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Meghan: Yes! She is a George Saunders character, with her Simuhair and Todd "the Lovemeister" Palin. But there's one important difference. Saunders' characters are drowning in some ocean of adspeak they can't find the source of and that leaves them helpless. Last night, I felt like Palin was finally master of her own jargon. In those TV interviews she kept straying into her own back alleys of weird speak. But in the debate, she tamed her folksiness into recognizable clichés (maaa-verick, Washington outsider, soccer mom). Ultimately, I think that's why conservatives were comforted by her performance. It's not that she had learned how to pronounce Ahmadinejad or memorized a health care statistic or two. It's that she suddenly sounded like a familiar political type: the folksy populist, Mrs. Smith, Ross Perot with an updo. Its amazing: In just a month, she's turned herself from a genuine outsider into a stock character on the Beltway scene. Sarah, welcome to Washington!
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Noreen,
You ask why it doesn't bother me that Sarah Palin claims a connection to the "heartland." I would chalk it up to a couple of reasons. For one, every time I see a picture from Wasilla, I'm reminded of the small town in North Dakota that my husband grew up in: the tiny city hall, the barely there downtown (except that Alaska's got all that gorgeous scenery). Though I've never been to Alaska, such images make it feel like an extension of the Great Plains, which are definitely part of the "heartland."
Secondly, I guess I take "heartland" less as a shorthand for folksiness and more as shorthand for non-big-city America. In an office conversation earlier today, our colleague Tim Noah pointed out that more Americans live in cities than in small towns, and this blog post in the Wall Street Journal looks at the numbers. The Census Bureau says that 80 percent of us live in metropolitan areas and only 20 percent elsewhere. But it's not that black and white. Some metropolitan areas dwarf others, and not every city is surrounded by the same bland, sprawling suburbs. The "suburb" I live in is actually a town that was founded in the early 1800s and has its own schools, a quaint downtown, and its own identity.
I grew up in a small town. I lived for eight years in the burbs of one our most vibrant and beautiful cities, Seattle. Now I live near Cincinnati, a place the Census Bureau would call a metropolitan area but one that feels minuscule compared with megalopolises like New York or Los Angeles and even considerably smaller than big cities like Seattle or Atlanta. One thing I've learned in my various experiences is that in many ways, people are similar wherever you go. People want a lot of the same things out of life and have many of the same concerns. And thanks to the mobility we enjoy, a lot of people in the big cities come from the heartland. But there are differences. And thank god. One of the things that I love passionately about this country is that it offers such a diversity of lifestyles. If you want to live somewhere where you can have a working-class job and still afford a sizable home for your family, where everyone knows everyone and half the town goes to the high school football games on Friday nights, there are thousands of places for that. If you want to live somewhere where you need to be an executive to afford an 800-square-foot waterfront condo that's within walking distance of Whole Foods and public transportation, well, did I mention Seattle? If you want to work 80 hours a week and be a millionaire, move to Wall Street. Want to be a surf bum or ski bum? The West is calling to you.
Noreen, my fellow Buckeye, you're from a part of Ohio that is definitely hurting more than some other parts of the heartland. I grew up in northeastern Ohio, and I remember the steel plants closing in the 1970s and my neighbors getting laid off. I remember when my grandfather moved his men's clothing store off of Main Street because the area was dying. I know how real that pain is, even if I'm more removed from it these days, and I can see why voters might think that Sarah Palin can't relate. At the same time, it's a problem that's been going on for decades, and I think people are going to be sorely disappointed if they're waiting for the federal government to fix it.
But, to circle back to your original question, when Sarah Palin says she's from the heartland, I get it on some level. Governing an oil-rich state with a budget surplus is indeed different than governing a state that is losing jobs and trying to figure out what to cut from the budget to save the schools and build roads. But most of us make our voting decisions based on a combination of a politican's skills, experience, ideology, and personality. Her experience might not scream "heartland," but her personality does.
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I couldn't help but cringe last night when Sarah Palin said the word "tolerant" three times within seconds in the debate. I hate that word.
Tolerance is widely accepted as an admirable virtue, but it still feels cheap to me. Essentially what Palin is saying is that she puts up with homosexual couples. There's no approval there, no acceptance, just respectful disregard. The difference between "tolerance" and "acceptance" is like the difference between looking the other way and actively supporting something. Her tolerant speech doesn't mean she supports, or even approves of, homosexuality. It means she just doesn't act out against it.
To be fair, neither Biden nor Palin support gay marriage. That was the one point on which they both whole-heartedly agreed last night. But Biden's answer was more political, less personal, and absolutely less grinding than Palin's, who seems to think looking away is a virtue in itself.
But maybe it's all just nuance.
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Marjorie, I couldn't agree more about Sarah Palin's convenient geographic confusion—why are people letting her get away with saying her Alaska roots give her a "connection to the heartland"? And Rachael, fellow Ohioan, why doesn't that bug you?
I get that the heartland is an easy shorthand for "folksiness." And the specifics she cited have a lot of resonance, sure: worries about a special needs child, a son in the military, the cost of college and of health care. But context is important. It's very different to be sitting around the kitchen table in Wasilla worrying about those things than it is in Ohio, where your local economy isn't hemorrhaging just jobs, but entire industries. The "heartland" she references so glibly formed its identity and its values from the industries—manufacturing, agriculture—that are rapidly changing or disappearing, and that's a large part of what makes the piecemeal worries about health care and tuition weigh far more heavily than the sum of their parts for people who live there. Palin made a big deal about American exceptionalism last night, but Alaskan exceptionalism is far more germane—as she pointed out last night, it's the "nation's only Arctic state." You can define the heartland as broadly as you want, but Alaska just isn't in it.
Alaska's economy, thanks to oil revenues, has been likened to that of Abu Dhabi. The state has a budget surplus. There are relatively few manufacturing jobs and few illegal aliens, so there's not the looming specter of losing jobs overseas or to cheaper labor here. The state has the lowest individual tax burden. She's co-opting—and cheapening—a narrative that she has had no real contact with. Living in Wasilla is nothing like living in the rapidly changing modern heartland. That bothers me on a visceral level, but what troubles me on a deeper one is that that means she has no experience in what it's like to govern in the non-Abu Dhabi parts of America and very little context that would help her learn to do so, fluency in "doggone" and "gosh darns" put aside.
There's plenty about Alaska that makes it symbolically appealing as uniquely American, and the same goes for Palin, I'm sure. But from where I'm sitting, this seems like the most plausible heartland connection she's got.
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Couldn't agree more, Ann, on Joe Biden's manner and competence and show of feeling: the real deal all around, it seemed to me. (Well, except for the cosmetic dentistry. Just like you can so be too rich or too thin, you can also have chompers that are too blindingly white, as it turns out.) Gwen Ifill did a good job as well, didn't you think? She got out of the way, and asked questions that could not possibly be heard as gotchas. (Could they?) They were unfussy, most definitely not for show, and served their purpose perfectly. Though technically, most of them did not get answered, last night also confirmed my belief that in some ways, it matters less what you ask than how you ask it, since the only real question in these situations is: Who are you? And that one always gets answered in the end.
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I know this debate was mostly about Sarah Palin, but let's not be sexist and forget about Joe Biden. I thought he was great, not least because he came across as what Palin pretends to be but isn't—and what this campaign could really use: a regular person who resists pat categorizing, rather than a caricature in a polarized drama that bears no relation to life.
I'm not saying that's Biden's usual public mode by any means: Man-off-his-meds can be more his style. But last night on the stage next to Palin, he was a guy in a dark suit who calmly confounded a script that's getting awfully tiresome. He wasn't the Elite Insider to her Maverick Outsider; the way Biden drew on his career accomplishments, he made 36 years in the Senate sound like real-world experience with real challenges for an independent minded person—not (as McCain often does) arcane ritual, and not like the vague grandstanding Palin invokes when she refers to her executive experience. He didn't come across as Professorial Wonk to her Main Street Mom, either, and not just because he said "champ" and invoked his blue-collar origins; he marshaled facts with ease, gave them punch because he knew what he was talking about, where for all her folksiness, her own patter sounded totally canned.
And he wasn't the Old Guy to her Young Gal; only six years younger than McCain, Biden may say "ladies and gentlemen," but he seems a generation apart, lacking the condescendingly old-school tone I hear in everything McCain says about his running mate. Maybe it's that Biden has a hands-on dad aura, which he comes by totally honestly. (Shouldn't we be parsing that choke-up? Seemed completely real to me.)
Race, gender, age, class, education, values, experience: This is a campaign in which both sides like to talk about surmounting divisions and bringing both sides together. But doggone it, you don't very often get to see someone just walking the walk.
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I have been racking my brain to figure out who Sarah Palin reminds me of ever since she came on the scene with her bright smile, her folksy-corporate style, and her Silly Puttied authenticity, which mirrors back at the viewer whatever talking point she's just absorbed. From the start, I've found her stylistically arresting, for reasons that have to do with her energy and her youth but also, I felt, with some dim recollection of a dark literary doppelganger ... And just now, watching the very end of the debate, it struck me: Sarah Palin reminds me of a character in a George Saunders story. Saunders writes brilliant short stories about characters trapped in the American DreamTM. They are workers at theme parks or Hooters-style restaurants, mummified in corporate-sponsored "flair" (to borrow from the brilliant film Office Space). They speak in the same style of substanceless perk. They are to humanity what MSG is to flavor. (At least, some are.) Palin is, of course, far more successful than many of Saunders' characters, and I don't make the comparison merely to caricature her but to capture what I think is crucial about her. She buys into a whole vocabulary of signifiers that often don't signify very much, and she scaffolds that lexicon with winks, smiles, and carefully mimed gestural reinforcement. All politicians employ empty rhetoric, of course. But I don't know that I've ever seen one employ superficial language with such a sense of palpable enjoyment at her (or his, of course) mastery. And just like Saunders' characters, she refuses to show vulnerability or hesitation, deploying rapid-fire prepackaged phrases like a missile shield, as if the silence that comes with groping for ideas were deadly. (Just listen to her answer about her "Achilles' heel" in the V.P. debate, and compare it with dialogue in a Saunders story.) She loves to say "maverick" and "zero-base" and to recount how she once "quasi-caved" on an issue but didn't "compromise." (Huh?)
A lot of the original media coverage of Palin was confused by things about her that derive, it seems to me, from the fact that she's a woman in the West (which Camille Paglia wrote astutely about a few weeks ago). But what's *not* Western about Palin is how avidly she's borrowed and inhabited the language of cute-can-do-ism that's exploited by companies to lull workers into taking pleasure in how much of their time is given over to "breakout sessions" and the business of being an employee. Throughout the debate, she talked like the executive she's so proud to be rather than the governor she ought to be. (It's no surprise, it occurs to me belatedly, that Saunders wrote a brilliant parody of Palin's speech patterns right after the RNC speech, which you can find here.)
Meanwhile, Biden was the tortoise to her hyper hare: He chipped away slowly and steadily and relaxed as the night progressed. And his answer about being a father and understanding what it's like to raise a child who might not make it was authoritative and emotional at the same time.
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I was teaching a class tonight (on T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," of all texts) and so I just got home to watch the debate and read everyone's responses. A number of my XX Factor colleagues here said that the debate tonight wasn't "about" gender. I guess that's true, but on the other hand, it was, at least in one small way. On CNN, the tracked "real time" reactions of uncommitted Ohio voters were divided by sex. And boy, did Biden simply not seem to connect with male voters. Those same men seemed to like Palin, though—a lot more than the women did. The Ohio women thumbed their disapproval when Palin got cutesy ("It's 'Drill, baby, drill' "), sending her ratings down. Women *really* didn't like it when Palin talked about Iraq and the "white flag of surrender." And they loved it when Biden talked about Pakistan. Meanwhile, any time Palin turned and faced the camera, the men's ratings shot up attentively. This division may have a lot to do with issue keywords—that is, a difference in which issues mean what to the two sexes in Ohio. But it was striking nonetheless. Gender may not be an issue, but I still contend that Eros is one, and Palin just has much more charge on stage than Biden does. (I have to say, I don't think that his suit or tie helped; he seemed overdressed, overformal.)
Meanwhile, I was disappointed (if not surprised) to find that one of their few moments of total agreement concerned the issue of gay marriage. When Biden firmly said "no," neither he nor Obama supported gay marriage, I thought: *here* is politics as usual. Two candidates who've suffered discrimination in different ways (Obama, Palin) yet both defend a profound form of continued discrimination. Nice.
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Posted on behalf of XX Factor contributor Marjorie Valbrun, who's experiencing technical difficulties:
Sarah Palin pandering to Jewish voters while simultaneously being hyperbolic about the threat that Iran poses to Israel: We can't allow "a second Holocaust" against "this peace-seeking nation" where we'd one day like to place our "embassy in Jerusalem."
Sarah Palin trying to compensate for being less than worldly, unknowledgeable about foreign and domestic policy issues, and inarticulate during one-on-one interviews: "It's so obvious I'm not a Washington insider." "I may not answer the questions the way you want me to."
Sarah Palin being annoyingly and disingenuously "folksy" and "real" while trying to take the focus off McCain's record in Congress: "Now Joe there ya go again looking at the past, now. Doggone it, let's look ahead." "Can wait to get there and get with ya." "I want to send a shout out to all those third-graders at Gladys Elementary School."
Sarah Palin being geographically challenged: Referring to Alaska to describe her "connection to the heartland of America." (Since when did Alaska become the heartland of the United States?)
Sarah Palin communicating in a language other than English: "We have got not to allow ..."
I don't believe she is purposely displaying a streak of anti-intellectualism to appeal to the Republican base, as some have suggested, I think she just is really not that smart or quick on her feet. When she couldn't answer a question, she went back to her talking points and repeated the same lines over and over like a malfunctioning robot. Her small town girl witticisms aside, I heard nothing from her to reassure me that she has one iota of the emotional intelligence needed to be vice president (and possibly president) or the necessary intellectual heft.