Why does the cultural establishment and the intellectual elite continue to hate, and hate on, Sarah Palin? It’s a question I continue to ask myself. The latest example is the HBO movie “Game Change,” which by all accounts is yet another vicious hatchet job on the former politician. The TV movie is based on a book which included many other plot lines, from the John Edwards scandal to the Hillary versus Barack contest. Yet Sarah Palin is singled out. Give it up already! She’s not even in office and right now isn’t running for office.
There’s something going on beyond a mere difference in issues, or stated questions about her fitness for an office she’s not running for; questions which can be raised about any candidate or prospective candidate. No, the constantly expressed hatred, manifested the moment Palin appeared on the scene, goes much deeper. It’s emotional: visceral.
Something about her very being, the fact of who she is, rubs the elite intelligentsia the wrong way. It’s partly a regional thing—they hate her pronounced accent—and no doubt partly a class/snobbery issue; that she dared aspire for higher office without having an elite degree from a place like Harvard or Yale. There may be something more—that Sarah Palin in her life and in herself, like the women in the movie I’ve been reviewing, “Westward the Women,” represents a fuller version of feminism, a gun-toting earth mother fertility symbol version, quintessentially American, a rifle on one arm and a baby on the other, than the rather restrictive uptight version which comes from the east coast. Just wondering, yo.
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