History

-By Warner Todd Huston

Americans love to be led by what they feel are ordinary folks. They want to assume that their sons or daughters could become a representative, senator, or even a president. It’s a can-do nation filled with folks that feel they are just as good as the next citizen in line. This is why Sarah Palin is so successful.

The reason for this goes back even before the American Revolution. Americans built this nation by the sweat of their brows, the brawn of their backs and their God-given abilities, a veritable natural aristocracy among men. They looked to leaders from their own strata and looked askance at any that claimed a noblesse oblige.

In fact, it was seen as so untoward for America’s early leaders to appear ambitious of position that politicians did not directly campaign for office nor did they often publish policy discussions under their own names. This is the reason why the Federalist Papers were published under the name “Publius” instead of under the names of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, its actual authors. It wasn’t even widely known who wrote our most famous political treatise until a decade after its publication.

This desire to appear un-ambitious and “regular” didn’t stop with the founders either. When President Andrew Jackson ushered in the “era of the common man” in the 1830s this idea that just anyone could become president reached new heights. Famed visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, who noted that the common man in America enjoyed an unprecedented level of dignity and success, made this a central theme of his famous book “Democracy in America.”

Many presidents were presented as the fellow next door. William Henry Harrison was a “log cabin” candidate (even though he was born to a well-to-do family), Lincoln was “Honest Abe” the “Rail Splitter,” Grant was the hard-fighting general that struggled his way up by his own efforts with no family help, Truman was just a regular guy. On the other hand, many presidential candidates that lost did so in part because they could not shake the accusation that they were “elitists.”

John Quincy Adams, for instance, lost his second run in small part due to this perceived elitism. Closer to our own day it was widely thought that Democrat Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was too brainy and high class to appeal to the average American and he went down to defeat to the regular guy Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower. Not long ago both Al Gore and John Kerry were denigrated as too upper crusty to appeal to most Americans. They didn’t seem like regular folk to the regular folks. Heck, even with his Hollywood pedigree, Ronald Reagan stressed his hardscrabble upbringing as a common man in Illinois.

It’s a long, long tradition of the upper crust trying to take on the mantle of the lower classes and losing elections if they fail.

Then came Barack Obama. Mr. Obama is one of the few American presidents easily able to overcome the appearance of the nose-in-the-air, scion of the university that he is and get elected anyway and he didn’t do it by appearing as if he was a commoner. So, Obama is one of the exceptions to the usual American political practice of putting on the cloak of the common man. The American public decided that his upper crustiness wasn’t disqualifying but since he’s been in office his arrogance has come to grate on more and more Americans. This sneaking suspicion that Barack Obama doesn’t like us lowly Americans very much only adds to Palin’s appeal.
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Obama and the Media is Why Palin is so Successful”