NYT: Praise for Palin, finally

Who would ever have believed that a writer from the Hew York Times might actually wake up and hear what Sarah Palin is saying? While this begins with a lot of qualifications as though she knows what a risk she's running with the "in crowd," once the author finally starts talking in reportorial style, it is an honest evaluation.

You will want to click through to read it all. And if you haven't, you really should see and/or read the transcript from Palin's 9/2 I owa speech - links below:

Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Published: September 9, 2011

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS -- Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it.

That is not how we're primed to see Ms. Palin. A pugnacious Tea Partyer? Sure. A woman of the people? Yup. A Mama Grizzly? You betcha.

But something curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea Party event in Indianola, Iowa. Along with her familiar and predictable swipes at President Barack Obama and the "far left," she delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment -- left, right and center -- and pointed toward a way of transcending the presently unbridgeable political divide.

The next day, the "lamestream" media, as she calls it, played into her fantasy of it by ignoring the ideas she unfurled and dwelling almost entirely on the will-she-won't-she question of her presidential ambitions. [note from Barbara: why does the author call it a fantasy even while giving evidence of its truth?]

So here is something I never thought I would write: a column about Sarah Palin's ideas.

There was plenty of the usual Palin schtick -- words that make clear that she is not speaking to everyone but to a particular strain of American: "The working men and women of this country, you got up off your couch, you came down from the deer stand, you came out of the duck blind, you got off the John Deere, and we took to the streets, and we took to the town halls, and we ended up at the ballot box."

But when her throat was cleared at last, Ms. Palin had something considerably more substantive to say. [note from Barbara: this author has so far just been clearing her own throat, too!]

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a "permanent political class," drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called "corporate crony capitalism." Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

Read more at New York Times

Read transcript and or/watch video of Palin's 9/2 speech in Iowa at Beltway Confidential