Recently in Palin Category

If she'll back out of an anti-abortion event in Anchorage, what won't she back out of? Why would anyone ever invite her to anything? 

Andrew Sullivan calls attention to the Biblical allusion in Sarah Palin's comment, "Politically speaking, if I die, I die." It's a quote from Queen Esther (Esther 4:16), a figure that we know Palin identifies with. So how good is the analogy?

Here's the context. Mordecai has just read Esther the riot act, telling her that her new status as queen will not save her from the fate pronounced against all Jews by King Ahasuerus. And, he adds, if she remains silent, relief for the Jews will come from elsewhere but she and her family will perish. And who knows, Mordecai says, but that you have been elevated to your royal status for just this moment? So Esther decides to suck it up and approach the king. And as spiritual preparation, she undertakes a three-day fast and asks that all the Jews in the city do the same. Then if she dies, she dies.

If Palin is Esther, then she must have conceived of her resignation as the only possible public move for her: I resign, and if I die politically, I die--because I believe that I'm going to die anyway. So the resignation is an exercise in self-denial preparatory to undertaking a risky but politically necessary move--running for president. Perhaps she has been elevated to national status for just this moment. At any rate, she claims (repeatedly) to be acting on behalf of her people, Alaska. But like Queen Esther, she is really looking out for herself and her family.

Final exam questions: Who is King Ahasuerus, the Republican National Committee or the Sovereign American People? Who is Haman, the Media or...President Obama?

In an heroic effort to mount a modest defense of Sarah Palin today, fresh-baked NYT columnist Ross Douthat avers:

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin's popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal -- that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal -- that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

Now wait just a minute. As of last October, equal proportions of those without a college education and those with at least a B.A. supported Palin. (Since then, she's gained seven points with the no-college crowd.) That's nothing to hang a class-based analysis on--especially when all these numbers are in the 40s. But look at ideology, and what you find are huge numbers for her among conservative and white evangelical Republicans. Her popularity does not have as much to do with class as it does with ideology.

And as for which ideal she represents, let's not forget that the meritocratic ideal is the democratic ideal: You make your way forward on the basis not of family ties or wealth but by your natural abilities. What Palin represents is something else, call it the populist ideal. It's found in the title of the song Huey Long made his slogan: "Every Man a King." The song begins:

Why weep or slumber America
Land of brave and true
With castles and clothing and food for all
All belongs to you

Ev'ry man a king, ev'ry man a king
For you can be a milionnaire

It's a dream of meritless success. You go, girl!

Oh and by the way, on the faith front, Douthat says that among the lessons to be drawn from the Palin experience for any politician sharing her background and sex is that "[y]our religion will be mocked and misrepresented." Now, Mike Huckabee may not share Palin's sex, but he came as close as any of last year's GOP presidential aspirants to sharing her religious background. And his religion was not mocked during the campaign.

Was this because Palin isn't a Baptist but a Pentecostal? Who knew, really, what her religion was? She'd switched churches, denied she belonged to any church, and declined to identify with with any but the most generic "faith in God" sentiments. Everyone, including her most fervent supporters, thought they knew where she stood. But she never made the slightest effort to define herself religiously. Maybe there's a lesson from her campaign in that. 

Over at Religion Dispatches, Bill Berkowitz has an interview with Talk To Action's Bruce Wilson, whose sleuthing into Sarah Palin's religious associations helped make Pastor Muthee, well, if not a household name at least familiar to some of us. Actually, much of the interview is taken up with Wilson's explanations for why the MSM didn't make more of those associations. Among them: The nondenominational neo-charismatic movement he fingered is pretty unfamiliar; it's pretty strange; and the story was pretty complex. But as someone who followed the Palin religion story pretty closely, I'd say the most important explanation is Palin's own effort to obscure her religious identity. She refused to answer even the most straightforward questions, such as what church she belonged to. She wouldn't say what her beliefs were. And this occultation dated back several years, to when she first ran for statewide office. In the heat of the general election campaign, it was a tough story to nail down--a lot tougher than Wright-Obama or McCain-Hagee.

Dan Gilgoff calls attention to the absence of faith or any reference to social conservatism on the website of Sarah Palin's new political action committee, and indeed it's striking. Even Mike Huckabee's HUCK PAC lists "the family" among the things it cares about. But movement evangelicals like Huckabee and Palin don't need to advertise who they are to the movement. They do feel the need to veil it from everybody else. That's why no one could manage to lay hands on the sermons Huck gave when he was a Baptist minister. And why Palin was so exceptionally vague about her religious views and attachments during the campaign. Is anyone fooled? Nope.

This, from Lauren Collins' interview with Mike Huckabee in the current New Yorker, is worth pondering:

While some of Huckabee’s gripes come off as rinky-dink—in the book, he admonishes Romney for hogging golf-cart parking spaces during the Iowa straw poll—others are more stinging. Asked about Sarah Palin, he responded, “She, uh, was an appropriate choice, because she put John McCain back in the game.” That was the get-along answer, but a few minutes later the new, aggrieved Huckabee resurfaced. He recalled, “It was funny that all through the primary—I mean literally up until McCain got enough delegates to win—people said, ‘You know, Huckabee’s really running for Vice-President. Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ And from that day forward, when I actually was no longer running for President, nobody ever said, ‘Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ ” Neither was he quite so unperturbed by the Palin pick: “I was scratching my head, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.’ It wasn’t so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn’t prepared.”

We've achieved a certain grasp of what got Palin the vice presidential nod: She charmed the pants off those cruising conservative pundits; McCain liked the mavericky cut of her jib; and, yes, the religious righteous elite had her at the top of their lists. But it seems to me that poor ol' Huck is entitled to scratch his head and wonder how he sank so fast from top veepstakes contender to back of the pack.

My guess is that none of the GOP powers-that-be trusted him to be their Highnesses' dog at Kew. ("I am His Highness' dog at Kew/ Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?") He'd called the Club for Growth the Club for Greed, and was never willing to play the government-is-always-the-problem card. He was soft on immigration. He was, or seemed to be, a reluctant culture warrior. He appeared to have no appetite for remaking the world in our image. And his ability of garner votes owed nothing to their support. In a word, he seemed far too independent for a party always in search of the front man, be it Reagan or Quayle or George W. Bush. Under the largely spurious guise of reformer, Palin fit the role perfectly. Sorry, Huck, you didn't.

In its just released overview of news coverage of religion in the campaign, Pew ranks "Palin Family/Personal Issues" as the biggest religion story of the campaign after Obama's alleged Muslim identity, consuming fully 25 percent of religion-related campaign coverage. In late September, a Pew report noted "the relative lack of attention to Palin's religious biography within the mainstream media," and nothing happened afterward to require altering that assessment. For those disposed to assail the MSM for inattention to religion, this is a pretty good case in point. Not that it was an easy story to get. I'm convinced that Palin, aided and abetted by her handlers, engaged in a conscious occultation of her religious beliefs and commitments. But journalists often dig out things public figures try to hide. The most charitable view I can summon is that in this case they began to feel that the truth might be sufficiently disturbing as to suggest that Palin ought not occupy the second highest office in the land. But doesn't the Constitution forbid religious tests for office? So let's not go there, and hope we never have to deal with the possibility. In the end, they didn't.

A lively discussion took place yesterday in the upper reaches of the blogosphere in response to Kathleen Parker's rant against the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, in the course of which Marc Ambinder asked whether there is any actual evidence out there to suggest that suburban independents declined to vote Republican because of Palin-inspired concern about the influence of conservative evangelicals in the party. What the survey data show, he notes, is concern about her readiness to handle the job, not about her religion.

It's a fair question, and it is at least arguable that had Palin demonstrated a greater command of the issues, a significant number of those Democratic-voting suburban independents would have gone with McCain. The problem is that, so far as I know, pre-election polling didn't ask potential voters what they felt about Palin's religion; they were asked whether they thought the candidates on the national tickets were ready to be president, and she came up short. The evidence that Palin's religion was a problem is (beyond the anecdotal) indirect. Here's how I'd lay it out.

1. Palin's identity as an evangelical and a strong social conservative was well known, as was her strong appeal to the evangelical/social conservative base of the Republican Party.

2. When it comes to evangelicals, voting patterns show sharp divisions, not only between Republicans and Democrats but within Republican ranks. In the Republican primaries this year, the strong evangelical preference for Huckabee was widely recognized, but there was also a strong disinclination for other primary voters to vote for him. Non-evangelical Christians, and Catholics in particular, stayed away from Huckabee in droves.

3. There is clear evidence of strong anti-evangelical sentiment in parts of the American public. For example, in a recent study, 53 percent of faculty members at colleges and universities admitted to negative views of evangelicals. The next highest ranking were Mormons, at 33 percent. Catholics came in at 13 percent and Jews, the lowest, at 3 percent.

4. Palin's readiness on the stump to divide the country into real and unreal America cannot but have helped turn away suburban independents. As she presented it, the real America is the America of (among other things) religion. Readiness for the presidency was not an issue here.

While this evidence is plenty suggestive, it is far from determinative. It would, therefore, be good to have some post-election surveying that sought to identify the sources of anti-Palinism more directly.

In her many post-election interviews, has anyone engaged Sarah Palin in a discussion of her religious identity and beliefs?

What to make of Laurie Goodstein's article in yesterday's NYT on Sarah Palin's connections to the spiritual warfare "brand" of Pentecostalism? You can check out the thing here and here. So far as I can tell--and I claim no expertise whatsoever--it's a strain of evangelical thought that emphasizes the believing individual's and community's struggle with otherworldly forces, conceived in highly specific terms as particular demons and particular demonically influenced places. Palin's regular invocation of "prayer warriors" (as in her recent chat with James Dobson) comes out of this strain of Pentecostalism. A representative of this tradition is Bishop Thomas Muthee, the Kenyan witch-hunter who visited Palin's old church and laid hands on her to protect her from witchcraft prior to her gubernatorial run.

Should we be worried about having such a spiritual warrior a heartbeat away from the Oval Office? In the spirit of the moment, I suppose John Stewart et al. could start postulating a Palinesque belief that the un-American parts of America are demon-possessed. Palin as Pentecostal Ghost-Buster or Woman in (Valentino) Black. But I'm not sure if it's really anyone's business if a politician believes that part of her religion involves spiritual combat against Satan and his minions.

Not the least disturbing sentence in Goodstein's article is:

"Religious leaders in Alaska, including Mr. Donelson [Patrick Donelson, 'a pastor and fishing guide who helped found a spiritual warfare ministry' appointed by Palin to the only seat reserved for members of the clergy on the state’s Suicide Prevention Council], declined interviews, with several saying they had been told by the McCain-Palin campaign not to talk to members of the news media."

So Alaska's spiritual commanders are taking their marching orders from McCain-Palin headquarters?