“The simple fact of her being a pro-life married mother of five with a thriving political career was–before anything else about her was known–enough for the left and its outliers to target her for destruction. She could not be allowed to contradict symbolically one of the central narratives of the left. How galling it will be to Sarah Palin’s many new enemies if she survives this assault and prevails. If she does, her success may be an important moment in the struggle to shape not just America’s politics but its culture.”

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“In the end, though, it is not just Palin’s large family and important job which have made her the topic of the day at every school pick-up queue in America. It is also the fact that she breaks the Hillary Clinton mould, not only in personality and lifestyle but in ideology as well. By this, I don’t mean merely that she’s a conservative, that she’s an evangelical Christian, or that she opposes abortion.

More interesting are the ways in which she shatters all of the stereotypes altogether: Left/Right, Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative…

None of this is meant to imply that Hillary Clinton’s generation is finished, let alone Hillary herself: she may well be back in the national game, in 2012, 2016, or later. But the appointment of Palin does bring the Hillary Era to an end – she isn’t the archetypal Female American Politician anymore, she’s just one of many.”