[NEohioPAL] A thoughtful opinion written by a Republican pundit, NY TIMES Op-Ed 9/15/08

[Brooke Willis]

Please please please let's not start this....
We get plenty of political opinions in our regular e-mail these days.
Thank you.


On Sep 17, 2008, at 3:56 PM, Matthew Wright wrote:

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 15, 2008

Philosophical debates arise at the oddest times, and in the heat of 
this election season, one is now rising in Republican ranks. The narrow 
question is this: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president? Most 
conservatives say yes, on the grounds that something that feels so good 
could not possibly be wrong. But a few commentators, like George Will, 
Charles Krauthammer, David Frum and Ross Douthat demur, suggesting in 
different ways that she is unready.
The issue starts with an evaluation of Palin, but does not end there. 
This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader 
and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom.There was a time when 
conservatives did not argue about this. Conservatism was once a frankly 
elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism 
and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical 
education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was 
acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.

But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, 
strain. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but 
practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the 
universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools.

The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor 
simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor 
instinct.

This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the 
belief that time in government destroys character but contact with 
grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has 
produced Sarah Palin.

Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to 
do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in 
the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the 
liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman 
because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never 
been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never 
summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her 
backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks 
in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular 
people need to take control.

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, 
Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified 
citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe 
in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and 
rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through 
the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it 
was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first 
term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, 
the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired 
skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a 
specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of 
information and still discern the essential current of events — the 
things that go together and the things that will never go together. It 
is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which 
arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader 
possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the 
study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances 
to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and 
who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t.

Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have 
rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without 
long experience and prudence is not good. As George Will pointed out, 
the founders used the word “experience” 91 times in the Federalist 
Papers. Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It 
is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a 
corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of 
governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national 
issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like 
President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with 
brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” 
is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the 
right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to 
throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders 
who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so 
marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

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