What Do The Experts Know?

What Do The Experts Know?

I've been intrigued and even a bit startled by the negative reactions to Governor Palin. Yes, she's light on experience to be President, and being Vice President under Senator McCain means that she is likely to end up as President. But anyone who is upset about Palin being "light on experience" can't possibly be serious about voting for Obama! I mean, Governor Palin actually has some experience running a small government and an executive branch--unlike Senator Obama.

Governor Palin is not terribly glib--which some people mistake for not being very intelligent. One of the smartest people I know, my best friend (after my wife), is not terribly glib. He will often take many, many seconds to think carefully what he is going to say, and then say it--and the results are often utterly startling in their wit or brilliance. I'm sure by the standards that are popular in some circles, he would be considered not too bright. And my, would they be wrong! Dan Quayle came in for a lot of criticism (and often justified) for not being too well informed--but it was nothing like the ferocious hatred that Palin engenders (which is an apt choice of word, for the following reason).

As near as I can tell, much of the really fierce hatred of Governor Palin is that she is two things simultaneously that make her anethema to the left:

1. She's a pro-life, evangelical Christian.

2. She's a woman.

To the left, it is axiomatic that every woman has to be pro-choice and hostile to the patriarchial system of oppression that is Christianity. A woman that doesn't fit this model is a traitor to her sex--and we all know that traitors are more hated than enemies that haven't changed sides.

Now, it turns out that a number of Republican columnists and experts are blathering on about Palin. As my friend Stacy McCain points out:

None of her critics in the commentariat could ever draw such a crowd or generate such enthusiasm, and yet they do not hesitate to proclaim that she is "not close to being acceptable in high office" ([Ken] Adelman), that her selection as John McCain's running mate is "irresponsible" ([Francis] Fukuyama) and even that she "represents a fatal cancer to the Republican Party" ([David] Brooks).

Popularity as a pathology? What Brooks and the others are saying is that these people who spend hours in the cold October wind for a chance to see Sarah Palin are too stupid to know what's good for them. "Listen to us," say the political experts.

YES, THE EXPERTS always know best. In September 2002, [George F.] Will advocated "preemptive" war with Iraq, with a nuclear "mushroom cloud" as the alternative. Now, he denounces as "carelessness" the war he once urged, lumping Palin into the same category of Republican error.

Fukuyama militated for war with Iraq much earlier, signing onto the Project for the New American Century's 1998 letter to President Clinton calling for "a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power." In the run-up to the 2003 invasion, Brooks warned that "the fog of peace" was blinding critics to the "menace" of Saddam. Among the advocates of invasion, Adelman took the cake, so to speak, by predicting a "cakewalk" in Iraq.

Experts, you see. And at nothing are they more expert than evading responsibility, a task that requires scapegoats. So the unpopularity of the Republican Party has nothing to do with the policies the experts urged and the politicians the experts supported. Rather, it's the provincial hockey mom who is to blame.

I'm not going to spend a lot of energy criticizing Adelman, Will, and others for their mistakes with respect to Iraq. There's plenty of blame to go around. Lots of Democrats made the same mistakes that they now criticize Bush and McCain for making. As I have pointed out previously, while some of the Bush mistakes with respect to Iraq were incomprehensible, others were "damned if you do, damned if you don't" choices. As the saying goes, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

I do think Stacy is on to something here: when the people that played a major part in the Iraq strategy suggest that Palin was an incredibly bad choice--consider the source.