Dissecting the Palin haters

Sarah Palin is a newcomer to the national stage, said Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, but already she's been called every name in the book—"Caribou Barbie," "Christian Stepford wife," "a national disgrace." The big complaint seems to be that she "doesn't qualify for the national political fraternity," but the only reason snobby media types have so much "downtime to take free kicks at Gov. Palin" is that they can't be bothered "to look very deeply" at real issues.

Palin has invited so much scorn, said Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic online, because she is there to make the Republican ticket more palatable to "Bush's America: a country of capitalists and Christians." By picking her as his running mate, John McCain, who otherwise had great appeal to centrists, "told the United States of America to go f*** itself."

McCain would be getting "a whole lot more love right now" if he'd picked a more moderate running mate, said Froma Harrop in The Providence Journal via RealClearPolitics, such as Tom Ridge, the pro-choice former Pennsylvania governor and ex-Homeland Security secretary. Instead he chose a woman who has "a habit of dividing America—even individual states—into good and not-so-good sectors." What kind of reaction did McCain expect?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The outpouring of Palin hatred was predictable, that’s for sure, said Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard online. But that’s because “liberals—or I could say Democrats, since the terms are now synonymous”—are such reliable flip-floppers. “Palin has precisely the career profile that liberals are supposed to admire in a woman,” but since she’s a conservative Republican, pro-life, and a “serious Christian,” liberals loathe her.