To Palinize

Victor Davis Hanson, who long ago squandered any academic reputation he may have had in the pursuit partisan hackery, does a good job of crystallizing why the media's coverage of Sarah Palin is making conservatives so crazy right now. He begins his post with this:

Palinize: to slander and caricature a working-class female public figure for the noble advancement of liberalism.

Sarah Palin—self-made woman, and governor of Alaska—is being reducing by the left to a hickish, white trash mom of five.

Now let's put aside for a moment the fact that no one of any significance on the left is actually criticizing Palin in this way. Hanson's post is nevertheless instructive in this sense; it gets to the heart of what's angering conservatives right now. They're upset because they believe that a conservative politician--one they really like--is getting caricatured and ridiculed unfairly, that she's not being taken seriously enough (never mind that their own pundits are just as guilty of this).

What doesn't occur to Hanson (because he's a partisan hack) is that caricature and ridicule are THE chief weapons in the Republican arsenal. As long as we're coining new verbs, let's throw a few more out there: how about to Kerryize, to Gorize, to Dukakisize, to Carterize. The bottom line is that Republicans win presidential elections by doing exactly what Hanson is complaining about here, i.e., reducing their opponents to simplistic caricatures and objects of ridicule. What does he think McCain was trying to do with those Britney/Paris ads and the constant repetition of the word "celebrity"?

The Republican freakout about Sarah Palin's press coverage (which, let's face it, has been relatively mild and focused almost entirely on her obvious lack of experience), is one of the more breathtaking displays of hypocrisy and hyperbole that I've ever seen. I just hope their whining and tantrum-throwing doesn't scare the media into backing away from their responsibilities.