Fair enough, but bear in mind that, while I grew up in working-class PA, I live in NY and have an Ivy League degree. I don’t like seeing my friends and colleagues dismissed based on demography any more than I like seeing my family elders dismissed based on demography from the opposing direction. There are plenty of big-government types who went to heartland state schools, and there are plenty of graduates of hoity-toity private schools who work in the private sector and are adamant against interventionist, overreaching government.

In any case, I don’t think that Palin’s anti-establishment political orientation is really up for dispute. What’s up for dispute is whether she has the mettle and the specific kind of smarts to make inroads into the nuts and bolts of Washington power-broking. Perhaps she’ll be content to be a party rainmaker and grey eminence; I think she’d do a great job at that, and it would mean that assessing her preparedness for the presidency would be unnecessary. But if she’s thinking of the White House, that’s different from being “one of the leaders.” That’s being the leader. I’m not convinced she can do it. If she shows she can, I’ll be happy to vote for her ticket (again). But she’s got developing to do.

I thought Emperor Akihito had his game face on, and yes, he probably thought President Obama was overdoing the be-nice-to-important-Japanese-people act. I’ve never been in a position to witness any interactions between a crippled toilet attendant and his supreme master, but yes, the commenter you cite is correct that Obama has the form all wrong. Keeping the back stiff as a breadboard and bending at the waist as if it were a gate hinge is something you get used to in Japan; inclining oneself like a shrimp waiting to be slung over a cocktail-sauce dish is unappealing and wrong.

“…which was written in exactly the same voice as Living History, Dreams from My Father…”

Bill Ayers ghost-wrote for Palin also?

As far as Sullivan is concerned, I think the guy is mentally unbalanced. Some kind of dementia? And the obsession with who is Trig’s mother? Well, D’Uh Oh!, Andy-boy, it’s ……. Sarah!

Also:

“….it does keep alive the central question of whether she has the right kind of smarts to use her “rogue” instincts to change the way the federal government does business.”

True enough but limited. She does have the “right stuff” put together right to be one of the leaders. Most of Middle America is just about sick of the coastal elites who have not one frakkin’ clue to what the rest of us in flyover country think and believe. We are mighty tired of the Ivy League and Blue City elite looking down their noses at us.

Tree, rope, tar, feathers and/or 223. Some assembly required.

Good, I came here looking for your take on The Won’s bow to Akihito. Followed the link. I liked this take:

“Foreigners are not expected to bow, as they lack the requisite knowledge of the elaborate etiquette governing this for at least 1000 years.

This BHO bow, because of its degree of declination and the shamefully rounded back, is in Japanese eyes the bow of a crippled toilet attendant to his supreme master.
Posted by: Takuan Seiyo”

Also, it looked to me like the poor Emperor was highly embarrassed. What is your take?

Additionally, I didn’t say Obama was the first president to bow to any foreign leaders, certainly not those in the Far East. I’m sure Bush I looked silly, too. OTOH, his foreign policy program wasn’t predicated on apologetic nice-making, so people were probably less tempted to see a bow on his part as a gesture of favor-currying.

I’m puzzled by the persistent comparisons of “Going Rogue” to “Dreams From My Father.” People seem to be under the erroneous impression that Dreams was first published in 2004, when that was actually the re-issue after Obama’s well-received speech at the Democratic convention. In fact, Obama was approached to write a book about his life while he was still in law school, after his name was in the papers for being elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He took some time to write it, but it still was published in 1995 before he’d even run for the Illinois State Senate.

There were no “weighty decisions” about policy for Obama to describe in Dreams; in the timespan he described (which ended even before his starting at Harvard Law), the biggest decisions he had to make that would affect anyone other than himself were about how to do his community organizing job. Because he was given a book contract based on his having some sort of unusual life story — not because he was a household name — he was obligated to show more of the dark side of himself and his life: his drug use; his absentee, alcoholic father; his struggle with his identity as a biracial man. There’s none of that in Palin’s book; her self-criticism is only for her naivete (i.e. it was always ultimately other people’s fault).

(BTW, about the bow to the emperor — Bush Sr. bowed to the prior emperor, along with many other heads of state, when they attended his funeral.)

And thanks to you, too, Eric. Heartburn-inducing as it can get, I did miss blogging regularly.

Honestly, yours if the first sane, even-handed account I have read of Palin’s memoir. As for me, I like Sarah very much as a person. I think she’s done it all on her own and according to her own plan. Can’t help but respect that. And she seems, contra Sullivan, to be a genuinely warm person. But for president? Reality doesn’t seem to favor it. Doesn’t mean she couldn’t be helpful at something, perhaps even forging some compromise positions on the big issues (since she does have experience that and since both parties seem obsessed constantly with “doing something”). Can’t imagine the left allowing that to happen, though. Meanwhile, it seems to me, they’re a going-off-the-cliff train wreck, so who can definitively say what would and would not be better? …