But no politician has better embodied the Orthogonian spirit better than Sarah Palin. Like Nixon, Palin was driven by a sense that the elites were out to get her. Those elites could be the mainstream Alaska Republican Party. They could be Ivy League graduates. They could be national media figures who mock her use of platitudes. They could be secularist elements that see the world in more complicated moral and theological terms than the Assembly of God. Sarah Palin played on the paranoid dimension of Orthogonianism - Obama palling around with terrorists, etc. - better than any Republican in years.I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that I'm not the only bitter out there who gets a tad peeved when liberal politicos try to convince the public that $787B of red ink wasn't enough, public health care will be swell (also resulting in more debt), and that I'm some kind of a terrorist. The anti-elite sentiment comes from the perception that people with political power ridicule flyover country cultural norms and call everyone traitors if they're not driving a Prius to work.
But, that doesn't mean that smart people shouldn't be running the country. Sarah Palin wasn't very smart.
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