Contrary to all indications otherwise, Sarah Palin is not an idiot. Oh, you bet, she says things that indicate her brain may at times resemble a vast windblown tundra, but she's smart as a whip in ways I will demonstrate below. Don't forget, she was, until two weeks ago, the future of the Republican Party. Only because the electorate had time to parse her words and study her record as a public official has she become a national laughingstock, now widely cited as the reason McCain's campaign sank like a stone.
Without the corruption probes (still going on in Alaska), though, Palin has it made. She knows how to pander and pose. She knows how to simultaneously be the pious hockey goalie librarian, slapping liberal thoughts away from the net of Wasilla, and the winking Girl Next Door. To the great minds of political punditry—at least at Fox News and the AP—this means she's a future "star" of her disgraced party.
Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) will no doubt be joining her over the next four years of fundraising and binge-buying at Nieman-Marcus after she loses her reelection bid in two weeks. Bachmann, another telegenic right-wing woman, told Chris Matthews last week that Barack and Michelle Obama hold "anti-American views," equating the pair with people who "detest America." Bachmann then called on the media to "take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would love to see an expose like that."
Holy Joe McCarthy, you betcha they would!
Though Bachmann has been widely excoriated for her remarks, she was merely echoing what Palin has been saying on the stump for weeks about "pro-America areas of this great nation" and "the elites in the liberal media." Palin has been spewing nativist rhetoric that harks back to a time in our history of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-black "Know-Nothingness." Specifically, she often uses the word "exceptional" to describe the American people. It's not an accident of the tongue. "Exceptionalism"—a term, used most recently by the framers of the Project for a New American Century, which helped justify the "doctrine" that the U.S. was entitled to take pre-emptive military strikes—was the buzzword of the early-twentieth-century American eugenics movement, the goals of which were "race betterment" and "breeding exceptional Americans." Though this movement had the veneer of "progressivism," what it essentially meant was that dark-skinned and "ethnic" residents were discouraged from having children, while white Americans were encouraged to breed.
Kathy J. Cooke, a professor of history at Quinnipiac University, has focused her research on this period of time. "I doubt it is an accident of language choice, because the idea [of exceptionalism] is so common among historians and I would think speechwriters would know this," said Cooke, who is working on a book about the so-called "American eugenics movement."
While Cooke does not recall "exceptional" being used in a political context in the early twentieth century, she said similar ideas were floating around the campaign trails.
"One-hundred-percent Americanism was particularly strong just before World War I," said Cooke. "Aside from the political context, though, exceptionalism really permeated American culture. America has considered itself exceptional right from the beginning of European settlement."
Where did this idea come from?
"Its origins are substantially (although not entirely) Puritan, the idea of the City on a Hill with early Puritan settlement," said Cooke.
What Palin and Bachmann are tapping into, knowingly or unknowingly, are ideas that have been used and abused throughout American history. They resonate on some deep level with a nation that likes to view itself as unique from, if not better than, other nations.
Expect this rhetoric to increase over the next four years.
