A reader writes:

I’m writing with a question that struck me today while reading the American Thinker piece about feminism and the left as illuminated by the treatment of Palin. I’d be interested to know your thoughts, because it bears on your repeated statement that you think Palin is not qualified for presidency.

Specifically, it occurs to me that beyond all the normal sorts of concerns (wars, diplomacy, fiscal policy, etc.) that always go along with the Presidency these days, the office has taken on an increasingly symbolic importance that adds to the list of concerns in an election.

What the 2008 presidential election really showed was that the election of a black man in itself was an important symbolic step to a very large portion of the electorate. Electing Obama was a collective cultural action whose importance (in the minds of many of those who voted for him) rose above the details of the policies he hoped to promote. This much was made clear by the media coverage both before and, especially, after the election.

It therefore occurs to me that, whether we like it or not (and I am certainly not prepared to say that I do), the battle for the white house has become as much about what a candidate represents as what they can do or hope to do. This may not be the fight we want to fight, or the forum in which we want to fight it, but this battle has been brought to us. We could ignore it, but I wonder whether that would be wise.

And in this sense, Palin’s values and personality do, in a sense, make her an attractive choice for many conservatives. In the terms of the culture war, rallying people around Palin in a presidential race could be viewed as a critically important step in itself– again, even if she is still a politician and may not have all the qualifications we’d like to see.

I myself am undecided on this issue. I respect Palin’s principles and admire her courage in her embrace of fertility and life even with the hardships she might have chosen to avoid (which would also have saved her so much criticism from society). On the other hand, I do have some hesitations, including as-yet unresolved questions about her competency. Naturally, if she is proven hopelessly incompetent or hopelessly duplicitous, that would be a dealbreaker; but what if she is merely unexceptional in her abilities and as opportunistic as every single other politician in line? We are in dire straits and need to do whatever we can to dramatically turn our culture around. If there is any hope that Palin, or even just electing Palin, might be able to do this, I’m beginning to see the argument in her favor.

So, I apologize for the length of this mail, but I would be very interested in your take. What do you think?

I think that voting for any candidate on the basis of Identity Politics (“He makes my Mubutu tribe feel affirmed and enrages the members of the Ungowa tribe that I hate.”) is an extremely dangerous basis for voting for a candidate for President of the US. That is precisely why a huge number of people voted for Obama (witness Helen Thomas’ Thanksgiving day exclamation that she is thankful, not for a competent President, but for one who has black skin–as though that has the slightest thing to do with the office.) As John Mark Reynolds is discovering, Palin seems to have a instinctive knack for hitting culture war notes but, well, she often doesn’t seem to know what she’s talking about too. What is needed in an executive is somebody who can place the office and its demands above narcisstic need. We don’t have that now. And it is highly dubious we will have it if we elect somebody who bailed on her responsibilities as governor in order to dash off a hastily-ghost-written book full of unverified assertions and bogus quotes, self-aggrandizement, and ego–all aimed at the talk show circuit and years of self-promotion in pursuit of fame and the highest office in the land. That’s more or less what we have now.

I think, by the way, that the American Thinker piece has some prescient things to say about the rank sexism of the Left and the grotesque way in which Palin’s femininity and (especially) fertility drives the enemies of life on the Left crazy. Sullivan is a textbook example of this, but the many other examples of this the articles cites are a handy reminder that Sullivan is not an isolated case so much as an archetypal one. That said, I’m always a little leery of reading testimonies from political converts from one extreme to another. They have a tendency to strike me as sort of becoming mirror universe images of themselves, just with reversed victimologies and demonologies. I have this notion that, in politics, mostly we are dealing with human beings and not demons vs. spotless victims. But the piece does identify the obvious crazy loathing of Palin’s fertility and femininity that stains so much Lefty rhetoric about her. I’m still chuckling about the 11(!) freakin’ reporters the AP assigned to her fluffy little bit of self-promotion. That and Sullivan’s driving need to climb right inside her uterus with a telescope and a bullhorn and suss out the exact details of Trig’s birth are all the illustration you need of the article’s main point. Demonic succubus indeed!