Sarah Palin - Voice of America

Here's a nice article at NRO by Michael Novak entitled "Listening to Sarah; She is a happy American warrior", which I ran across after posting the link just below...

Every time I hear Sarah Palin talking — more and more to jubilant overflow crowds — I hear the voice of America speaking. The other day, I was calling a bank in the small town in Iowa in which my wife Karen grew up (the same hometown as the Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug). After a few sentences, I told the clerk speaking on the telephone that she sounded just like Sarah Palin, and not only because she once answered me “you betcha.” My nephew, who goes to school in the same town, had just handed in a school paper in which he wrote: “Sarah Palin talks just like us.”

A few weeks before, my aunt in western Pennsylvania (John Murtha’s district, recently cruelly slandered by him), celebrated her 80-something birthday with a large surprise party attended by her whole side of the family. A great deal of kindness and mutual concern passed from person to person. I heard many voices that sound a good bit like Sarah Palin’s. The same guts. The same common sense. The same instincts. The same sense of America.

I wonder if most of the people who are today dissing Sarah Palin, at least among a few conservatives I greatly admire, are more accustomed to debating highly educated liberals. Could it be that they understand the diction of journalism and the academy better than they understand the speech of most of America? They understand the maturity, sophistication, and rationalization of their own world better than the simpler but truer instincts of most of America.

I can’t help thinking, when I hear them, that it is not Sarah Palin they feel far superior to, and embarrassed by. It is the life and common sense of most of the humbler American people — and not only in rural areas, but also in the myriad cities and towns that have populations of 100,000 or less. More Americans live in such environments than in the large “sophisticated” cities. And it is they who seem disproportionately to give their lives for this country, more so than the rest of America. Not coincidentally, the schools in these smaller towns seem to hold to considerably higher standards than those in the big cities. And more people in them seem to be in touch with the frontier traditions of America (even western Pennsylvania was once the frontier) than in more “sophisticated” environments.

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Just because Alaska is far from New York, she later said, doesn’t mean Alaskans don’t read. The same magazines and papers come there as everywhere else in America. And it is not obvious that the more you read them, let me add, the better in touch with reality you become.

Read the whole thing!