Truth plainly spoken cannot be overcome. That is the secret to her success.
Are there gaps in her knowledge? Indubitably. But her instincts and guiding principles are without fault, and those are far more important. She is, I think, heiress to the tradition of Reagan, Truman, Lincoln, and Jackson, all of whom were ridiculed for their lack of education and sophistication, yet achieved success beyond the dreams of any intellectual.
Look, I went to an Ivy League grad school. I know who Reinhold bloody Niebhur is; I wrote a term paper on his attempts and ultimate failure to synthesize Marxism and Christianity. I'm an economic conservative and social moderate, who has never been red-hot on abortion. I'm nominally Catholic but skating dangerously close to agnosticism. I speak three languages and am unbeatable at Trivial Pursuit. I've read Marx, Herodotus, Burke, Joyce, Gibbon, Rousseau, Hayek, Plato, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Friedman, Popper, Darwin, Sartre, Montesquieu, Woolf, Kierkegaard, Boorstin, Locke, and the Federalist Papers.
In short, I could sit with David Brooks and Chris Matthews and Kathleen Parker at a Manhattan cocktail party and give them all tingles up and down their legs for a week if I were a candidate for President. But I'm not, and never will be, and never would want to be, because I know that at my core I do not have what it takes. She does.
No politician in my lifetime save Ronald Reagan has awakened my desire to fight for the American dream quite like Sarah Palin. Beneath the accent, and the sometimes fractured syntax, and the grins and winks, there is a voice that speaks with the accumulated courage and wisdom of four hundred years of the American experiment. Everything this woman is and does and has done, she accomplished by her own pluck and native intelligence. She is utterly fearless, with a pitch-perfect balance between compassion and ruthlessness, and an immense gift for speaking to and for the common man and woman.
It is only by an accident of birth that she grew up in a little hick town with less than sterling educational opportunities. If her father had been able to send her to Wellesley and Yale like Hillary Clinton, I tell you that Hillary could not now dare to stand on the same stage with her. I know that she is a quick study who will rise to the occasion, absorbing all she needs to know for a successful Presidency in the first six months on the job.
If you've seen her pre-campaign interview with Maria Bartiromo, you've seen how well she can speak extemporaneously on topics she knows well. If she seemed to stumble a few times over the past six weeks, I think it is because she was over-programmed and over-scripted by the campaign staff, and (at least at first) scared to say anything that would contradict something McCain may have said on the Senate floor six years ago. Silliness like the "maverick" meme or Alaska's proximity to Russia sound like words that were put in her mouth by the Bush/McCain morons. When she speaks her own words in her own voice, it is far more authentic.
I do not presume to know the nature of the Divine, but I cannot help but think that we owe it to the hand of Providence that she was raised up to fight for us at this time of great danger. If McCain wins, as I expect, I believe it will be she who has carried him across the finish line, she who has energized him and roused the masses, she who is to be thanked for rescuing us from the most dangerous Gramscian termite ever to foul our national political stage.
I would follow her banner to the gates of Hell. She is magnificent.
Cheers!