AS PALIN’S two books—her memoir, Going Rogue, and her new testament, America by Heart—indicate, she has an inveterate hatred of those she perceives as elites. In tracing that hatred, too little attention has been paid to Palin’s youth. She notes that her father left the precincts of American liberalism—North Hollywood—for the sticks (first Idaho, then Alaska). Thanks to the forty-ninth state’s eagerness to attract teachers to the Far North, he could earn double his normal salary (though Palin makes much of her mistrust of big government, she doesn’t really address the fact that her father was a state employee).

Her memoir suggests that her suspicion of elites surely has its origins in her childhood membership in the Assemblies of God, the world’s biggest Pentecostal church whose members often engage in the practice of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Palin calls it the most “alive” church in Wasilla, where she soaked up fire-breathing sermons. The hockey mom has never attended a hierarchical church that claims sacerdotal authority. Instead, the emphasis on an unmediated, direct access to God may help explain why not much seems to impress Palin apart from her own intuition. Palin, who after attending one college after another finally landed a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Idaho, makes it abundantly clear that she is wholly unimpressed by diplomas, expertise, science (a subject that her own father, who, she hastily notes, was no churchgoer, taught). She announces:

In eighteen years of impromptu supper-table lessons and expert-guided field trips to America’s national parks, never had Dad or anyone else convinced me that the earth had sprung forth conveniently stocked with the ingredients necessary to spontaneously generate life and its beauty and diversity; in fact, I thought that idea flew in the face of the evidence I saw all around.

She flaunts her ignorance as a badge of credibility.

In this regard, she is different from her idol Ronald Reagan, who worshipped new technology and actually lived in a futuristic home outfitted by General Electric, for whom he worked as a pitchman. Where Palin does jibe with Reagan is in serving as a town crier for the old virtues that America has supposedly abandoned. Her early career also resembles his—like Reagan, who first worked as a sports-radio announcer, Palin recounts that she covered high school and college sports as an intern for several television stations: “I loved the intensity of the newsroom, the deadlines, the adrenaline.” But Reagan lit out for Hollywood to make it big.

Palin, by contrast, argues for the backwoods. It was a “huge relief” to her to return from Idaho and, we are told, “beat feet back to Alaska,” where her boyfriend and future husband Todd lived. She never traveled beyond her comfort zone. Even today she doesn’t leave the red states for her book tour, let alone take a trip abroad. One wonders if she even holds a passport.

And though she may now be a celebrity extraordinaire, Palin never carved out a working career. Instead, she became what she purports to despise—a professional politician. The Wasilla City Council. The mayoralty where she got to ban books at the local library, or so the story goes. Service on an oil and gas commission. Then governor. Finally, the nod from John McCain. For all her noisy praise of the joys of motherhood, it seems clear that, again and again, her children took a backseat to her political career.

To underestimate Palin or treat her as living in cloud-cuckoo-land, as many do, is obviously a mistake. Palin is formidable, enterprising, gritty. Among other things, she has managed to transform the very insularity of her life into a trampoline upon which this lissome lass can keep bouncing higher and higher.

 

NOW SHE is staking out her political positions; and they all vibrate with an antielitist, America-as-chosen-nation, tell-the-world-how-it-is tenor. Nor is hypocrisy in short supply.

She begins her gauzy book, America by Heart, by extolling Frank Capra’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. She declares that because it contains “timeless truths,” “it’s a movie Hollywood would never make today.” In fact, it’s a treacly left-wing film devoted to showing that the powerful corporations, who buy politicians with ease, are intent on oppressing the working class. For Palin, however, the bottom line is that the movie shows that Americans can take their country back if they only have enough gumption to stand up to The Man. How she squares her denunciations of backroom corporate oil deals in Alaska with her call for more drilling is somewhat mysterious. But overall, her populism amounts to a very 1960s message, if you think about it, further testament to the radicalism that’s overtaking the conservative movement.

Radicalism is also present in her foreign-policy views. Palin exemplifies the neocon credo that America, because of its innate goodness, is an exceptional nation, one endowed by a higher power to act with force around the globe to promote freedom, behaving as though tyrants at home (yes, the evildoers on the left) and foreign dictators are functionally and morally equivalent, requiring overthrow from freedom fighters on the right. This from the woman who can see Russia from her backyard. Palin, who has remained immured among her kind, exemplifies the illusion of American omnipotence.

Then there is her adulation of Reagan once again reflected here—redolent of Neocon 101. She regurgitates the brummagem claim that Reagan huffed and puffed and blew the Soviet door down. She claims, “For my entire life, Americans had been told by the propaganda mouthpieces of the Communist regimes—not to mention plenty of others in the free world—that Soviet communism was the way of the future.” Oh, please. Belief in the “Soviet experiment,” as it was known, was a phenomenon of the 1930s that petered out with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. And by the 1980s, shrewd observers of the Soviet empire such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan were arguing that it was a spent force, not a potent threat to American national security.

Palin’s real aim in lauding American exceptionalism and decrying Hollywood and the liberal media elite is to portray Obama as deeply unpatriotic, un-American and a very bad man. She concludes, “We have a president, perhaps for the first time since the founding of our republic, who expresses his belief that America is not the greatest earthly force for good the world has ever known.” But Palin is preaching Wilsonianism on steroids, not conservatism. At a moment when Obama is prosecuting two ruinously expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and might become mired in a third in Korea, it seems odd to criticize him for a lack of martial vigor, as does Palin. And when it comes to domestic politics, she seems to regard Democrats as unpatriotic varmints who need to be hunted down.

 

ARE THESE jabs just preparation for a presidential run? Some of Palin’s pronunciamentos about “refudiating” the Left are simply good for a giggle. But she clearly is trying to bulk up her policy credentials. Palin has been weighing in on a variety of issues, including monetary policy, where she is warning of hyperinflation thanks to Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s determination to stimulate the economy back to some semblance of life. For his part, Obama says he’s not spending any time “thinking” about Palin. If so, he must be the only person who isn’t.

The truth is that Palin’s star wattage has never burned more brightly. Supermom has her books, a reality-television program, a Fox News show, not to mention her sprawling family, to keep her center stage. Perhaps Palin’s celebrity will fade. But it doesn’t seem likely. She has every incentive to make a run for it. The longer she occupies the limelight, the more she becomes a member of the class that she denounces. To capitalize on her populist credentials, she needs to run, now or never.

There can be no doubting that Palin’s formidable political talents and sheer viciousness would make her difficult to defeat in the Republican primaries. As a presidential candidate, her adherence to contemporary conservative catechisms, coupled with her Mean Girl acidulousness, might make her the perfect weapon to defeat the prissy Obama, who seems terrified of uttering a sentence without the assistance of a teleprompter. The only person who could take on Palin might be the current first lady, but Michelle’s not running for office (at least not yet).

Palin couldn’t ask for a more perfect foe. Obama represents everything she has been battling against for decades, an Ivy League elitist who surrendered his street cred to join the meritocracy. Palin has been in combat almost since she left the womb. But whether Palin is qualified to be commander in chief is another matter. Her wild statements suggest that she lacks an internal governor, which is why to call Palin a conservative is a misnomer. She is a radical. If this Mama Grizzly reaches the Oval Office, her lusty roars might well make the Bush presidency look like a dainty tea party.

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