Outsider Mystique

If you're anything like me, the appeal of Sarah Palin (and George W. Bush before her) is like a dog whistle you just can't hear. Some people watch Bush and see a guy they would like to have a beer with. I see an extraterrestrial. So far as I can tell from reading and listening to what others have to say, the Bush-Palin appeal has to do with perceived authenticity. They keep it real. If so, Palin's resignation speech was when keepin' it real goes wrong.

This article by Victor Davis Hanson, a professor at Stanford's Hoover Institute, is a pretty typical example. (The Hoover Institute is basically a conservative think tank attached to Stanford University. I don't know why Stanford has a conservative think tank.) He presents what I would call the School of Hard Knocks case for Palin: she has been living real fuckin' life while the other candidates have been...well, I don't know exactly. The article is so blatantly stupid in so many ways that it would be silly to spend a lot time discussing it, but one of the strangest things about it has to be the assumption that Obama had everything handed to him on a silver platter. Certainly he had a rougher childhood than Palin. Hanson is also very impressed by Palin's four children, but seems not to be aware that Obama has kids too. I'm guessing his ticket for 2012 is John and Kate Plus Eight.

According to one line of thinking Palin's lack of job-specific qualifications for vice president was actually a plus: she hadn't had a chance to be corrupted by the insidious "culture of Washington." There's an obvious contradiction between criticizing candidates for their lack of experience, as both Obama and Palin were criticized, and at the same time wanting a Washington outsider. You can't have it both ways. The dream of an outsider leader seems like a distinctly American one (think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), but it actually goes back at least as far as ancient Rome. Considering Hanson is a Classics scholar, I'm surprised he didn't bring up the story of Cincinnatus.

Cincinnatus - the guy Cincinnati is named after - was a Roman politician famous for his crisis intervention skills. Roman law allowed for the appointment of a temporary dictator in emergency situations, the thinking being that when the shit got really deep it was best to cut through the red tape. In one such situation - Rome's enemies, a tribe called the Aequi, were advancing on the city - the Senate tapped Cincinnatus to assume the role of dictator. At the time he was hanging out on his farm and, according to legend, required some arm-twisting to take the job. But once he got in the saddle, he swung into action impressively, instituting a draft of every able-bodied male in Rome (this is 500 B.C., so we're talking city state, not empire). He then personally led his ragtag army into battle against the Aequi and won a crushing victory. The threat averted, he relinquished his powers and returned to his farm after an absence of just 16 days.

This is the dream scenario for the outsider leader, but even the story of Cincinnatus is more complicated than it appears. Most tellings of the story make him out to be a lifelong farmer. In fact, he was a noted policitician, forced to live on a farm because of a strange series of circumstances. This period in Rome's history was marked by struggles for political power between the patricians (the upper class) and the plebeians (the middle class), which at times devolved into little more than a street brawl. Cincinnatus was a patrician and his son Caeso, apparently a big guy, made a name for himself by repeatedly beating the shit out of various plebeians. The plebs succeeded in bringing legal action against Caeso, but rather than hold him until the trial, they set a ridiculously high bail. When Caeso jumped bail Cincinnatus was held responsible and "had to sell all his property and live for some time like a banished man in an out-of-the-way hut on the other side of the Tiber."

Cincinnatus was no rustic, he was a rich politician in exile. Hanson makes the point that a farmer's knowledge of irrigation is just as impressive as a professor's knowledge of ancient Greek. This is true, of course, but the two sets of knowledge are not interchangeable. Put the professor in the field and the farmer in the classroom and neither will have any idea what he's doing. So while Palin's lack of political knowledge doesn't mean she's an idiot, it's certainly relevant to her ability to serve in political office. It's kind of astonishing that the debate came to that, the question of whether or not there are job-specific qualifications for being president. Not just right-wing loonies but mainstream media types were saying things like, "She still has time to learn," or, "Well, she's been cramming a lot..." If Cincinnatus hadn't spent all that time in the political arena, he wouldn't have known what to do when called upon to be dictator. It wasn't his outsider status that qualified him, it was his experience as a leader.

Nor was Cincinnatus a populist. A patrician, not only was he originally shunted across the Tiber on account of his son beating up plebs, years later he received dictatorial powers a second time. This time the danger was not an external enemy, but an internal revolt of the plebs. In essence he built his whole political career around keeping down the lower classes. The image of a rustic outsider was a feature of the narrative created by others, not of Cincinnatus himself. His story was not one of humility called to service, but of privilege occasionally interrupted. Not unlike a certain beauty pageant queen.