'What's So Special About Sarah?'

Daniel Henninger, the astute political observer for The Wall Street Journal, writes that Sarah Palin's appeal is growing beyond the Republican base -- a reality that scares the heck out of the Democratic Party and its allies in the liberal media.

From his column, "What's So Special About Sarah?" Henninger notes:

One can't subtract politics from a woman who is running for vice president, but Sarah Palin's manifest appeal at the moment is about something larger than retail politics. If it holds up, the Democrats have a problem.

The Sarah Palin story doesn't fit the standard liberal model the past 30 years of what defines a high-achieving woman. The impulse in acceptable political society to condescend to lovely, ebullient Sarah is palpable. If the TV commentators tried to sound any smarter dismissing her qualifications, their big brains would burst.

The Democrats are counting on all of those 18 million Hillary Clinton voters coming to Barack Obama's side. With Palin in the race, that assumption may not hold up. Henninger says Palin's appeal to women has the Democratic Party worried.

From his column:

For starters, a lot of women voters don't live in New York, Boston, L.A. or San Francisco. Maybe Sarah Palin from Wasilla is a lot closer to the way many women today see themselves than the standard feminist model. Gloria Steinem, one of the many mothers of that ideal, is 74. Sarah Palin is 44. Times change.

Many younger women didn't learn what it means to be an achieving woman from dormitory feminism. She didn't abandon her hometown for the big city. She stayed home, had babies, helped her snowmobiling husband with his commercial fishing business and with him, tried to assemble a life.

She got into politics in Wasilla with zero connections -- no famous father, no financing husband, no mentor, nothing. She got elected mayor. She got into politics to improve her community, not to launch herself on some career path she had figured out while in college.

Then came the interesting part. Under the standard model, you deploy your superb IQ to maneuver upward around the oppressors. Sarah Jock, learning her self-discipline in such weird pursuits as morning moose-hunts with her dad, ran at the system. Doing something few women and no males would do, she went after the men who run Alaska's inbred politics, the machine. And cleaned their clocks. The people elected her governor.