The Republicans really struck paydirt with Sarah Palin, because she embodies everything the culture wars are about.

Here is a woman who had a questionable college education, who used wedge issues to elbow her way through politics, who mechanically repeats sound bytes and talking points with alarming regularity, who is insular, who masquerades as a social and fiscal conservative while advocating radical infringement on civil liberties and leaving behind a trail of debt... and while she's not stupid, she's also not very eloquent or particularly insightful. Her press conference today again stressed her faults in public speaking - constantly repeating herself, interrupting herself, speaking in confusing, repeated fragments.

The thing about Sarah Palin, though, is that she's very disarming to a large section of Americans who feel threatened by anyone who uses big words intelligently. And while that may sound like a snide remark, I'm talking about people like my family, who stare at me blankly if I try to have a real and nuanced conversation about foreign policy, religious issues, etc. They want issues to be black and white because that's how they think. They don't want it to be complicated. They tend to repeat themselves and repeat sound bytes... you see where I'm going with this?

Sarah Palin and George W. Bush have succeeded because the same average folks who vote for tax cuts for the wealthy and against tax cuts for themselves because they want to think of themselves as aligned with that kind of power (or are aspirational like Joe the Plumber, whether realistically or not), are the same average folks who want to see someone in the White House who is like them. Obama scared these people not because he was black, but because he often spoke in ways that flew right over their heads, or because they percieved him as an intellectual (gasp!), as if being intellectual was a bad thing.

To Republicans and religious idealogues, intellectualism is a very bad thing. Martin Luther (the 16th century German reformationist) said himself that intellect and reason were the worst and foulest enemies of religion. Religion has been the strength of the Republican party precisely because it trains people to follow faith rather than reason. Republican policies are not reasonable, but the mythology built around them creates a structure of faith in unseen power that works to keep Republicans themselves in power. This works hand-in-hand with dominionist churches who believe that the ends justify the means, and who are willing to go as far as they have to and tell as many lies as they need to in order to pass their religio-political agenda.

A friend of mine is from Wasilla, and his parents were sad that they couldn't in good conscience vote for their friend Sarah, because although they liked her a lot they just knew she was grossly unqualified. And I think the Republicans knew that keeping Palin out of direct media questioning was going to cause them less damage than Palin talking to reporters directly (case in point: her train wreck of a press conference today... 30 seconds of content stretched into an excruciating 8 minutes of unskilled repetition).

Palin and others like her will continue to surface until either the Republicans get the message that the majority of Americans aren't going to fall for it, or Americans again fall into a place of wanting "something different," not understanding that you have to have substance along with whatever political style happens to be the latest rage. Thankfully, Obama has that substance. If Palin can keep herself sufficiently in the limelight, I think she'll ride that all the way to 2012, and there's no telling how the narrative and culture will have changed around her.