Palin And The Politics Of Personal Destruction

Megan McArdle has an eminently sensible take on the whole Sarah Palin “scandal”. Needless to say, when someone like Ms. McArdle—who is an Obama supporter—is so disgusted with the left’s rhetoric, it signals that these juvenile and disgusting attacks are likely to backfire. As she puts it:

Sorry, I must have been confused. I thought I lived in a civilized society.

This is news, of course. But it is not particularly interesting news. It’s hardly the first shotgun wedding the world has ever witnessed, not even of a prominent politician’s daughter. It has basically nothing to do with her fitness to be the vice president. The people acting as if this matters deeply should be as ashamed of themselves as they claim to be of Sarah Palin’s behavior. …

On Sarah Palin as a VP I have no particular opinion, except that she doesn’t make me any more interested in voting for John McCain. But the people criticizing her are making me considerably less interested in voting for Obama. If this sort of deranged logic produces unwavering support for Obama, I have to question my own judgement.

The MoveOn.org/Daily Kos crowd is playing with fire here. They have no idea—not even the faintest inkling of a clue—of just how badly all this will play for them. They honestly seem to think that all “values voters” match their stereotypes, and that the Palin issue is some kind of magic bullet against her.

Make no mistake: the left is afraid of Sarah Palin. They are afraid of having the most powerful woman in the country be a pro-life, pro-gun conservative. They cannot stand someone they view as not falling within their carefully-drawn definition of what a woman should think.

The depths they are plumbing to attack Gov. Palin and her family are not a sign of the weakness of the pick, they are a sign of abject terror. People in a position of strength don’t need to go after a 17-year-old girl to make their points.

They are afraid of what Gov. Palin means for this race—and they well should be.