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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (266532)	9/6/2008 10:10:35 PM
From: Ruffian	1 Recommendation Respond to of 794270

Our values reflected in those of Palin By Jim Wooten \| Friday, September 5, 2008, 07:46 PM 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.