Joe Carter provides a gentlemanly defense of Sarah Palin’s credentials right here at Culture11. He’s right to point out that her performance on one television show, especially one that has deep reserves of ideological contempt for her and anyone like her, is less than decisively disqualifying. Still, our national leaders are public figures and as public figures should be held to a reasonable expectation for delivering both crafted and extemporaneous articulations of policy and the like. Of course, if this were uniformly enforced as a criterion, Biden would never have been picked as Obama’s running mate. The real source of disdain for Sarah seems to be rooted in her anti-cosmopolitanism—she embraces the particularity of her origins, of her moral beliefs, and of familial and political relations. By extension, she repudiates a chic multiculturalism, that in attempting to eschew all particularity, leaves only tolerance as the last, however now dogmatically transformed, virtue.
