THE OTHER SPEECH – Sarah Plays Hong Kong

posted at 9:58 pm on September 23, 2009 by CK MacLeod
[ Politicians ]   

The onslaught of two or was it three 3rd Worldist blowhards at the UN left me weary, but there was at least one speech given on Planet Earth today (Wednesday), if not at the world body, that didn’t need translation into American English to be understood, since in this case it’s the speaker’s native tongue.

Like an up-and-coming rock band booking out-of-the-way too-small venues to intensify the buzz, Palin traveled across the world to a closed-door meeting of international financiers in Hong Kong. By now, she’s posted a lengthy excerpt”Thoughts from Hong Kong” on Facebook – but it’s hard to get past the rope line and you have to climb over the kids ahead of you… To get an idea of how she came off, for now you have to squint at the reports from attendees, and you’d have to be in the know like a polit-groupie scamming a backstage pass if you wanted to review the recording ahead of the average fans. The rest of us will probably have to wait for a set of “Sarah Live!” bootleg YouTubes to appear, and whoever first gets the video and posts it better have a professional class server, or it will break down.

Contrast the phenomenon with the interminable and appalling UN speeches: All the usual suspects assembled – and for this group the old cliche applies quite well – the remarks carried and translated live, readily available to everyone, valuable to no one – Pay-Me-To-View TV.

Sarah Palin appears to be pursuing a strategy, for now, of reduced exposure especially on television, letting her ideas speak for themselves while reducing the implicitly demeaning emphasis on her persona, including her personal appearance. At the same time, she builds suspense about an eventual, inevitable “return” in dramatic living color. She stokes hunger among her political following just for the sound of her voice and the sight of her smile, but without ever quite going away. More than a few observers, even enemies and adversaries, have been forced to acknowledge her demonstrations of power at a distance – the fact, for instance, that a couple of Facebook entries and an op-ed have repeatedly forced the President to respond directly to her claims, arguably losing rhetorical control while indulging in his personal attacks on her. That he resists the mention of her name even while “everyone” knows, whispers, and passes it on, inflates her further: She has become the “one who must not be named,” looming like some psychic or supernatural force in the Obamian political drama.

As for what she actually said, few Reagan conservatives will find any reason to fault her content. Rich Lowry at the Corner provides extensive excerpts and a three or three-and-half stars out of four review:

The first thing we can say about Sarah Palin’s speech is that it is exactly the kind of address she should be giving. It’s plain-spoken and not exactly ground-breaking, but it’s substantive and the kind of thing that is absolutely essential to adding some heft to her political portfolio. She describes her approach as “common sense conservatism,” and it lives up to its billing, falling firmly within the mainstream of conservative thought.

After completing his gloss, Lowry concludes by broadly outlining a path and a purpose for the woman whom so many declared politically dead a couple of months ago:

Palin is an authentic, powerful voice of the populist right and in the speech she implicitly connects its call for limited government and sensible fiscal policy with America’s role as a world power. Palin can play a very important role in channeling the inchoate populist anger out there in a responsible direction, which makes it all the more important that she engage on the issues in a serious way and avoid rhetorical over-kill. The speech, judging from what we’ve seen of it so far, is a big step in the right direction.

(Additional excerpts can be found at the Wall Street Journal.)

I think Lowry has it exactly right, as far as he goes, and if the world cooperates even a little: Palin has the populist right in the palm of her hand already – not 100% by any means, but no one will or can or should seek to claim that. By sounding a thoughtful “common sense” rather than alarmist tone, she can maintain a relatively uncompromising position on the issues that matter most to the conservative base, placing herself all the way on the other side of the world from President Obama and the other leaders he seems so intent on impressing, while letting the fright images that have been built up around her fade into memory, and revealing those still obsessed with them as the real crazies. If she carefully and consistently negotiates this path, many who once feared her, her putative inexperience, or the forces they believed she represented may instead come to see her as something of a familiar and re-assuring presence, especially as compared to the alternatives on all sides. That’s not all of the battle, for her or for her supporters, but it could be a big part of it.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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