John Mark Reynolds, a Professor of philosophy at Biola University, runs a live-blog of his thoughts while reading Sarah Palin's Going Rogue.
(Yes, you read that right. Live-blogging a book. What's next? Live-blogging "live-blogging?").
Biola's a Christian university and Reynolds is a conservative (though an admitted Mitt Romney fan), so it's nice to get a take from within that demo.
Two of his key take-aways.
.... Palin uses four hundred pages to give her side of things, but I am still at a loss to describe her political or governing philosophy in any detail. President Obama is sickening us all on the academic as commander-in-chief.
She is the opposite of President Obama, but the opposite of excess is defect and not virtue. Again, Reagan wrote a breeze easy autobiography from which you could discern a serious man, so it is not the fact that this is no dissertation.
.... Palin is most effective in new media because the way it is typically used plays to her strengths. However, it also encourages her weaknesses as it tends to build a like minded community with too little criticism and allows her to stick to sound bites and generalities.
Having said that, he's still immensely impressed by her ability to connect with people and thinks she's endured some vicious hits from the media. But it's how she's chosen to respond to those hits that leaves him worried.
As an aside, I haven't tackled Rogue yet. I'm finishing Sarah from Alaska by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, and again -- if Palin is to pick up support from those beyond hardcore devotees, she's going to have to suck it up and listen to (gulp) McCain's 2008 campaign manager, Steve Schmidt.
Sarah from Alaska, pg. 197.
At the beginning of the campaign, Steve Schmidt had told Palin to "never, ever, ever complain about the media" and instead to leave that task to the aides.
"You need to be tough and strive to have the steeliness of Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Hillary Clinton," he had told her.
Several of Palin's former aides who remained intensely loyal to her agreed that most Americans are turned off by high-profile politicians who play the victim card.
"Our advice was 'Turn the page. Let Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Laura Ingraham beat up on the media. You are an elected official," says one former aide who still speaks highly of Palin.
"But we never really succeeded at that."
The best way for Palin to prove she has the capacity to not just tolerate, but actually welcome dissent is to jump off the Hannity/Mark Levin/ Rush talk show tour and make tough (not necessarily nice, but tough) with Katie Couric and others whom she's clearly blacklisted.
The only person who ever impressed by bearing a grudge was William Wallace (also, Michael Jordan, but he shot that to shit with his Hall of Fame induction speech).
Conroy and Walshe note how quickly Mitt Romney and McCain forgave and made up after beating each other to a pulp during the primary season (also, documented well by Sasha Issenberg here). That's what a unifier does, and what Sarah Palin needs to do, as well.
[Hat tip: Rod Dreher]
