If the people lead....

One of my neighbors seems to be a pretty standard Boulder hippie bourgeois liberal. She drives a subaru outback and has an "I Love Barack" sticker on it. Recently it was joined by the rather tired cliche "If the People Lead, the Leaders will Follow." I think we have all come to realize that this, along with another classic "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" have implied clarifiers "if the people leading are Leftists... if the dissent is Leftist." But thinking about the disdain and shameless lies about the dissent over Health Care reform I have come to realize that the Leaders also don't like the "people."

Ken Gladney is of the people, Henry Gates is not- neither is Barack Obama. I am not a Sarah Palin fan, but she resonates deeply with me, because unlike Barack Obama she is the first politician on the national stage to represent the people on an experiential and personal level. Even when they are out of touch, our leaders still represent us, but none of them know us like she does. Can you name any major leader who went to a state college? Who worked with their hands? Whose ability to wield a hammer went beyond photo shoots and actually helped her husband build their home? More than any politician since, well Lincoln, she truly represents the people. She is one of us. But we never got to know her, because the media created a caricature of her that is just like the one they are making of us now: dumb, ignorant peasants.

I heard, and hear, my students make all kinds of dismissive comments about her. The most recent was that she is a dumb B!*%h because she said Africa was a country. I asked my student if that made president Obama a dumb bastard because he said there were 57 states in America... He was lost and didnt know what to say. I then asked him the same rhetorical questions above and asked him who really knows his world and understands his life- who has actually lived it? Only Palin. She represents him, she represents the people and if the Establishment doesn't like her it's because she reminds them of the great unwashed "people."

Americans did not get to see the real Palin, because the Establishment cannot know her anymore than they know us. The leaders don't want the people to lead. We had a chance and they crucified the people. They call the people a mob, nazis, and other assorted epithets. Bill Ayers actually killed people, and does not regret it, but he is one of the Establishment- definitely not of the people, so he gets a pass. Sarah Palin suggests that socializing medicine may lead to "death panels" and she gets ridiculed. The irony is that her statements are no more inflammatory or idiotic than the stuff spoken by college professors across America on a daily basis. Churchill and Ayers are not the exception. But then they are not the "people" either. Sarah Palin is, and therefore must be crushed.