Give Palin a chance

There are many factors that render Sarah Palin fit for high office, not the least of which is a generous helping of common sense — a faculty sorely lacking in the current leadership. She is unpretentious and is nearer to the majority of ordinary people than her faux-sophisticated competitors, the beltway schemers, insider traders, brazen peculators, and outright liars now in power. This is precisely what an indignant punditocracy cannot forgive her: the plainspokenness, the deep convictions, the sense of loyalty, the chiming with ordinary folk — what the pointy-headed can only interpret as blunt-mindedness. But Palin’s moral and political values hew closer to the heart of the American republican experiment — individual liberty, personal integrity, Emersonian self-reliance, responsibility for choice, true patriotism, unobtrusive government dedicated to the public weal — than do those of almost any other political figure on the American scene today, with the exception of Mike Huckabee. I have no doubt that such stalwart values would stand her in good stead in the perilous world of international politics and that her decisions would invariably strengthen rather than weaken the United States, which latter is the deplorable case in today’s international theater.