But overall, they don’t want it. Now we just have more proof to this; The Left says you can’t be a good leftist in good standing if you show any support for Gov. Palin, and The People say: Okeedokee!

But the real reason why Sarah Palin is so popular? Her supporters. People like me.

You see, for the last forty years The People have been buried in all these images of supposed sexism and non-sexism…in our politicians…in legislation…in our teevee sitcoms…at the water cooler. They’ve been lied-to the entire time, and they know it. Sexists claim to be non-sexists perpetually, 24 hours a day, seven days a week — half the time, when they do that, they point to some other guy as a sexist, who really isn’t one. And it’s widely understood that that’s a lie, too. It’s been flying around thick and fast.

That’s what is so refreshing about the Palin movement. Here, you see gender-blindness for real, and probably for the very first time. We are for McCain/Palin…emphasis on the last two of those syllables. We’re for them, because we’re for her. It’s the “Sarah Palin and that old guy she’s running with” movement. And the fact that she’s a woman, counts neither as a plus or a minus, in our eyes. We really don’t give a good godd*mn. In modern times, nobody has ever seen a woman in politics draw this kind of support, from supporters who manage to arouse from themselves such a stunning, blinding apathy toward the fact that she is one. And that is what is so inspirational to everyone else.

The leftist attack soldiers say the pick is a cynical, pandering move, made for the express purpose of attracting women. The truth is, the pandering of which they speak, is the status quo. We’ve been neck-deep in it for generations now; culturally bludgeoned into saying out loud this-woman or that-woman was picked for her abilities and not because she was a woman…in fantastic, surreal situations in which no thinking person believes that to be true. The Left just doesn’t get it — people are rallying around Gov. Palin because her selection is the end of this kind of nonsense, not the beginning of it.

This point is nailed — as in, bulls-eye — by Jeffrey Bell, writing in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard. He buttons this one down in just two sentences:

But it was precisely the venom of the left’s assault that heightened the drama and made it a riveting television event. Palin benefited from her ability to project full awareness of the volume and relentlessness of the attacks without showing a scintilla of resentment or self-pity.

We like her politics. We like her dedication to the principles behind them. And we love how she doesn’t apologize for this. We admire her for her drive, and for her scruples. After those, the experience she does have, is just frosting on the cake; it is more than sufficient for the task at hand. Keep arguing with us on that point, leftist ankle-biters, and you’ll just drive up her approval ratings even higher.

I can’t wait to watch it happen.

Cross-posted at House of Eratosthenes.

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