BLUNDERING ON SARAH

Posted at 7:45 a.m. ET

On the heels of Charlie Gibson's often-sneering interview with Sarah Palin, Michael Gerson examines another example of the liberal establishment's blundering in dealing with her.  They could ask legitimate questions about her qualifications and background.  They have, however, other ideas. 

But instead of engaging this issue, liberals have been drawn, helpless and mesmerized -- like beetles to the vivid, blue paradise of the bug zapper -- toward criticizing Sarah Palin's religion. Palin's former Pentecostal church is called a "shout-and-holler tabernacle." Reporters press Palin's former pastor to reveal if she has ever spoken in tongues, the way it was once asked if candidates had ever used drugs. Palin's beliefs are compared to those of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- though it turns out that she was caught on tape requesting prayers for the success of her country instead of railing against it. In that sense, Palin sounds most like President Franklin Roosevelt, who prayed on D-Day that, "by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph."

And...

There are serious responses to such silliness. If religious beliefs about the dignity of human life were illegitimate as a basis for public policy, there would have been no abolition or civil rights movements. The idea of a divine image found in every human person is one of the main foundations for the American tradition of liberty, tolerance and pluralism. Religious duty motivates millions to love and serve their neighbors -- and thus to respect their neighbor's rights of conscience.

Exactly. 

But it is the political effect of these attacks that must have Team McCain shouting and hollering with the joy of a frontier camp meeting. In general, liberal political and media elites demonstrate a religious diversity that runs the spectrum from secularism to liberal Episcopalianism -- all the varied shades from violet to blue. Yet they assume their high church or Mencken-like disdain for religious enthusiasm is broadly shared.

They are shocked to learn that anyone - especially members of the non-coastal peasantry - could possibly disagree with them.

The media treatment of Pentecostalism (Palin's main religious background) and Bible church evangelicalism (her current affiliation) has had the quality of a National Geographic special on a newly discovered Amazon tribe. You might not suspect that Pentecostalism -- grown from the admirable, racially integrated roots of the Los Angeles Azusa Street Revival of 1906 -- is one of the fastest-growing and most influential forms of mainstream Christianity.

But who would want to research religion when one can research the newest UN statement on global warming, and drop a word of encouragement to Al Gore?

And so Democrats and their liberal allies set out a self-destructive mixed message. Democratic politicians press their appeal to blue-collar workers and the working poor -- while liberal intellectuals and pundits express their disdain for the religious values and motivations of the poor and middle class themselves.

Didn't used to be this way.  When I was young, Democratic leaders felt as much at home in the pew as in the smoke-filled rooms.  And both the pew and those rooms produced some pretty fine statesmen.

While most religious people in America don't speak in tongues, many pray for healing in times of sickness and trouble, and most are offended when sneering elites attack the religious practices of their friends and neighbors...

...All this can only work to Barack Obama's disadvantage, given his cool, aloof manner and his patronizing comments about the bitter and religious. And it has brought an unintended benefit to the McCain-Palin ticket -- a populist, religious appeal that McCain alone did not possess.

Well-written and well analyzed.  I suspect that part of the liberal crowd's problem is that they don't know their own country very well, and don't want to.  If one hasn't slept in a Yale dormitory, how can one live? 

In that sense there's been a role reversal in American politics.  Before the mid sixties it was the Republicans who did most of the sneering, looking down at those immigrants, those workers in the fields and factories who could never afford a Buick, those people with rough hands.

Now it is the Democrats.  And like those pre-Reagan Republicans, they will probably never learn.

September 12, 2008.