My friend Noreen Malone makes a good point about Sarah Palin's claim that she's connected to the Heartland:
It's very different to be sitting around the kitchen table in Wasilla worrying about those things than it is in Ohio, where your local economy isn't hemorrhaging just jobs, but entire industries. The "heartland" she references so glibly formed its identity and its values from the industries -- manufacturing, agriculture -- that are rapidly changing or disappearing, and that's a large part of what makes the piecemeal worries about health care and tuition weigh far more heavily than the sum of their parts for people who live there. Palin made a big deal about American exceptionalism last night, but Alaskan exceptionalism is far more germane -- as she pointed out last night, it's the "nation's only Arctic state." You can define the heartland as broadly as you want, but Alaska just isn't in it.
Alaska's economy, thanks to oil revenues, has been likened to that of Abu Dhabi. The state has a budget surplus. There are relatively few manufacturing jobs and few illegal aliens, so there's not the looming specter of losing jobs overseas or to cheaper labor here. The state has the lowest individual tax burden. She's co-opting—and cheapening—a narrative that she has had no real contact with. Living in Wasilla is nothing like living in the rapidly changing modern heartland. That bothers me on a visceral level, but what troubles me on a deeper one is that that means she has no experience in what it's like to govern in the non-Abu Dhabi parts of America and very little context that would help her learn to do so, fluency in "doggone" and "gosh darns" put aside.
It's not an unusual sentiment. I ran into a family friend up in New Hampshire today, a rock-ribbed conservative and a hunter who's made some trips up North just for that purpose. Talking about the Palin's debate performance, he observed that "Alaska's weird ... it's not like the lower forty-eight." He's a bit put off by Palin's act, wondering whether she would appeal to someone who likes "folksiness." If her manner doesn't appeal to actual heartland residents or conservative New Hampshire outdoorsmen, I'm not sure what demographics are actually impressed by our winking Republican VP nominee.
--Tim Fernholz
