I just got back from walking my dog, Eli, who is now five months old and loves everybody. A pretty young woman came over and he jumped on her and she caressed him. (My son says that if I were twenty years old, I would get a dog.) She asked what kind of dog he was. I said he was a poodle and then she asked if poodles were as smart as people say. I answered with a quip: “He is a lot like Sara Palin. He holds up his end of the conversation, but just barely.” The woman got the joke and quipped back. "I don't want to talk to you, anymore," she said. "You just insulted your dog."

How is it that Sarah Palin, who I never heard of a month ago, has so deeply engrained herself into all of our mentalities? She is not going to go away, even if McCain loses. She will be remembered long after Dan Quayle is lost to American consciousness. People have tried to distance themselves from her having successfully leeched herself onto their brains through humor, substituting the Tina Fey parody for the real thing, and so making her a joke, just as happens when people distance themselves from bodily processes with gross out humor. But Palin is stronger than that, more like the pornography that shocks and then takes up residence in the imagination. What is so awful about her that we need to be sanitized of her? Consider her seriously, for a moment, if you can stand it.

First, she represents everything bad we Northeasterners find in the American character-- that combination of arrogance, provinciality, anti-intellectualness, and a sense that everything is easy to understand because nothing is understood. Palin can, to that extent, be understood through theology. She has, to begin with, a sense that true opinion about religion is vouchsafed through an act of grace. She also senses that matters of secular knowledge are vouchsafed in a similar way and, more than that, every insight that occurs to her is not subject to comparison to evidence but just seems right, another act of grace. So she does not need to study economics or history to “understand” Russian-United States relations; she just has a sense of them that is not very well expressed when she says that she can look at Russia from Alaska. She possesses something deeper, which is to identify a sensation of knowing with knowing. What you and I would call “knowledge” disappears from the equation. 

Another reason it is so upsetting to see the intrusion of Palin into national politics is because it constitutes an insult to the political process of a magnitude that I would not have thought even Republicans capable. Spiro Agnew was a small time hack. But he could put two or three sentences together without having memorized them. Did the Republican think such a Palin candidacy was credible to the public, never mind whether she was also able? That shows contempt for the electorate, that you can sell them any pig in a poke. Political cynicism can carry you just so far in justifying her. Sure, candidates are not always nominated for their bona fides, though, as a matter of fact, most of the Vice Presidential candidates since Agnew do indeed have the credentials to be President. I may not like Lloyd Bentsen for any number of reasons, but he could have been President, as was also the case with Muskie and George Bush the First when he was picked to be President by Ronald Reagan, as was Al Gore and even Jack Kemp. Palin, however, is so far beneath the bar that she lowers the bar.

There is a third explanation that I think is the most probing. It is very psychological. Palin is one of those people who we have all run across who is intellectually or otherwise so deficient that they are accidents waiting to happen, to become embarrassments to themselves as well as others. It is therefore everyone’s inclination to hope for the best and to believe in the best interpretation of her behavior possible. To do otherwise is cruel as well as a way of calling down upon ourselves very unpleasant feelings associated with watching someone melt down, display what Erving Goffman might have called their inadequate presentation of their competence, a requirement made of all who engage in the most minimal of human interactions, never mind run for Vice President. Dan Quayle was dumb; she acts as if there were no such thing but that the media make it so.

What follows from that is the desire of the rest of us to cooperate with her in the maintenance of her competence or at least the denial of her incompetence. So Katie Couric does not press her too much for to have done so would have been a very severe form of rudeness, to insist on holding up her incompetence for attention. Couric was a bit embarrassed when she pressed on even once to ask her about McCain’s stand on deregulation because Palin could not even come up with standard ripostes to deflect questions, such as the lunge grave, like “you shouldn’t expect me to know such things” or the lunge fallacious, where you just lie, or the lunge abstract, where you talk about what deregulation means.

This is the tyranny of the weak. It is not the tyranny of those weak in character or distorted in their emotions, to use some old psychological categories. It is the tyranny of those who are weak in intellect to the extent that no amount of cramming can make their minds sufficient for the demands that are put on them for at least a bit of abstract thinking. We ran into a bit of this with George W. Bush, and there too made a joke of it, so unwilling to point out his deficiencies in 2000 because his dumbness, after all, was just another trait to compare with Gore’s trait of stiffness or whatever. Dumbness deserved equal time.

I maintain that in 2000 equal time for dumbness was just an excuse to deal with the fact that there is no socially appropriate way to confront dumb people who will not acknowledge their dumbness, which is to say, their insufficiency at dealing with abstract matters. The Reese Witherspoon character in Legally Blonde, after all, was neither stupid nor uneducable. She just had a limited information base, and applied that to brilliant effect. Those weak in intellect get their way because not to give in to them is, at least in the short run, more upsetting than not giving in. You feel sorry for Palin, but if you give in to her, allow her to rant, as Joe Biden did, because he did not want people to gravitate to that pole, she starts to exhibit her arrogance, her sense that she is in charge and should be, just because people do not want to embarrass her by colliding with her outrageous remarks, and so wind up at the opposite poll, enabling her to sound as if she had a position different from yours rather than a chain of words that made no sense. What was that she said about the vice-presidency? That it needed to be more powerful? Was she channeling some right wing theory of the unitary presidency? More likely, she was just saying something stupid based on a misreading of the notes she had been provided. So you can’t either feel sorry for her or challenge her. Now that she has her confidence back, she attacks Obama via Ayres. Would she even understand why a person might think guilt by association is a bad thing? William Kristol understands, though he thinks it should be done anyway. To say this to Palin, though, would be rude, given that she is incapable of operating on that intellectual a level. And yet she could, likely would, become President, if McCain were elected.

I have met people like her in my life, and the only thing to do is run away from them. I wish my head were rid of Palin, that I could stop making snide remarks about her. Her candidacy is therefore a very unfortunate cultural event, regardless of the politics of it. I have difficulty in thinking of a precedent any later than Aimee McPherson, the LA evangelist, someone else who could be played for laughs if one wanted to shrug off her all embracing, barracuda love. Palin is a malignant force that has become a type to replace the anti-intellectual whose style has long intruded on American politics. Palin’s is a more dangerous kind of vicarious interaction. She appeals for you to support her anti-intellectualism lest you seem unkind.