This base of support for Palin — maybe not that large, but very passionate, and very powerful in places like the Iowa Republican Caucuses — isn’t going to abandon her just because the Serious People in the GOP laugh her off in favor of blow-dried flip-flopping pols like Mitt Romney or blandly “electable” figures like Tim Pawlenty. To her supporters, mockery is like nectar.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty and Hugh Hewitt provided some proof of this today:

My first thought was that it tied heavily to her appearance; in liberals’ minds, conservatives are supposed to look like the couple from the painting American Gothic: Dour and joyless, aged, spartan and frail. Political leaders aren’t supposed to be young, really good looking women, full of energy, smiles and winks.

Hugh suggested it tied to the contrast between her lifestyle and her critics: “She is the embodiment of the anti-choice, the opposite of every choice that lefty elites have ever made — as to going back home instead of moving to the west coast, having children, having a child with Downs, staying married to one man the whole time, choosing rural or suburban over urban and living a generally conservative lifestyle, working with her hands… That everything she is is the antithesis of everything that liberal urban elites are, so it’s not just enough to say, ‘I disagree with you,’; she has to be repudiated and crushed.”

The argument that liberals despise Palin because she had a child with Down syndrome probably makes less sense outside of the talk radio sphere than anything else said about her.

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