Brooks’s main argument against Palin is that she lacks the type of experience and historical understanding that led President Bush to a 26 percent approval rating in his final months in office [bold mine-DL]. ~Laura Ingraham

Er…what?  This is what Brooks said:

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

In other words, as Matt Lewis managed to pick up, Brooks objects to the logic of the Palin pick because he thinks it resembles the approach to governing that typified the Bush years.  Lewis finds the comparison to Bush offensive and wrong, but that is at least what Brooks said.  Like James, however, I find the idea that the Bush years represented an anti-establishment attitude bizarre.  It is impossible to think of Bush, the legacy President with his administration staffed by the relics veterans of Republican administrations past, and conjure up an image of a foe of the political establishment.  James writes:

Bush simply tried as hard as possible to ignore, brush off, and sideline criticism. It just so happened that the establishment media was one such source of criticism, and Paul O’Neill was another, and there are lots of examples to draw from of ‘insidery’ voices being silenced and establishment dissent frowned upon. But these things are like peas clustered at the base of a mountain of evidence that Bush had no problem at all with establishmentarianism so long as it suited his basic purposes. For every Scowcroft that was left out on the doorstep there was a Cheney given the run of the house. We can try as hard as we like to insist that cronyism, secrecy, and vindictiveness are anti-establishmentarian, but as a rule they are the products of establishments, and the pathologies of bureaucratic institutions.

This is right, but this entire debate about the anti-establishment populism Palin supposedly represents and its similarity or lack of it to Bush’s style simply reproduces McCain campaign propaganda that presents Palin as an anti-establishment reforming champion.  Challenging and throwing out incumbents are not enough–if that constituted being anti-establishment, Macbeth would be one of the great anti-establishment heroes of all time.  Bush, too, claimed to be an outsider and ”reformer with results,” but we understand that this was all a lot of nonsense that he felt compelled to say as the nominee of the party out of power.  His experience was limited, he came from outside the city, but his ties to the establishment were strong, which is the worst of all worlds, since he built up his inner circle with longtime loyalists who shielded him from reality, but he also became more dependent on Washington fixtures for advice and did not have the preparation to be able to judge matters apart from their counsel. 

Something that seems to elude these discussions is the recognition that ambitious, new pols are not anti-establishment–they want to be the establishment, or a part of it, or else they are bound for long, disappointing, stagnant careers in the backbenches or the backwoods.  The basic truth about anyone competing at this level for high office is that they may not yet be of the establishment, but they are very much in favor of the establishment provided that they are an important player in it.  The real anti-establishment candidates are known by their marginalization.  Washington pols and their allies who run against Washington are having us on in the same way that the branches of the federal government con us by pretending to check one another while constantly aggrandizing more power for the central state as a whole.  Every wave of reform is stymied because Washington pols will never of their own volition yield power that Washington possesses, which gives the citizens less and less leverage over each succeeding generation of so-called reformers.  No one in the major parties calling for reform or change intends to alter this structure in any meaningful way. 

The flip side of Palin’s anti-elite rhetoric is the burning desire for validation and inclusion in that elite; the hostility to her by those who belong to the elite is that of the insiders who really do not like the new applicant.  Obama endures being mocked as an elitist, which is proof that he has already made it, which is why he is all the more careful not to challenge the status quo in any meaningful way.  As Lizza correctly observed, “Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.”  I will leave it to psychoanalysts to ponder whether this was a calculated effort to avoid the embittered oppositional route his father took against Kenyatta.  Regardless, the relevant similarities between Palin and Bush, beside the slightly shared background as evangelical governors of oil-rich states in the West who know nothing about foreign affairs, are their inclinations toward decisiveness, stubbornness and perhaps lack of curiosity, which made for such a dangerous combination over the last seven and a half years.  Those are the similarities that should give us pause about Palin.  There is no reason to worry about her anti-establishment attitude, because she does’t have one.

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