A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on July 7th, 2009 in General

I think it’s hard for people to think clearly about Palin, for some reason – and I’ll include myself in that. I had never heard of her before McCain picked her from obscurity, but I quickly found her so distasteful that I simply couldn’t bear to hear her speak.

But, from the start, she was attacked from the left for cultural differences. She could field dress a moose, she liked to hunt and fish, etc. Well, I have several cousins who could give her a run for her money in the outdoors stuff – and I’m pretty sure they could take her in a “rasslin’” match. That stuff doesn’t matter when it comes to policy stuff, but neither does the fact that Obama lived in Hawaii and Indonesia. So…both sides are guilty of gilding the lilly and then peeing on the other side’s gold.

The problem, I think, stems from the fact that Sarah Palin is, I think, a basically good person. The left kind of shrugged that off as immaterial while the right seemed to make it a panacea for all her ills. She was hopelessly unprepared to be on the national stage – she wouldn’t have even spoken at the NRC if she hadn’t been the running mate – and either no one tried to prepare her or she was singularly untrainable. Which one it is really doesn’t matter. It amounts to the same – she wasn’t ready.

What are our options now? Well, on the one hand, we can believe that Palin was driven out of public life by people who were someone on a scale that ran from vindictive to simply trying to sell more product (magazines, newspapers, whatever). If that is what happened, then there is a very sad lesson for basically good people who want to have a public life. On the other hand, we can believe that she has made a calculated political move. If that is what happened, then I am wrong and every political analyst on both sides of the divide are simply being duped by Sarah Palin. The truth is probably somewhere between the two. She may have rough-hewn political skills, but she is still a politician and her decision was made with one eye on her future political career.

I think for Sarah Palin to have any sort of political future, she’ll have to get up to speed on policy – but she will also have to learn to not be such a good person. She’ll have to get a thicker skin and she’ll have to no longer care what people say about her or her family. I worry for any system where success is predicated on a person not being “such a good person.”

Originally posted as a comment by ThurmanHart on The Moderate Voice Discussion Forum using Disqus.

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