Misopalinism

Victor Davis Hanson
October 28, 2008

I remain convinced that the continuing furor over (as opposed to disagreement with) Palin still originates in large part from class, cultural, and geographical disdain. So I am struck how often criticism of Palin could be more than equally applied to both Obama and Biden--but rarely is. I would be curious to collate Mrs. Palin's undergraduate transcript with that of Mr. Obama's, but learn that would be impossible since for some unknown reason the latter at Columbia is under lock and key. No comment on Mr. Biden's, since long ago we learned that the senator is not factual in his recall of matters academic.

Anti-intellectual and anti-enlightenment? Anyone who collates the rantings of Rev. Wright, the 20-year erstwhile spiritual advisor to Mr. Obama (whom 'I could no more disown than ....' ) would find discourses on crackpot anti-black middle-classness, strange new bombs primed to hunt down blacks and Arabs, and something called black liberation theology that is on an intellectual par with phrenology. If one were to review the lunatic groups that received money from the Chicago Anneberg Challenge or the Woods Fund, one could infer that neither logic nor facts weighed into Obama's decision-making.

Scholarship? I know of no legal scholarly papers published by Obama, either as an editor at Harvard Law Review or a lecturer at the Chicago Law School; what little op-ed commentary he has written (cf. his post 9/11 essay) is on par with Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis. His memoirs are well crafted, but their content is ignored since it offers a logical explanation for everyone from Wright to Ayers, and everything from redistribution to racialism.

Both Obama's and Biden's historical recall is at times frightening (e.g., We liberated Auschwitz; the largely Anglo-American Berlin Airflift was a world effort; FDR went on TV as President in 1929; Hezbollah is out of Lebanon; etc.).

Their popular notion of science often turns puerile (checking for proper tire pressure substitutes for the energy captured by tapping into billions of barrels in reserves of new oil; we are not to burn coal--when it currently supplies half the power for our electrical generation and we sit atop the world's largest coal reserves, etc.). If we turn to math, we learn there are either 57 or 47 states, and J-O-B-S is a three-letter word.

And while Ms. Palin is donating her clothes to charity, I am not sure that Team Obama can do the same with the now discarded multimillion-dollar faux-Greek columns and pediments or the now obsolete vero possumus seal.

I have no problem with admitting (thankfully) that Palin is no Adlai Stevenson, but why do others apparently assume that Obama or Biden is?