Palin vs Obama

Victor Davis Hanson has a excellent essay up contrasting Sarah Palin and Barack Obama:

Palin vs. Obama

The race unfortunately has been framed the last two weeks by Democrats as one of Obama versus Palin. That will stop as Obama realizes he loses should it continue. Nevertheless, the comparison of the respective experiences of a McCain and Obama is so much in favor of the former, that it requires no discussion. So I turn to Palin, given the charges that she is unfit and clueless.

Is Palin Tough?

I have been asked by many why I have such confidence in a rookie Alaskan governor, given the rigors of the campaign to follow. (Many Republican pundits apparently do not.) I think we are starting to see the answers to that question. The proverbial “they” hacked into her private email accounts. They swore that her daughter was the real mother of her Down Syndrome baby. They sent legions of reporters and lawyers to Alaska to dig up dirt. They wrote columns suggesting that she was stupid, uneducated, dishonest, a liar, and worse still. All this was the work of moralists, who, in their more extreme manifestations, tried to flood a Chicago radio station to disrupt guests, who doctored photos of McCain to subvert his portrait, who disgraced the Atlantic brand by trafficking in pregnancy rumors, and who now publish the private email of Palin.

And? She is still smiling and apparently unmoved. Had they done this to Biden, he would have gone berserk. Wait — they didn’t do this to Biden, and he seems near berserk in his daily gaffes.

So Who Is Really Experienced?

The point is this: I think it is much harder for a mother of three or four in an out-of-the-way Alaskan town to get elected to city council and the mayorship, then take on the entire Republican establishment and get elected governor than it is for a Barack Obama to emerge from Chicago politics into the Illinois state house and later Senate. The qualities that allowed a Palin to succeed without the power spouse, the identity politics, the Ivy-League cache, the fawning New York editors and D.C. insider-press will ensure she does not implode on the campaign trail — and won’t in office either.

Barack Obama, in contrast, on numerous occasions has complained how tiring, how hard, how unfair, how racist the campaign has turned out to be; Palin never. I could not imagine Obama doing his hope and change thing in the Senate while holding a one-year-old and checking on four more children at home. And I wager shooting a moose or trying to navigate a snowmobile in the chill is a little harder than shooting baskets in one’s down time or offering riffs to the fainting at a Beverly Hills get together or Presidio Heights fundraiser.

Again my point? That the much deprecated “life experience” is every bit as important to leadership as is abstract learning. Both complement each other, but so far I think Palin understands the symbiotic world of word and the world of deed far more so than does Obama. And again, we are not talking about McCain, where the contrast only widens–and is far more important.

[. . .]

What Is Wisdom?

Not necessarily degrees, glibness, poise, or factual recall, but the ability to understand human nature. And that requires two simple things: an inductive method of reasoning to look at the world empirically, and a body of knowledge and experience to draw on for guidance.

Palin in empirical fashion bucked the Republican establishment and the old-boy network when she thought it was unreasonable; Obama never figured out or at least never questioned Tony Rezko or the Chicago machine, Trinity Church or the Pelosi-Kennedy liberal mantra — unless it proved advantageous. Palin draws on everything from position papers on ANWR to how to keep four screaming kids fed and bathed; Obama on Harvard Law Review and dispensing more public money to more Chicago interest groups.

That’s a simplification, but also an answer to the old Euripidean question “What is wisdom?”

You should go and read the rest.

Notice something else. As soon as any details about Sarah Palin began to emerge the entire Left-liberal machine, from the Obama campaign to Hollywood to the mainstream media, began to attack her mercilessly with a sheer viciousness and intensity that they had never used on McCain. This is because McCain is an enemy in that he stands in the way of putting B. Hussein Obama into the White House But he has never been The Enemy to the left.

The sad fact is that John McCain has spent nearly half his time in elected office, especially in the last 10 years or so, working for the left's interests as much as he has served the right. To the overwhelming majority of liberal Democrats McCain was an acceptable fallback. Yeah, they wanted "their guy" in the White House but if they couldn't get that they would take McCain in his place. This kept the attacks on him somewhat muted. He was "too old", "out of touch" and would be a "third term for Bush".

Then Sarah Palin entered the race and the left immediately recognized her as The Enemy. Governor Palin is a conservative who walks the walk as well as talks the talk. In this she is very much like another Western governor who went to Washington, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

And in addition to being a genuine conservative Palin she is also a genuine reformer. There are a great many politicians, many of them Republican, in Alaska who are soiling their diapers at the thought of Vice President Palin guiding Attorney General Fred Thompson (who has already brought down one corrupt state party machine) and his investigators through the sewer of Alaska's corrupt "old boy" network.

And there are even more politicians, even more of them Democrat, who have night terrors over the thought of someone like Sarah Palin draining the Capitol Hill cesspool and flushing away the mess, some of it to land in federal prison.

To the left Sarah Palin is THE ENEMY. She has captured the heart of Red State America (also known as Real America) and everyone with a brain knows that the vice presidency is only the prologue to the Pain Era in Washington. Even if McCain manages to lose this election (and he may very well lose since he can't seem to control his impulse to run to the left as fast as he can) the national political stage will not have seen the last of her, just as it took Ronald Reagan more than one try to get to the White House.

Make no mistake about it. The left views Sarah Palin as the greatest threat it has ever faced. She is a greater danger to them than Ronald Reagan ever was since his target was the Soviet Union while her target will be them. They will use every tool in their toolbox to not only defeat her but destroy her.

The only thing that has prevented them from doing so already is their own panic-driven hysteria. In their blind thrashing about for any weapon to use against her they allowed too much of their real nature and agenda to show. Instead of criticizing her official conduct as governor or her stated positions on national political issues they attacked her children using the most hateful gutter tactics imaginable. Her youngest child should have been murdered in the womb because he has a disability and besides her daughter is the real mother and when her daughter was revealed to be pregnant the only candidate for father in the left's mind was Todd Palin.

To the average American people who think this way reveal that they have absorbed evil into themselves until it has penetrated down to the very bone because this kind of thinking doesn't come naturally to anyone who isn't irredeemably rotten and corrupt. Leftists showed themselves to be the kind of people that decent Americans cross the street to avoid and don't think should be allowed to live within 1000 feet of a school.

This is why the McCain/Palin ticket is now tied with the Obama/Biden ticket among the nation's women. Even if Governor Palin wasn't as attractive, competant and likeable as she is large numbers of people would still driven to support her out of sheer disgust with her enemies.