Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [117]
Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham said, “Because this woman is strong, conservative, independent and pro-life, and politically and personally lives her life that way, she’s reviled and hated.”51 One-time presidential candidate Fred Thompson claimed, “She is from a small town, with small-town values, but that’s not good enough for those folks who are attacking her and her family.”52 Rep. Adam Putnam (R-FL) asserted, “The media doesn’t understand life membership in the NRA; they don’t understand getting up at 3 a.m. to hunt a moose; they don’t understand eating a mooseburger; they don’t understand being married to a guy who likes to snowmobile for fun. I am not surprised that they don’t get it. But Americans get it. A mooseburger means she is like one of us.”53
With all due respect to Representative Putnam, a fifth-generation Floridian who has spent his entire life in the state, what the hell does he know about mooseburgers?54 One of the absurdities of persecution politics is that what Palin and Beck call “real America” is a mishmash of cultures, creeds, professions, and lifestyles. Representative Putnam is an Episcopalian rancher’s son from the sundrenched southeastern tip of the country, while Governor Palin is a Catholic-to-Pentecostal schoolteacher’s daughter from the nation’s icy northwestern extremity. But because they are both white Christian pro-life NRA members, they are kindred spirits united by their appreciation of the essence of mooseburgerness—in contrast with “the media” for whom the mysteries of moose meat are forever inaccessible no matter how much they might devour.
We’ll return to this theme in the next chapter. The important point for the moment, succinctly illustrated in Putnam’s mooseburger comment, is that Sarah Palin is not just a politician who takes conservative positions; she embodies conservatism. As a white, evangelical, gun-toting, middle-class, small-town mother of five, she is the quintessential “lesser citizen” that Charlton Heston described when he asked, “What color star will they pin on our coats?” Palin’s supporters interpreted the media barrage and late-night parodies as denigrations not only of their own political beliefs but of their way of life. “You’re being told by the media propagandists that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be vice president. You’re being told she’s dumb,” said Rush Limbaugh. “These attacks on Governor Palin are attacks on you and attacks on me. They are attacking every single person outside the Beltway, outside the New York-Washington axis, outside their social circle of elitist friends that represents what’s great about this country.”55
Meanwhile, as the media propagandists were attacking Sarah Palin and every single person outside the New York-Washington axis, something unusual was happening on the campaign trail. Before Palin joined the Republican ticket, McCain rallies averaged 1,000 participants. With Palin at his side, crowds ranged from 5,000 to 10,000.56 Journalists initially described Palin fans as “euphoric” and “energized.” Soon, they began to call them “angry” and “ugly.” When Palin evoked Obama’s name, people would shout out “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and on one occasion, “Kill him!”57 When Palin criticized Katie Couric after her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media,” the crowd turned on the press area, screaming obscenities. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for one of the networks and told him, “Sit down, boy!”58 Around this time, the Secret Service reported a sharp increase in the number of violent threats against Barack Obama. Shaken, Michelle Obama asked a top campaign aide, “Why would they try to make people hate us?”59 But Rush Limbaugh was delighted with the behavior of the crowds. “Fifteen years of frustration is coming out