Posted on 06/11/2011 8:05:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
There is a connection between Palin and Revere, unrelated to his Midnight Ride, which bears on her coming decision about running for president.
We all know a little more about Paul Revere than we did a week ago, thanks to Sarah Palin – or more accurately, thanks to the avalanche of posts analyzing what she meant by her impromptu response to an unrecorded question about Revere:
. . . he who warned the British that they weren’t gonna be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells, that we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free.
The reactions to Palin’s remark were more interesting than the remark itself. Buried within them is a connection between Palin and Revere, unrelated to his Midnight Ride, which bears on her coming decision about running for president.
The initial wave of comments about Palin’s remark treated her as simply stupid — everyone knows Revere warned his own countrymen, not the British. Our basic knowledge on the subject comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. We don’t remember much of his 986-word poem, but we remember whom Revere was warning.
A day or two later, we learned that Palin had been basically right. In his lengthy 1798 letter recounting his ride, Revere described his harrowing detention by British officers after midnight and how he frightened them by warning he had alarmed the country all along his ride and there would be 500 armed Americans waiting for them. That part of Revere’s ride is not described in Longfellow’s poem.
Palin was also right about “taking away our arms.” Revere’s ride had resulted from discovering that British General Thomas Gage had received orders that all cannons, small arms, and other military items be “seized and secreted” and that “the persons of such have committed themselves in acts of treason and rebellion, should be arrested and imprisoned.” Revere was summoned to ride to Lexington to alert John Hancock and Samuel Adams. And there were shots and bells as well.
The second wave of comments acknowledged that Palin’s remark was correct but asserted that truth was not a defense. Revere’s letter was supposedly “obscure” and something her supporters had “dug up” to defend her. She had been only inadvertently right. In a widely-read post at Forbes.com, E.D. Kain noted Revere’s letter but asserted you don’t “babble incoherently about warning the British” (he was referring to Palin, not Revere’s letter): “If you answer a question about Paul Revere . . . you recite Longfellow.” In going beyond the words taught to schoolchildren, Palin had gone rogue.
The third wave of comments took the position that the problem was not Palin’s accuracy, but her “incoherence.” Some prominent bloggers on the right took this line, concluding that Palin’s inelegantly expressed remark was further evidence of her “chronic problem” — an alleged inability to speak clearly even when making valid points. Some expressed the hope that this trait, allegedly evidenced by the latest kerfuffle, would end her presidential prospects.
The tri-part reaction to Palin’s remark — (1) she’s stupid; (2) she was only unknowingly right; (3) she was right, but she can’t speak good English — was an elite response. It was the reaction of a class that prizes, above all else, educational credentials and the ability to speak well.
Ironically, that is part of our current predicament. The sitting president is someone elected without experience or accomplishments, largely because he was well-educated, spoke well, and wrote a book. Some Republicans and conservatives thought Obama was potentially a great president while lacking even the qualifications of the vice-presidential candidate on the opposing ticket — a sitting governor with an impressive record of achievement.
As Joshua Green chronicles in this month’s Atlantic, Palin was a “transformative governor” — repeatedly challenging her own party on ethics violations, reaching out to Democrats, confronting the oil companies that controlled Alaska, vastly improving her state’s fiscal condition. But the very day Palin was selected by John McCain, David Frum described her as an “untested small-town mayor.” Michael Medved asserted that “by any standard” she was “less prepared as commander in chief than Obama” (without specifying the “standards” for comparing her to an untested first-term senator). A few days later, George Will called her “a person of negligible experience.” David Brooks later labeled her a “cancer” to the Republican Party (he evaluated Obama by applying a sartorial standard to his pants).
There was something about Sarah Palin that set her off from the elite from day one, preventing her from joining the club. And this takes us back to Paul Revere.
Jayne E. Triber’s acclaimed 2001 biography of Paul Revere, A True Republican, portrays him as a working man whose artisan status excluded him from the council of the elite in the Revolution and the political leadership thereafter, but who played a critical role for reasons unrelated to his Midnight Ride. In the words of one review:
Triber’s well-substantiated thesis is that Paul Revere was an excellent representative of an eighteenth-century artisan/mechanic culture, which sought, not entirely successfully, to bridge the gap between artisans and the social and political elite. . . . [A]s a leader of an emerging working class, Revere, “a true republican,” should be considered along with his more famous elite colleagues as one of the creators of the American republic.
Another review noted that Revere’s republicanism was evidenced in his relationships with his family, his socioeconomic status, occupation, and associations, and that:
Revere was more than the romantic figure created by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, more than an ambitious goldsmith caught up in the crucible of Revolution; rather, his ambition for “prosperity [and] social distinction led to Republican ideals of liberty and equality based on merit.”
More than two centuries after the Boston Tea Party (which, as we all know, occurred in 1773), another “tea party” revolution came to America, led not by the Republican elite, but by private citizens such as Sarah Palin, who had resigned her governorship and was having an extraordinary influence on the national political debate from her Facebook page. She drove the national conversation with phrases such as “death panels” and “hopey-changey stuff,” which drove the elite crazy but communicated the key issues in a compelling fashion. During the 2010 election, she was instrumental in forging the connection between the “tea party” and the Republicans that created a political earthquake (also known as a “shellacking”).
This does not necessarily mean she should run for president, any more than Paul Revere should have. Revere never held elective office. After the Revolution, he championed the ideas of republicanism — particularly the necessity of virtue in public life — and gave critical support to the battle to ratify the Constitution. Sarah Palin may likewise be more effective as the voice of those who — with good reason — do not trust the political elite. She reflects Angelo Codevilla’s cogent observation that “a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to the country class’s diversity as well as to the American Founders’ legacy.”
She may be better as a Paul Revere than a president. But we should acknowledge that as a candidate, she would not likely say anything as dumb as her prior problems were caused by working too hard for her country; nor say anything as incoherent as her health care legislation was great for her state but would be terrible for the nation. If she decides not to run, she will not likely schedule a live TV announcement to say anything as ludicrous as all the external signs said she would win but God told her to keep her TV show.
She speaks with an honesty and directness still found in the “artisan class” to this day, often missing from the eloquence of the elite, which is why — more than three years after the elite denigrated her as an unprepared small-town mayor of negligible experience — she is still a major political force.
Palin’s little trick to bring Paul Revere into the news was brilliant. A lot of the young skulls full of mush are learning that America DID NOT win its independence from VIETNAM as many of them now believe.
I very good article until the writer seems to capitulate to the elitist class argument after all, suggesting that she, like working Joe Paul Revere, might be better suited to influencing than leading.
It would be good to chronicle the really stupid stuff that Obama has said; like 57 states, etc.
i am so sick of this gotcha crap that only applies to the right. and I am so sick of the establishment republicans like romney that has tried to crucify Palin. It is more important to them that they are able to preserve their perks than to have them disenfranchised as happened it Alaska. they would rather turn the country over to the like of Obama
Wait! We didn’t?!?
Some Republicans may have thought this, but I doubt that any conservatives did.
FWIW, Sarah is a distant cousin of Revolutionary war hero Nathan Hale, whose maternal line (the Strongs) later emmigrated to Wisconsin and contributed to Sarah's genes.
I am also a distant cousin of Nathan Hale, so related to Sarah as well.
I'm betting Sarah Palin knows her genealogy AND her history far better than her pissant critics.
I’m forwarding the link to this interview to every leftist who came up to me and said, “Did you hear what that idiot Palin said this time?”
This would be the guys at Powerline in this post.
I heard someone (one of our female conservative pundits. Just can’t remember which one.) on talk radio once who claimed, while at her niece’s high school graduation, she asked the graduates a few questions. That was one of her favorite questions to ask and Vietnam was the most common answer she got. Now that’s sad.
Sad indeed. I recall a few years back, Bill O’Reilly conducted a poll of graduating high schoolers......he asked them “Whom did America fight in World War II?” Somewhere in the neighborhood of 72pct didn’t know. I guess thats ok as long as the little darlings self esteem is intact./sarc
In their haste to prove her wrong and/or "ignorant," perhaps her detractors may actually read some of the ideas which transformed this wilderness called "America" into a place of liberty, opportunity, prosperity and plenty.
Those are ideas which may have been censored from their textbooks, departments of economics at their universities, and law schools, and replaced with counterfeit ideas preferred by the so-called "progressives."
Let them explain and argue against the wisdom of Jefferson, as expressed below:
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
"I deem [this one of] the essential principles of our government and consequently [one] which ought to shape its administration:... The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:322
"I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23
"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40
What an interesting piece of information! Outside GW, NH was always my favorite revolutionary hero, but I doubt that too many kids today have the slightest idea of who he was.
Longfellow's poem was the basis for my interest in Paul Revere as a child.
My first reaction to the short video clip the media selected of Sarah Palin after her visit to the Old North Church was that she misspoke.
I didn’t give it any more thought until I heard Bill O’Reilly tell Bernie Goldberg that Sarah Palin was correct. Bernie Goldberg said that he didn’t know that. That piqued my interest and I searched the Internet for more information. I discovered that Dr. Jeremy Belknap requested that Paul Revere add his comments to the history. Paul Revere’s letter was fascinating to read and I learned that Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly were correct causing me to be better informed.
Soon after, NPR introduced Professor Robert Allison as the Chairman, History Department, Suffolk University, and he confirmed that Sarah Palin was correct.
Let’s add some perspective. Sarah Palin had just visited the Old North Church, the focal point of Longfellow’s poem. A reporter asked what she had taken away from her visit. A reporter has never asked me what I had learned after visiting a historic site. If a reporter did ask, I assure you that virtually every time I did learn something I did not know. I always have learned new things from reading a plaque on the wall or seeing a short video or reading a pamphlet. Isn’t it quite reasonable that Sarah Palin learned something from her visit to the Old North Church that we would not know?
In any case, the media’s conspicuous and rapid departure from ridiculing Sarah Palin’s response tells me the media also learned something from Sarah Palin.
Nice writing with excellent thinking. I disagree on her being better suited to influence than to lead, but it’s still good workmanship and a positive contribution.
I've always always like her but wasn't sure about her ability or readiness for the Presidency but comparing her to the dweebs (thinking mostly of Romney and Newt, neither of which can think on their feet under pressure) running and the idiot currently occupying the office, she is looking better and better all of the time.
Man! Rick Richman sure knows how to punch you in the gut while patting your back.
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