Sarah Palin, True Believer

A few months ago I had a post in which I compared some of the aspects of the current conservative movement in the US to aspects of life for many people in North Korea. My point was that if you grow up and never are exposed to anything other than one set of political beliefs, even a wacky set, then you never suspect that there is anything else.

I was thinking about that again in relation to Sarah Palin. It occurred to me that one of the reasons there is a disconnect between what she says and how it is interpreted is that she cannot conceive that there could be more than one way to interpret it. To take one of her better-known public statements, her answer to Katie Couric's question about the economy last fall, it was widely seen as a rather inept evasion. I think it's possible that Palin did not even realize that she was evading the question--that she was answering in what she saw as a straightforward way, but that her thought processes were so disorganized and her knowledge of the issues so poor that the result was a nonsensical answer.

Palin is of the generation whose first votes were for Ronald Reagan. So for her, growing up in a largely conservative environment in which her views were never challenged, her beliefs may simply be set on a poor intellectual foundation. She may well believe every word that comes out of her mouth, and be genuinely baffled when what she says is seen as meaningless crap. For her it has meaning: what she says is as carefully reasoned and well-informed as the political thought she has always known.