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| Why Palin Really Matters | Market Failure: Government is the Problem |
The Arc of Celebrity
by Christopher Chantrill
September 12, 2008 at 11:17 am
IF YOU BURST onto the scene, they say, your celebrity will last about 15 months unless you amount to more than a flash in the pan.
Let’s see. It’s about 15 months since Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) burst onto the national scene as a breakout presidential candidate.
The trouble with celebrity, Charles Krauthammer warns, is that its currency is novelty. You can trump yesterday’s celebrity with today’s new phenomenon. It is becominig clear, with the Palin phenomenon, that the Obama phenomenon is becoming old and, well, yesterday.
It is clear, in retrospect, that the natural arc of Obama’s celebrity had started to decline by his Berlin speech earlier this summer. So his handlers decided to make his convention acceptance speech a more sober affair, full of facts and figures. Yet he had already committed to make this sober speech in a football stadium complete with faux-Greek temple.
The incongruity between text and context was apparent. Obama was trying to make himself ordinary — and serious — but could hardly remember how.
One star fades, another is born. The very next morning McCain picks Sarah Palin and a new celebrity is launched. And in the celebrity game, novelty is trump. With her narrative, her persona, her charisma carrying the McCain campaign to places it has never been and by all logic has no right to be, she’s pulling an Obama.
What we conservatives hope is that when Palin’s celebrity novelty cools off her real self will emerge and it will turn out to be the reality a gifted and serious politician.
Earlier this week she gave her first media interview, to Charlie Gibson of ABC News. “Mixed Reviews,” said the London Daily Telegraph. “[U]nfamiliar with the Bush Doctrine,” said the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, the conservative blogosphere was full of comments about Charlie Gibson’s missteps.
Sooner or later, either before the election or after it, the American people are going to tumble to the fact that the Demcrats are not offering Change this year, but more of the same leavened with a new celebrity. How could they be offering change? Ninety percent of the government programs on the books today are their legacy, the legacy of a century of the welfare state.
Democrats are not yet ready to consider that there might be ways other than the model of the centralized government program to deliver social services. Givern that the government program has served them so well—in political power, in fame, and in comfortable sinecures—why would they offer Change?
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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