Granted she does not speak for main stream intellectuals or policy wonks who think all political speech has to have certain expectable qualities. Being already too much lost in their own heads, these superficial critics fail to notice when someone has come on the scene who actually speaks from her heart.
This speaking from the heart many Americans will understand. Not all hearts experience the same truths - heart values are not necessarily universal values. Nor am I suggesting that Governor Palin ought to be the next President. That dynamic is of a whole other order. What she is doing, however, in following her heart, is braking free of what was imposed on her from the outside by political operatives and policy wonks within the Republican Party, and by the Press with its own assumptions and ignorance.
It is in fact her very much breathless presentation, and the absence of an aide-written speech, that was on display in her recent announcement. She spoke what she felt, and knew that this was something that has to be added to the political dialog. Her breaking away from the prison of Republican and Press presumption was in fact an act of courage. She very much was following something that would have been prized by Emerson, who said: In self trust all virtues are comprehended.
Freed now of the straight jacket of contemporary expectations of both the Right and the Left and the Press (all of whom are confused and overly critical) she first becomes invisible (to those types of thinkers) for she is demonstrating characteristics which their natural cynicism believes will lead to failure (when the goal ought to be winning elections and leading). She is, in a very real sense, the counter-pole to Obama's clearly ineffectual cool intellectuality.
She will have considerable response in those Americans who prize speaking from the heart rather than the arid intellectuality of policy wonks and the over-controlled pablum-speech of contemporary politicians. It remains to be seen whether she will take this freedom from the prison of assumptions and become a genuine leader.
If the metaphor of being a point-guard is true to her real nature, then we might expect her to also lack the vain egotism the inflates the self-view of most politicians. She wants us to care, not about her, but about real American questions. Stranger things have happened in the political history of humanity, and she just might touch a cord in the many people who are finding themselves falling into the morass of the economic chaos of the near future.
Separated from the constraints of the hate-speech tendencies of the blowhards on both the Right and the Left, she might actually bring something much needed to the contemporary political dialog. Freed of any allegiance to the worst of recent pseudo-conservatism, she might just bring a rebirth of conservatism's higher virtues. Even so we will have to wait and see. If she falls under the influence of the Rove-type manipulators or the arrogance of the demagogues, then she can be a real danger to the needed harmony of our polity. If she continues to grow and see the folly of these kinds of influences too, she just might surprise us all.
