Posted on 11/27/2009 4:41:31 AM PST by quesney
From a classical perspective, Palin's is the more compelling narrative. The obstacles that she must overcome to fulfill her destiny are many, varied, and real. Raised in the frozen outback by a schoolteacher father and a school secretary mom, Palin accomplishes nothing without a good deal of work, often under difficult physical circumstances.
Palin takes a semester or two off to pay for college. She works at a diner over the summer. She enters the Miss Alaska contest to help pay tuition and is awarded second runner-up and "Miss Congeniality." She interns during other summers to become a sports reporter.
After college, Palin joins fiancé Todd on his Bristol Bay salmon boat. During slow salmon runs, she works "messy, obscure seafood jobs" until she can find a job as sports reporter, and even then she keeps returning to Bristol Bay when the salmon are in season.
Throughout this period, despite the hard work and harsh environment, Palin never loses her sense of wonder about the spectacular natural theater in which she is so very much at home. When asked about the state's best attributes during a Miss Alaska pageant, Palin responds, "its beauty and everything that the great Alaska outdoors has to offer." Prophetically, she also plugs the state's "potential in drilling for oil," which, even then, "Outsiders don't understand."
Back in Hawaii, either through his grandparents' connections or by dint of affirmative action, Obama spends grades five through twelve at Hawaii's poshest prep school. Like Palin, he plays basketball, but while she is leading her school to the state championship, he is a second stringer on a team whose wins and losses go unremarked. The only scores Obama shares are the imagined racial ones that need to be settled, a working out of his "pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against [his] mother's race."
In his recent book Barack and Michelle, Chistopher Andersen quotes a black friend who rejected Obama's claimed reason for being benched in a particular game.
No, Barry, it's not because you're black. It's because you missed two shots in a row.
Obama admits to "marginal report cards" in prep school, but his underperformance does not diminish his dreams. He hits the mainland in the late 1970s with the "diversity" movement in full flower. Diversity's rationale is that people of varied cultures enrich the educational experience. Obama's upbringing, however, has been thoroughly white and elitist. The diversity bean-counters couldn't care less. His skin color improves their "metrics." Obama will ride this pony far.
After two druggy, uninspired years at Occidental College, Obama transfers to the Ivy League -- Columbia, to be precise. In Dreams, Obama dedicates one half of a sentence to a summer job on a construction site. Otherwise, he is silent on how his tuition might have been paid for. As to his grades and SAT scores, it would be easier to pry North Korea's nuclear secrets out of Kim Jong-Il.
what is even MORE baffling is that she gave up her Senate seat to be a part of his administration. Surely she KNEW she was making a deal with Lucifer himself! Surely she KNEW that she would get lost in the shadow behind him.
My guess would be that she felt he would fall flat on his ass, and a stint as Secretary of State would enhance her resume for a run against him in 2012. Not to mention getting worldwide contacts would give her a much better chance to take advantage of her position, much more so than as a Senator. She’s in it for Hillary, pure and simple.
IMHO, a win by her would not have been anywhere nearly as empowering for the conservative cause as has been, and will be, the spectacle The One is making of his core. Very few people could foresee the disaster he is proving to be. Granted a LOT of us here on FR saw it coming, but most were just blinded by his aura.
The Iowa Caucus. If you get a chance to speak to or read a narrative of one of Hillary’s people who were there, you’ll better understand.
Hint: it’s not dissimilar from the rumblings of threats of rioting and physical violence if the BC were revealed and Obozo had to be removed. There was physical intimidation in the ranks at Iowa as well as the racial psyops going on between the upper managements.
Sarah is our best psy-op. And the 2A should ultimately negate any restless natives.
SP does have a much more inspiring American story than 0bama, but life in AK is very different than the life that the rest of us in the 48 know. I’ve started reading her book and learned that she lived in Skagway for her first few years. Skagway is very tiny and very isolated. It is not just like any other small town in the 48.
Hard to believe. There aren't many schvatzas in Iowa, and the Anointed Zero was still a longshot then.
ML/NJ
It happened at the caucus. I read several accounts of people who were there who posted on some hillary board- the board that went for Mccain/Palin after the conventions. They had stories to tell about being there.
The Hillary crew thinks he stole Iowa. Buses full of non-Iowans were taken to caucuses. Acorn and SEIU had a roll if I remember correctly. That loss was the first nail in her coffin because it broke the spell of her victory being inevitable.
btt
If the press had done its job and reported the Breck girl’s affair, Obama wouldn’t have won in Iowa.
Ain't no way the Magic Marxist is running in 2012. There will be an attemted turn-over to Hillary. A "Pass the Baton" moment.
Hillary is twice as smart as this guy and just as much of a marxist. But she really did go to an Ivy League College, not the basement night annex of one (Barack is a Columbia General Studies Man, not a Columbia College, although the College grants the degree) One could literally walk in off the streets into that outfit. One reason his college records are secret is that the courses he took as an undergraduate were mostly crap .,.. no econ, no math, no real meat. The fellow really is amazingly ignorant. He didn't even take the LSAT's. Didn't have to.
Harvard Law was his big Affirmative Action break ... but we don't know what exactly, he died there either. He obviously passed the Illinois Bar, but lied like a bandit on the application in regard to past offenses (traffic tickets) and other names used in the past.
All I know about Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. / aka Barry Soetoro, is that if his father was who he says his father was, he is not a "Natural Born Citizen,"and thus ineligible to run for and hold the office to which he was was elected by The Electoral College, each member of which knows the Constitution at least as well as you or I.
I can understand the lack of transcripts, but darned if I can figure out why no one knew him all these years. Look at the people who come out of the woodwork to crow about know a POTUS “when”. Absolutely nothing like that in this case. Surely there some others in that Basket Weaving 101 course or Sex Life of the American Bobby Pin 101.
No pictures of him in yearbooks, etc.
Mighty strange.
One other contrast that is rarely mentioned is their very different approaches to generosity and compassion.
Going by the available tax returns, until the year Obama began running for Prez, he and Michelle gave 1.1% of their income to charity on an income of more than $1 million.
The Palins consistently gave 7%.
(Meantime McCain gave 22% and Joe Biden’s high, over 10 years, was $389 in his best year, or 16/100ths of one percent).
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