"Give 'em Hell, Sarah"
HAYWARD, STEVEN F.
Give ’em Hell, Sarah Like Truman, a natural-born executive BY STEVE HAYWARD Lurking just below the surface of the second-guessing about Sarah Palin’s fitness to be president is the serious...
...American political thought since its earliest days has been ambiguous or confl icted about the existence and character of a “natural aristocracy” of governing talent...
...Steven F. Hayward is F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989, to be published in early 2009...
...Reagan and Truman forced their way into grudging acceptance and eventual recognition by the establishment through genuine and hardearned political success, and Palin too will have to prove herself...
...another six years in the governor’s offi ce isn’t likely to tell us anything we can’t already discern if we don’t let status bias get in the way...
...Her success with voters, and in national offi ce, would be an affront and a reproach to establishment self-importance...
...Here Adams was reminding us of the centrality of substantive persuasion in political life, something Republicans haven’t been very good at of late...
...It’s not just that she didn’t go to Harvard...
...She hasn’t been brought into the slipstream of the establishment by which we unoffi cially certify our highest leaders...
...Today’s establishment doubts this...
...Can one imagine Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton (or John McCain for that matter) wondering such a thing...
...Reagan knows who he is and therefore he possesses the fi rst prerequisite for being a good president...
...When things come to that stage there’ll be no more to this job than there was to running Jackson County and not any more worry...
...Jefferson, moreover, trusted ordinary citizens to recognize political virtue in their fellow citizens: “Leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff...
...I say there are simple answers to many of our problems— simple but hard,” Reagan liked to say...
...But this begs an even more troublesome question: If we implicitly think uncertified citizens are unfi t for the highest offi ces, why do we trust those same citizens to select our highest offi cers through free elections...
...Give ’em Hell, Sarah Like Truman, a natural-born executive BY STEVE HAYWARD Lurking just below the surface of the second-guessing about Sarah Palin’s fitness to be president is the serious question of whether we still believe in the American people’s capacity for self-government, what we mean when we affi rm that all American citizens are equal, and whether we tacitly believe there are distinct classes of citizens and that American government at the highest levels is an elite occupation...
...she’s never been on Meet the Press...
...So far no one has picked up on the significance of Palin’s invocation of Harry Truman in her convention speech...
...Doubts about Palin have come not just from the left but from across the political spectrum, some of them from conservatives like David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will...
...In general they will elect the really good and wise...
...Well I’m facing another tall day as usual,” he ended that letter to Bess...
...The issue is not whether the establishment would let such a person as Palin cross the bar into the certifi ed political class, but whether regular citizens of this republic have the skill and ability to control the levers of government without having fi rst joined the certifi ed political class...
...To the contrary, Palin’s ascent revives issues and arguments about self-government that raged at the time of the American founding and before...
...Ronald Reagan evinced the same attitude toward offi ce as Truman and Palin...
...In his third summit meeting with Gorbachev, Reagan wondered aloud what would happen if the two of them closed the doors to their offi ce and just quietly slipped away: “How long would it be before people missed us...
...If the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are watching the storm over Palin, they must surely be revisiting their famous dialogue about America’s governing class...
...It is incomplete to view the controversy over Palin’s suitability for high offi ce just in ideological or cultural terms, as most of the commentary has done...
...The establishment is affronted by the idea that an ordinary hockey mom—a mere citizen—might be just as capable of running the country as a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations...
...In his reply to Adams, Jefferson expressed more confi dence that political virtue and capacity for government were not the special province of a recognized aristocratic class, but that aristoi (natural aristocrats) could be found among citizens of all kinds: “It would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society...
...But I like ’em that way...
...Adams’s widely misunderstood argument that there should perhaps be an explicit recognition and provision for an aristocratic class fi nds its reprise in the snobbery that greeted Palin’s arrival on the scene...
...This closed-shop attitude is exactly what both Jefferson and Adams set themselves against...
...Some of the doubts about Palin are doubts about self-government itself...
...No previous president of the United States,” Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote shortly after Reagan’s election in 1980, “had so bizarre a preparation for political offi ce...
...Partly this is the self-justifi cation for establishment institutions and attitudes, but partly it represents the substantive view that the size and complexity of modern government require a level of expertise beyond the reach of ordinary citizens...
...In her fi rst innings, Palin has offered a unique display of the capacity that John Adams described as the essence of a “natural aristocrat” in America: “By an aristocrat I mean every man who can command two votes—one besides his own...
...We can see already from Palin’s record—unseating a governor of her own party, delivering a long-blocked pipeline deal—that she shares this trait...
...Indeed, the basic problems of the few and the many, and the sources of wisdom and virtue in politics, stretch back to antiquity...
...they wanted a republic where talent and public spirit would fi nd easy access to the establishment...
...she hasn’t participated in Aspen Institute seminars or attended the World Economic Forum...
...Less than two months after abruptly taking over from FDR with no preparation, Truman wrote his wife Bess describing his quick progress in taking the reins: It won’t be long before I can sit back and study the whole picture and tell ’em what is to be done in each department...
...Churchill wrote that he immediately liked Truman when they met for the fi rst time in Berlin in 1945 because he could see that Truman possessed the “obvious power of decision...
...Her reference was more than just a bridge to a heartland-versusBeltway theme...
...She shows signs of sharing their humility, power of decision, and simplicity toward self-government...
...That this graduate of Eureka College— where?—had made his career in Hollywood, a place as exotic and peculiar as Alaska, was decisive with the establishment...
...Reagan’s election,” John P. Roche, a former head of Americans for Democratic Action, wrote in 1984, “was thus an 8-plus earthquake on the political Richter scale, and it sent a number of eminent statesmen— Republican and Democratic— into shock...
...He didn’t need any more “experience” to master the job...
...Truman, recall, was the only president of the 20th century who was not a college graduate...
...It’s the complicated answer that’s easy, because it avoids facing the hard moral issues...
...In retrospect it is clear that Truman “got it...
...John Sears, whom Reagan had unceremoniously fi red from his campaign in 1980, later put his fi nger on a key aspect of Reagan’s strength: Since the primary prerequisite for handling the presidency is to ignore the immensity of it, a president must fi nd the confi dence to do so in selfknowledge...
...In fact, on closer inspection, one can hear in the criticism of Palin the echo of the same kind of complaint made against Ronald Reagan throughout his political career...
...Never mind that he’d been governor of California...
...Sure, she gives a good speech, but . . .” They should be saying to Palin, “Welcome to the aristocracy, governor...
...Reagan knows himself better than most presidents and has kept his identity separate from politics...
...Part of what bothers the establishment about Palin is her seeming insouciance toward public offi ce...
...For Truman and Reagan the key ingredient to successful statecraft was simplicity...
...Nor is this a new question...
...Anyone who affects making it look easy surely lacks gravitas and must not grasp the complexity or depth of modern political problems...
...The talking heads of the establishment deprecated Palin’s debut...
...It wasn’t only liberals who found Reagan incomprehensible...
Vol. 14 • September 2008 • No. 2
