Britannia Radio

September 8, 2008

Palin by comparison

Daily Mail, 8 September 2008

Are ordinary people beginning to fight back at last against the forces which, over the past halfcentury, have turned their world totally upside down?

Across the Atlantic, Americans have been convulsed by the overnight sensation of Sarah Palin.

At a stroke, this hockey-mom ‘pitbull with lipstick’ has galvanised John McCain’s presidential ticket and given the Obama Democrats their biggest and maybe insuperable problem.

But her significance does not stop there. Despite obvious differences between the U.S. and the UK, her triumph carries important lessons for British politics, too.

Palin’s storming of the political citadel is the victory of the outsider, the little person who takes on the establishment — and wins.

In Britain and America — as in other parts of the Western world, too — an enormous gulf now yawns between leaders and led.

People have concluded that politicians of all parties seem to inhabit a world apart, governed by self-interest, cynicism, corruption, incompetence, deep contempt for the electorate and an incorrigible instinct to deceive them.

Politicians know this. Which is why they all purport to stand on a platform of ‘change’. But change from what to what, precisely?

Unless there’s a clear answer, ‘change’ becomes a pointless soundbite which risks creating an impression of yet more political sleight of hand.

This is the trap into which Barack Obama has fallen. Yes, he has amazing gifts of charisma and oratory; along with his youth and black ancestry, this all helps create the impression that he is an outsider and embodies a fresh start.

But, on closer inspection, he looks suspiciously like yet more of the same old same old. The way he changes his political message to fit the audience he is addressing sits ill with his pitch to represent a new politics of integrity.

And his voting record and positions on social issues place him firmly among the Left-wing elite which has waged such devastating war upon the West’s moral values.

By contrast, Palin has a very strong sense of right and wrong rooted in her evangelical Christian faith. Perversely, this damns her in the eyes of the Left as the ‘hard Right’.

This is clearly absurd: she is a working mother of five who has shown herself as capable of felling Big Oil and other political cartels against the public interest as shooting moose.

Moreover, her real achievement is to do what the Left assumed was utterly impossible: she makes social conservatism seem attractive.

Not only is she young, attractive, clever, witty and feisty; her love for her Down’s Syndrome baby embodies hope for the future.

As for her pregnant 17-year-old daughter’s proposed shotgun wedding, the priority there is the welfare of the unborn child.

By contrast, the ‘right to choose’ feminist Left, which also thinks all women have a right to deprive a baby of its father, appears not just callous and selfish, but even downright murderous.

Which is why so-called ‘progressives’ on both sides of the Atlantic have gone into paroxysms of rage and panic over Sarah Palin.

For she has taken the supposed characteristics of the Left — youth, dynamism, change, excitement and social conscience — and presented them as conservative virtues.

Since the Left habitually shores up its own position by demonising conservatives as nasty, backward-looking, mean-spirited, lifedenying, prejudiced, stupid and boring, it recognises her as a mortal threat — not just to Obama but to its whole political platform.

Accordingly, it is frenziedly hurling smears and allegations at her. And maybe she will eventually fall apart under the pressure.

But if she survives this witch-hunt, her crucial role will be to energise McCain’s core vote.

Because — and here’s where British Tories should be paying close attention — McCain is not popular with truly conservative Republicans.

His self-styled mission has been to detoxify the lethally unpopular Republican brand. He seemed well placed to do so because his opinions crossed party lines and made him attractive to the centre ground. (Sound familiar?)

The problem was that in doing so he alienated core Republicans. His views on man-made climate change (he believes in it), abortion (he’s a bit iffy) or immigration (he’s for it) made his core voters suspect he was a Democrat in drag.

As a result, the danger was that they would not turn out for him on election day. And exactly the same danger is lurking for David Cameron. If conservatively-minded voters want to turf Labour out but have no enthusiasm for the Tories, the risk is they will simply stay at home.

Like McCain and Obama, Cameron too has grasped the public’s anti-establishment mood.

But he made the error of assuming that the reactionary old order to be overturned was conservatism, while change, hope and progress resided on the Left.

But this is a caricature which, although an article of faith among the media, bears scant relation to reality.

It is the Left which upholds the miserable social and educational status quo which causes such misery and harm to so many at the bottom of the heap.

It is the Left which preaches despair by believing that nothing can be done to stop social ills such as crime, drug addiction or teenage pregnancy.

Instead, it sets up vast infrastructures at public expense to mitigate their worst effects — which has the effect of entrenching and deepening those very social ills.

By contrast, any hope of real change for the better lies in the restoration of this country’s tradition of morality rooted in Christian religious conscience, exemplified by the Tories’ Social Justice Commission.

To his credit, Cameron seems to realise this. Hence his support for marriage and his endorsement of the Commission’s work. But the message is still too equivocal.

For sure God, guns and abortion do not play out in Britain as they do in America. But Middle Britain is nevertheless desperate for a champion which it does not yet recognise in the Tory Party.

Middle Britain mourns that its country is being transformed by mass immigration; it is demonised for saying so.

It is aghast that it no longer governs itself but is becoming a province of Euroland; it is scorned as xenophobic for saying so.

It is furious that Britain subsidises feckless behaviour through welfare benefits; it is attacked as heartless for saying so. It is alarmed that the gay rights agenda is making a mockery of family life; it is vilified as homophobic for saying so. And so on.

The Tories are inching towards parts of this agenda. But unable to rid themselves of the fixation that only the socially liberal Left is attractive, they give out mixed or ambiguous messages –which leave people confused or suspicious that Cameron is just another slippery politician.

And, in today’s world where issues no longer matter as much as personality, that’s lethal.

Despite their very different opinions, McCain and Palin score because they are both mavericks — known to be true to themselves.

What the Cameroons have yet to grasp is that it was not so much conservative measures that the British public rejected, but Tory men.

There are millions who long for a conservative defence of Britain and its values by a leader they respect and admire.

Sarah Palin may well turn out to be Middle America’s revenge on its elites. Middle Britain is watching — and hoping that it will now be hunting season against the moose of the British Left, too.