In an earlier post, Jonathan sums up Palin as a “frontierswoman.” This seems to me to be true, but she also represents an old tension – between the city and the country. The distinction between Moscow and pretty much all the rest of Russia seems to be awfully important to the few Russians I know; a similar tension exists between Paris and rural France, Prague and (especially) Moravia. One of the commuting families at U.T. in the seventies split because, the husband explained, his wife could not imagine not living on one of the coasts. (Not surprisingly, similar commutes began happening here: if Austin’s the sticks, how much more are the hinterlands.) Some people identify with a city and some with the city. I can hardly complain about such self-definitions, since I’ve always felt the powerful pull of place; it’s a key part to the identity of many of my family and friends. Those of us from flyover country speak of it with some irony, but also with pride: all intensified and sometimes defensive because we feel others say it with disdain.
If, as one wit put it, McCain/Palin gets all the votes of brides pregnant on their wedding days (maybe add in the grooms), then if we can add the votes of those with strongly felt country roots, the favored Obama/Biden ticket will need to resurrect all those dead voters Acorn was finding. How well this plays out depends on how many understand these two – and, on the other hand, how many can’t. They are hardly typical of “Jesusland” – but in important ways they represent it. Plain talking, for instance, arises from the Puritan plain style, echoed in the American middle west & west. (And embodied in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books my mother gave every grandchild.) We speak with a tough wit, but, aren’t ironic about duty, loyalty, resilience, perseverance, active engagement, hard work. We don’t consider them ambiguous; we assume they just are, in themselves, good.