Shades of Reagan

Gov. Sarah Palin speaking at the Republican National Convention. (Flickr: Tom LeGro, NewsHour)

The idea floating around is that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is popular and exciting because she is something so new. Yes, she is the first woman to run as a Republican vice presidential candidate — and a gun-toting hockey mom to boot.

But her real appeal is the opposite. She is a throwback, conjuring with her every word the man who remains the hero to his party: Ronald Wilson Reagan, the morning-again-in-America guy. He made people feel good again about their country after the long, dark hangover from Vietnam and Watergate, and then the hostage crisis in Iran.

Reagan banished the ghosts of My Lai, wiped away any lingering humiliation over those hostages. America, he said, in his very posture and in every speech, is the beacon of hope and freedom, period, end of discussion. Always had been, always would be. Forget all those nattering nabobs of negativism, all the trendy postmodernironists, the David Lettermans with their smirks. This was the land of patriots and he was the No.1 Patriot — precisely how Palin (and for that matter, everyone else who has spoken at the Republican National Convention) has characterized herself and her running mate, Sen. John McCain.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

That’s why Palin’s acceptance speech for the GOP vice presidential nomination played so well in that hall — and why she resonates so strongly with the rank-and-file. She is all about nostalgia. Palin is tapping into exactly what Reagan tapped into: a bone-deep longing to turn the clock back, to be part of an earlier America when things were simpler, sweeter, decidedly less complex — or at least seemed that way.

“I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town,” she said. Not just any small town, but a small town in the wild and natural state of Alaska, arguably the country’s last frontier. Everything she says conjures an earlier America where men — and women — slaughtered and skinned their own meat, read their Bibles and raised their kids (home schooling) with scant meddling from the government.

The good old days, when most Americans lived in small towns — which most of them haven’t lived in for almost 90 years. It’s exactly what Reagan embodied — or skillfullyharkened back to: his heartland roots. It was epitomized by his evocative campaign slogan: It’s Morning Again in America.

That’s what Palin is striving to invoke — that feeling of nostalgia, that feeling that it can be a new dawn. It’s appealing, that sense that we can rewind the reel, return to a simpler time, when the country was flush with a sense of optimism and a sense of conquering dominance. Alaska, wilder and freer than all the other states, it seems, is still flush with some of that optimistic swagger and sense of freedom or license. This land is your land, this land is my land; we have a God-given right to drill on it –Palin is a daughter of Alaska to the bone.

She represents a kind of “Little House on the Prairie” feminism. That’s another reason why she has been confounding to some women, to many commentators. They haven’t known where to place her on the feminine/feminist continuum.

Maybe that’s because Palin isn’t feminist, or postfeminist even — the labels we customarily use. She is actually pre-feminist feminist. The fiercely confident pioneer gal who can raise a family and run a town, who can shoot a caribou or send a poison-arrow dart through a political opponent — as she did time and again last night, under cover of a sweet smile.

Palin is every bit as tough as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her toughness just comes in a far different retro-packaging, which makes it harder to classify. She doesn’t have Clinton’s sometimes uneasy mix of soft and hard, that observable internal tension that can sometimes give way to tears, sometimes to a testy quip. To a lot of women — and men — out there,Palin seems of a self-confident piece.

She doesn’t quite have Reagan’s charm or his “aw shucks” sophistication. Her small-town roots show a little more; her barbs were a little sharper, shall we say, less affably cloaked. But she’s got the rest of him down — certainly his message. Whether that message will play in today’s world — and whether it will play beyond the obvious conservative base — is hard to say. Some might say doubtful.

In her appeal to nostalgia, there was little mention of the country’s current problems. No mortgage mess, no talk of subprime loans or the need for financial regulations or health care. None of those currently vexing problems. No, no need to bring all that stuff up. It would be off script, messy. She was after a feeling. That’s what Reagan was such a genius at — the “B” script ham actor played like a charm in the political arena.

And that feeling is: America is the greatest. There is no mention of our current place in the world, how we are regarded or not. Not because she is a foreign-policy neophyte, but because it is off-message again. That’s why there was no mention of a newly reinvigorated Russia or a intimidatingly robust China. Just a brush through Iraq where, of course, we are the good guys. My son, she said, is being deployed on 9/11 — the symbolism lost on none of us — and I am so proud.

Proud, proud, proud. That’s the heart and soul of the nostalgia message. I am proud of my country.

It plays because Americans love that feeling of pride. We were all raised on it. In our children’s history books, we were told of the genius of the Founding Fathers, reminded that America was the planet’s great experiment — the shining city on the hill.

At a time when there is a definite sense that, in fact, we are no longer invincible — that this, unlike the last, will not be the American Century — what better thing to do than take a page out of theGipper’s playbook and gaze backward not forward.