LEFTIST COMMON SENSE?

Posted at 10:06 p.m. ET

I've said before that some of the best writing on American politics comes from British journalists.  Now, it's true  that the usual left-wing UK writers have joined the assault on Sarah Palin, describing her the way leftist Brits would - scary, monstrous, John McCain's mistake, and other things they've said a zillion times about anyone to the right of them.

But Nick Cohen has always been a leftist Brit with sense - it must be a gene variation - and he often goes his own way.  Here he risks life and limb with a caustic view of how his American comrades have treated Sarah.  The title alone tells the story:  When Barack's berserkers lost the plot.

It's very good.  Read on:

During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.

Well said.

For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was 'the other' - the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against...

...But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor's office.On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance.

The man knows the American press, especially the liberal contingent, which is the major chunk of it.

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right.

In this, American liberals are no different from the politically committed the world over.

But they're so expert at it.

When a hate campaign goes wrong, however, disaster follows. And everything that could go wrong with the campaign against Palin did.

And then came the Palin surprise.

As it was, her family appeared on stage without a goitre or a club foot between them, and Palin made a fighting speech that appealed over the heads of reporters to the public we claim to represent. 'I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion,' she said as she deftly detached journalists from their readers and viewers. 'I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country.'

I told you this was good.  And more:

'When a man believes that any stick will do, he at once picks up a boomerang,' said GK Chesterton, and when the politically committed go on a berserker you should listen for the sound of their own principles smacking them in the face.

Journalists who believe in women's equality should not spread sexual smears about a candidate, or snigger at her teenage daughter's pregnancy, or declare that a mother with a young family cannot hold down a responsible job for the pragmatic reason that they will look like gross hypocrites if they do.

There is a British precedent.

In Britain, the most snobbish attacks on Margaret Thatcher did not come from aristocrats but from the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who opined that Thatcherism was the 'anarchism of the lower middle classes' and the liberal Jonathan Miller, who deplored her 'odious suburban gentility.'

And they think of themselves as the good people.

In an age when politics is choreographed, voters watch out for the moments when the public-relations facade breaks down and venom pours through the cracks. Their judgment is rarely favourable when it does. Barack Obama knows it. All last week, he was warning American liberals to stay away from the Palin family. He understands better than his supporters that it is not a politician's enemies who lose elections, but his friends.

That's one of the best columns I've read recently, and it's by a leftist.  This proves that a leftist, like a German Shepherd, can perform valuable services for humankind when properly trained and subdued.

September 6, 2008.