Cult of Personality

Tough, plainspoken, attractive, with easy to digest views on issues like energy and national security, and a (disputed) reputation for standing up to corruption, Sarah Palin is easy to like. However, I find the zeal with which she has been embraced by America pretty astonishing. Like Obama, Palin has become a 'celebrity'. Unlike Obama, her celebrity seems to be driven primarily by identification. As Marc Fisher of the Washington Post points out, Palin is being widely celebrated for her relative ordinariness--she is an everywoman, thrust upon the national stage, duking it out with the big boys, juggling career and family, dealing with familiar domestic crises:

"In this time of American Idol, bedroom bloggers and the belief that experience, knowledge and education don't necessarily mean a whole lot, Palin is a symbol, a statement that anyone can make it if he or she really tries."

While Obama is dismissed for being an arugula-eating, Harvard-grad elitist, Palin is celebrated for her Wal-Mart-shoppin', moose-burger-eatin', hockey mom persona.

What is shocking to me is that this sort of folksy charm still appeals to the American public in the wake of George Bush, a profoundly unpopular president whose own persona is so distinctly similar. Bush has always been seen as a guy you'd like to have a beer with (never mind he doesn't drink). Sure he's clumsy with words, a bit simple minded, maybe even willfully ignorant, but hey, aren't we all?

For all the talk about Obama's celebrity, at least his cult of personality has developed around a persona primarily defined by intelligence, judgment, dispassion, and dialogue. In his most celebrated moments, Obama has attempted to elevate the political discourse and appeal to our 'better angels'. He has compromised those ideals many times, but that's still the basic appeal of his persona. The cult of Palin, on the other hand, celebrates gut-level thinking, simplistic reasoning, home-spun wisdom, and hockey mom toughness--a feminized version of the Bush mystique.

I, for one, would like our nation's leaders to be vastly more knowledgeable, experienced, intelligent, and thoughtful than myself, my family, my peers, or for that matter, our current Commander in Chief. I admire candidates who know more than I do about foreign relations, tax policy, or environmental degradation, and I certainly welcome candidates who would rather consult experts and analysts than their own small intestine.

I, for one, am tired of leaders who are "just like us."