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Why does this woman -- who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes -- deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so "real"?

Because the Republicans, very clearly, believe that real people are idiots. This disdain for their smarts shows up in the whole way they’ve cast this race now, turning a contest over economic and foreign policy into a culture war of the Real vs. the Elites. It's a smoke and mirrors game aimed at diverting attention from the fact that the party's tax policies have helped create an elite that's more distant from "the people" than ever before. And from the fact that the party's dogged allegiance to up-by-your-bootstraps individualism -- an individualism exemplified by Palin, the frontierswoman who somehow has managed to "balance" five children and her political career with no need for support -- is leading to a culture-wide crack-up. . . .

One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can "relate" to. This need isn't limited to women; it brought us after all, two terms of George W. Bush. And it isn't new; Americans have always needed to feel that their leaders were, on some level, people like them. . . .

There's a fine line between likability and demagoguery. Both thrive upon manipulation and least-common-denominator politics. These days, I fear, this need for direct mirroring -- and thus this susceptibility to all sorts of low-level tripe -- is particularly acute among women, who are perhaps reaching historic lows in their comfort levels with themselves and their choices.

Part One:

Part Two: