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Friday, September 5, 2008
Our values reflected in those of Palin
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Country music legend Loretta Lynn, the coal miner’s daughter, captured the America that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin touches in Lynn’s 1971 hit, “One’s on the Way.”
The song contrasts the glitzy world of celebrities with the routine of the ordinary life of a woman in Topeka where: “The rain is a fallin’. The faucet is a drippin’ and the kids are a bawlin’, one of ‘em a toddlin’, and one is a crawlin’. And one’s on the way.”
Though dated, it speaks to life removed from the spectacle of television, where unimportant people engage in celebrity and important people play games with incomprehensible purpose and rules, while, for the rest of America, “the screen door’s a bangin’; the coffee’s boilin’ over and the wash needs a hangin’,” and the routines of ordinary life prevail.
There is a frustration extant in this country. It’s the frustration that, while we play by the rules and manage, as a family, the routines of life, Washington betrays us. Betrays us in the sense that we are made strangers from our government. We can’t make it be responsible. We can’t make it reform. We can’t make it understand — we can’t make them, the celebrities and insiders, the important people, understand.
That’s what’s most refreshing about Palin. She is one of us. Her family is the one where the rain falls and the faucet drips and, no matter what, the family deals with it. These families go to work every day, send their sons and daughters off to fight the country’s wars, nurse their children through crisis, and walk proudly together to face the troubles that come their way.
It’s been said repeatedly that she’s genuine. She’s authentic. She’s real. She’s not somebody who scripted her life to be in a position of power and influence by age 30 or 40. She’s just a woman from the nation’s frontier state who lives among people who are open and honest, who don’t know when not to talk to the media or how to speak in phrases empty and correct. They just live and deal with life as it comes.
Gov. Sonny Perdue, when asked once why he didn’t trumpet his administration’s successes, responded by telling a story of farmers gathered at the country store. Boasting was pointless and unbecoming, he said, because farmers had but to drive by the fields of others to know the caliber of their work. The crop spoke for itself.
With Sarah Palin, the crop speaks for itself. There’s no pretense, nor political calculation, nor abstract Washington think-tank or interest group agendas in play on the issue of abortion. She and husband Todd had months to decide about a problematic pregnancy; they chose life. They chose to build their family in accordance with their values. They were not dealing with what-might-be. They were dealing with life.
On the crisis in their daughter’s life, they were pawns in a chess game that pits abstinence-only education interest groups against those that argue some other policy position. They are the American family. “Our family has the same ups and downs as any other,” she told the nation Wednesday, “the same challenges and the same joys.”
Their son Track is off to war. This is no abstraction. This is no pro-con on the wisdom of pursuing the war waged against us into Iraq. This is an Amercian family that understands and feels the obligation that John McCain had expressed to the Bob Dole generation in his 1996 speech to the Republican convention: You did for us. We do for you. It’s not a game. It’s not a talking point. It’s Topeka. It’s Commerce and Lithia Springs and Wasilla. It’s us.
It’s the family that’s proud to be American composed of those who feel goose bumps when the flag passes in parades. Palin drew wild applause Wednesday night when she declared in obvious response to Michelle Obama’s pronouncement that for the first time, with the ascent of her husband, she felt proud to be an American:
People in the small towns where she grew up, “love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.” It’s not conditional love. It’s not love based on whether we behave and believe as others wish. It’s lasting and unconditional.
Palin’s story is our story. Her life is our life.
She and McCain will carry the South because her values and his are ours.
She is not of Washington.
She is of us.
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Coverdell, gun joke, gas prices
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend-free-for-all, convention edition. Pick a topic:
It’s no secret that I was a great fan of the late Paul Coverdell, the U.S. senator from Georgia who was destined for greatness until his premature death in 2000. One of the nicest and most unexpected tributes imaginable came this week in Minneapolis from the 1996 presidential nominee, Bob Dole of Kansas, who served as Senate majority leader. Speaking to a small group that included no more than half a dozen Georgians, he extolled the willingness of Sen. John McCain to offer assistance, rather than criticism, on tough issues. Then, almost as an aside, he mentioned that there was another guy like that, uh, Coverdell. That free-thought tribute was, I thought, one of the finest possible from a legendary senator who had known them by the score.
Great joke making the rounds here: Every gun shop in Alabama was bought out after news broke that the Russians had invaded Georgia. Seems they were determined to stop the Russians before they ravaged Alabama too.
Gas prices drop. Pickup sales improve. GM’s Chevrolet Silverado was the nation’s best-selling vehicle last month. Discounts helped. Price still sells cars. Those who don’t like big trucks as personal vehicles like high gas prices because they dampen the market and, presumably, the need for more road capacity.
T. Boone Pickens, who’s pushing windmills from Texas to Canada and solar from Texas to California, likes high gas prices too. His argument is “drill, baby, drill,” an oft-repeated phrase since it was spoken on the floor of the convention Wednesday, but only as one part of an energy strategy. Nancy Pelosi makes Pickens’ argument that drilling offshore and in Alaska won’t solve the problem —- whoever thought it did? —- but she has no strategy for energy independence and Pickens might.
A band of “drill here, drill now” Republicans is manning the fort back in Congress, still trying to pressure Pelosi for a vote. That valiant effort, soon to conclude, was led by Tom Price of Roswell and kicked off by Lynn Westmoreland of Grantvillle. All Georgia Republican House members participated. When Price and Phil Gingrey spoke on it here in Minneaopolis, a supportive Georgia delegation cheered wildly. They want fighters (one of the reasons they loved Gov. Sarah Palin).
What Obama surge? Georgia’s Secretary of State Karen Handel still insists the numbers are not there. It could happen, but “right now you’re just having the normal presidential voter registration,” she told me Thursday. Between December and Aug. 31 of 2004, registration increased 4.9 percent. For the same time period this cycle, it’s up 5.2 percent. Georgia’s a high voter-registration state and “there’s not a whole lot more room to go in terms of getting full capacity to vote,” she said.
Lots of voter registration forms are going out the door, but in many cases they’re re-registering voters. That’s one reason Gov. Sonny Perdue can say, as he did here: “Let Obama and Joe (pause, as though trying to remember the name) Biden come to Georgia and spend as much money as they want … and we are still goin’ to wax ‘em.”
- Three reasons to be concerned about an Obama and a “what’s his name?” victory, as explained by Sen. Johnny Isakson: In the first 30 days of Democratic control of the White House and Congress, they’ll do away with the secret ballot in union-organizing drives, sunset “every one of the rational Bush tax proposals” between 2009 and 2011, and “the world will know America blinked in the war on terrorism.” Convinces me. And that’s just the last two of the three.
8 More threes, this from House Speaker Glenn Richardson. One’s a prediction, the other’s a promise and the third’s an epiphany, he said. Prediction: McCain-Palin wins Georgia by 10 points, and with 38 state House seats contested, Dems won’t take control. (Nobody in either party thinks they will.) Promise: “We’ll stop some of the fussin’ and fightin’” under the Gold Dome. (Yes, do, or it’s career terminal.) And the epiphany? He’s realized the truth of what his mother always told him: Just because it pops into your head, it doesn’t have to come out of your mouth.
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