The Happy Warrior

Dynamite Andrew McCarthy piece.

Do read it all, but here's an excerpt:

He was telling his audience of gazing law students and like-minded academics that we, not al-Qaeda, were the savages.

I couldn’t help thinking about that scene, which has been repeated more times than I can count, as I read commentary about the phenomenon that is Sarah Palin, who brought the house down with a barnburner at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night. Especially puzzling is the critique that the nominee for vice president was, at times, too biting, too sarcastic in her portrayal of the opposition.

I couldn’t disagree more. Palin is a natural. What we got is what she is: poised, sharp, charming, feisty, funny, and unapologetically patriotic. As she might have put it, the speech she gave in St. Paul is the same one she’d give in Scranton or San Francisco.

More importantly, the speech tapped into a teeming reservoir of repressed rage. Memo to Barack Obama: You’re right, many of us are bitter. We are damn angry about being framed as “the American Taliban” because we love our country and think it’s exceptional as is; because we think you deal with evil by defeating it, not cozying up to it; because the change we think we need is a government that shrinks and gets out of the way, not a confiscatory, will-sapping Leviathan; because we don’t see “patriotism” as the willingness — the eagerness — to catalogue America’s flaws while never acknowledging her greatness; because when it comes to “reputation in the world,” we think it’s the “international community” not the United States that has a lot of catching up to do.

But Sarah Palin didn’t court this anger with more anger. That would be a turn-off. What most frustrates Americans is that we are a happy, optimistic, can-do people ceaselessly harangued by media solons, delusional academics, post-sovereign Eurocrats, and the Democrats who love them. While we free and feed the world, they can’t tell us enough that we’re racist, imperialist, torturing louts. We know it’s a libel, an endless stream of slander. But we also know it’s an absurd libel. We’re tired of hearing it, but taking it too seriously would give it power it doesn’t deserve.

So Sarah Palin was sarcastic and biting. That’s how a happy warrior deals with absurdity. That’s how a happy warrior rallies the troops.

...

It is positively absurd that such a candidate [Obama] should have a snowball’s chance of becoming president of the United States. But he has a very good chance because Americans haven’t been rallied.

Well, they’ve been rallied now. And rallied, at long last, in a way that resonates: By an attractive winner with a smile on her face and steel in her spine. By a proud woman living the ups and downs of an American life — a woman the other side spent a week trying to destroy by coming after those she loves most. With grit and good humor, she brushed those critics aside like so many Styrofoam columns.