Media elitists are playing right into Palin's hands

Nixon understood that anti-elitism trumps everything — in his case, even his own unlikability. And when he delivered the masterstroke of lumping the mainstream media in with those elites, he effectively deflected any criticism of him as just more of “their” arrogance. Every time he was attacked, Nixon emphasized, the silent majority of ordinary Americans was attacked.

Palin is playing that same card on the gamble that anti-elitism will trump her own inexperience, incompetence and lack of knowledge. She knows that the more pundits harp on these so-called deficiencies, and the more the media cover it, the more she can claim that they are really just engaging in an old sport: expressing contempt for ordinary Americans, of which she is the self-proclaimed political exemplar. Her self-promotion is designed to elicit their contempt for her and express her’s for them, including the very title of her book. At one point she describes inviting NBC’s Andrea Mitchell to Alaska, ostensibly so Palin could be interviewed but really, she says, so that Mitchell and her fancy-pants East Coast crew could be “slimed” with fish guts.

We’ve been getting a lot of stories like that one during this tour, and we’ll be getting a lot more — because it is really all Palin has to sell, and because it works. It may even be more successful than Nixon’s similar gambit.