Palin is popular — not because she's a "populist," but because she works for the whole population "with a servant's heart"

Christopher Orr has a very interesting post at The New Republic about Gov. Palin entitled The Case Against the Case Against Sarah Palin. No, it's not savaging the MSM or Hard Left sources who've been vomiting out smears so fast it's hard to keep track of them — I, for one, have been playing Whack-a-mole since the announcement on Friday, and they finally seem to be slowing down some. Rather, Orr quotes at length from an unnamed Alaskan friend, who describes the fates suffered by those Alaskans who made the mistake of failing to take Gov. Palin seriously at various steps during her political career.

The collective term to describe them now is "Roadkill," and what they all have in common, be they Republicans or Democrats, is the look of sharp surprise on their (political) corpses' faces (which replaced looks of smug confidence). In a sentence, his theme is: "Trivialize her at your own peril."

His last two paragraphs particularly interest me:

Sarah Palin is a living reminder that the ultimate source of political power in this country is not the Kennedy School or the Davos Summit or an Ariana Huffington salon; even now, power emanates from the electorate itself. More precisely, power in 2008 emanates from the working class electorates of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Sooner or later, the Obama camp will realize that the beauty pageant queen is an enormously talented populist in a year that is ripe for populism. For their own sake, it had better be sooner.

I think the first of the paragraphs I've just quoted is dead-bang on the money, and I emphatically agree that Sarah Palin's political career so far is a compelling, eloquent proof of that. It is exactly that which thrills me about her nomination, and exactly that which makes her a game-changer in this race.

What I disagree with, though, is Orr's friend's choice of the term "populist" in his final paragraph. Sarah Palin's not a "populist," but a public servant in the most classic sense of that term, and it is precisely that which has made her "popular."

John "Two Americas" Edwards is a classic populist. William Jennings "Cross of Gold" Bryan was a populist. In external appearances, Barack Obama is a populist, but only at times.

Populists are class-warriors who advance by setting up class conflicts — "us against them." When Barack Obama proposes to penalize one class — shareholders of energy companies — through a windfall profits tax, he sells that pitch on grounds that the energy companies are somehow worthy of punishment, that they're greedy (moreso than "plain old capitalists"), and that the product of their efforts, the cash from the fossil fuels they've brought to market and sold, should be forcibly stripped from them and redistributed to some favored class.

Ultimately, populism is an appeal to the greed of the class the populist politician wants to favor. And ultimately, it is a destructive, hateful sort of politics. (Populists are usually also insincere hypocrites, as with John Edwards' $600 haircuts and 27k-square-foot house on its 102-acre estate.)

Obama's 2004 Democratic nomination speech was explicitly anti-populist in its "One America (not Red America or Blue America)" theme. He recognizes that populism actually provides inferior rhetoric, since it's ultimately grounded in hate and envy and class war. But Obama's actual policies, as opposed to his occasional rhetoric, are all about forced income redistribution. Obama in his substance is even more of a populist than Edwards, or Al Gore. And when Obama says he'll "fight for you," he means he's going to "take something away from someone else" to give it to you.

Gov. Palin is not a populist — rather, she's incredibly popular, and that's what Orr's friend was probably trying to say. Indeed, she's popular in large part because she's not mainly a populist. In this, she reminds me a great deal more of Ronald Reagan than of even John McCain (who occasionally needs some correction on this very subject, as when he he's talked about "excessive profits"; other times, as when he says "he wants to make everyone rich" instead of taking more from the rich, he's back on the right track.)

In her dealings with the energy companies who already have huge investments in Alaska (ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and British Petroleum), both with respect to the revision of Alaska's severance tax and the building of the new cross-state natural gas pipeline, she has been an extremely tough and able negotiator. She's insisted that the discussions be thoroughly disinfected by the sunlight of publicity, with no back-room compromises. She's very big on setting corporate actors into competition with one another, which challenges them to perform at their highest levels and benefits the public as a result.

In this, she has been acting aggressively on behalf of all of the citizens of her state. She hasn't demonized the oil companies. Nor, contrary to some folks' claims, has she tried to confiscate the profits that are flowing to their shareholders in these times of record prices through a windfall profits tax. Indeed, she's keenly aware of their importance in providing jobs and a property tax base for the state, and one of the regular paychecks that has kept her household going over the years (before she became governor and he shifted jobs) has come from First Dude Todd's employment by BP. And like most Alaskans, she's strongly in favor of aggressive (but environmentally responsible) development of Alaska's natural resources.

But in her dealings with the energy companies, she has insisted, through a mildly progressive and nonconfiscatory severance tax, that her citizens share in their record profits, since the fossil fuels being extracted will be forever lost to the Alaska tax base and represent a great deal of the state's wealth. And she's insisted that whoever builds the cross-state pipeline bring not just management but capital to the deal, and that it be an open bidding process. This put the noses of the big three companies already invested there out of joint, and a Canadian company ended up winning the bid. Those companies are now looking at a competitive alternative on their own, and maybe that will end up being what's built instead, but if so, it will be on a vastly different basis than the old "business as usual" was done in Alaska.

Most significantly, she's not using the budget surplus created by the proceeds to benefit particular classes and subclasses of citizens, but rather is rebating a large portion of that surplus directly to Alaska's citizens on a per capita basis. (Rebating it through other means isn't practical: Alaska has no state income or sales taxes to give tax credits against, and of course a rebate against property taxes would favor the rich.) That's popular, and it's literally based on population, but it's not "populist" in the John Edwards or Barack Obama senses; they doubtless would have used that money to fund more government programs targeted to particular subclasses.

When Sen. McCain introduced her on Friday, Gov. Palin used an odd turn of phrase is incredibly revealing. She did not paint herself as a warrior, which is the classic populist line, "I will fight for you [against the evil classes]." Look, instead, at how she characterized herself:

Now, no one expects us to agree on everything, whether in Juneau or in Washington. But we are expected to govern with integrity, and goodwill, and clear convictions, and a servant's heart.

Public service, instead of divide and conquer. Wow, what a concept!