WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL

Posted at 7:05 p.m. ET

Military writer Ralph Peters switches gears and does a very warm column on Sarah Palin.  Probably captures her better than anything I've seen:

I KNOW Sarah Palin, and so does my wife.

Neither of us ever actually met the governor of Alaska, but we grew up with her - in the small-town America despised by the leftwing elite.

I like this already.

The sneering elites and their mediacrat fellow travelers just don't get it: How on earth could anyone vote for someone who didn't attend an Ivy League school? And having more than 1.7 children marks any woman as a rube. (If Palin had any taste, her teenage daughter would've had a quiet abortion in a discreet facility.)

Even with the Ivy League degrees in my family, I'm cheering.  We're not all that way.  Some of us remember where we came from.

The opinion-maker elites see Sarah Palin clearly every time they look up from another sneering article in The New Yorker: She's a country-bumpkin chumpette from a hick state with low latte availability. She's not one of them and never will be. That's the real disqualifier in this race.

He's dead-on.  I call that the giggle crowd.  They don't argue political views, they just giggle at anyone who disagrees.  I've been on the receiving end of those giggles many times.

When The New York Times, CNN, the NBC basket of basket cases and all the barking blog dogs insult Palin, they're insulting us. When they smear her, they're smearing every American who actually works for a living, who doesn't expect a handout, who doesn't have a full-time accountant to parse the family taxes, who believes in the Pledge of Allegiance and who thinks a church is more than just a tedious stop on daughter Emily's 100K wedding day.

100K?  Cheap.  Why, darlings, what does that buy in Manhattan these days?  Some fast food and a Coke?

That rube accent of Palin's? It's a howler. But she sounds a lot more like the rest of us than a Harvard man or a Smithie ever will.

Why does Sarah Palin energize all of us who don't belong to the gilded leftwing circle? Because she's us. We sat beside her in class.

Might not have been an advanced placement class, either.

For the first time since Ronald Reagan, our last great president, we, the people, see a chance that one of us might have a voice in governing our country.

I once sat behind Ronald and Nancy Reagan at a Broadway show ("Crazy for You").  To watch the president interact with ordinary citizens was a pleasure to behold.

So here's the message Palin is sending on behalf of the rest of us (the down-market masses Dems love at election time and ignore once the voting's done): The rule of the snobs is over. It's time to give one of us a chance to lead.

Sen. John McCain's one of us, too. He raised hell at Annapolis (quadruple ugh: military!), and he'll raise the right kind of hell in Washington.

McCain's so dumb he really loves his country.

Sarah Palin's dumb that way, too. How terribly unfashionable.

If McCain wins, the people who despise Sarah can always move to Venezuela and participate in progressivism.

Great column.

September 20, 2008.