I don’t agree with all she has to say (but so what?), here’s the latest great read from Camille Paglia. Note, in particular, this:
Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology… One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice…
As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee — what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.
The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan — nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.
I have yet to come to any sort of final conclusion about Gov. Palin. The very real revulsion I feel at the way she has been treated by some in politics and the media (on both sides of the aisle, alas) is not in itself a reason to be for her, and there were aspects of her performance as vice presidential candidate that were indeed deeply unimpressive. At the same time, there is undoubtedly something there. Paglia’s advice is good. Palin should avoid the Senate, a dreary place at the best of times, and concentrate on proving her detractors wrong (if she can) by governing well in Alaska, preparing herself properly for the wider stage and, sure, hitting the circuit for rubber chicken and the cheers of the faithful.