Bernie Quigley – The Hill

Some hated her because she is beautiful. One prominent Washington Post columnist and TV commentator scorned her because she had a Garfield calendar on her desk. Others hated her because she is a hunter. A few on the margins even hated her because she is white. But it is too late now. Sarah Palin has arrived. But beneath it all — beneath almost two years of slander and disgrace on the part of the mainstream press — was a real fear. And for good reason, because Sarah Palin is a political genius.

While her detractors were in college reading Derrida and Michel Foucault, she was playing basketball. It made her a relentless competitor. It made her a great strategist. While the others were modifying the existing establishment to fit their own needs, she was building her own house with her own hands. And now she is building her own political establishment.

Supporters, like Dick Morris, say questions will arise about her quitting her job as governor of Alaska. But it was a bold, brilliant and necessary strategy. She wouldn’t have had a chance against such a hostile press and political establishment otherwise. Since then she has led the way at NY-23 — Rick Perry and Tim Pawlenty followed. Since then she faced off against mainstream party people George H.W. Bush, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes on behalf of “W,” Dick Cheney and others who supported Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) in a Texas primary.

She supported Rick Perry, and Perry won in a landslide. It was a definitive moment. Since then she has assumed all of the creative qualities of the Tea Party movement and left the rest behind. Without her it would have been a wandering horde of disgruntled rednecks and peckerwoods. But most telling, when Mitt Romney went South to support Nikki Haley in South Carolina’s governor’s primary this past spring, it barely made a bump. When Palin went, Haley jumped double digits and this week Haley’s picture is on Newsweek.

Now Levi Johnston, innocent and naïve but at heart a very good young man from Alaska who unknowingly became front man for the venomous horde of creepy things in the night which control the world, has apologized. And The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker, newly minted Pulitzer winner who on Sept. 26, 2008, just days after Palin arrived in the lower 48, called her, “an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who is clearly out of her league,” today writes:

“For what it’s worth, I get a kick out of Sarah. May I call her Sarah?”

Jut alors! The Palin phenomenon is “a new feminine mystique,” she says now. Who knew?