The Empty Vessel

Peggy Noonan, who I never thought I would like, can be very insightful, and she comes through in this column on Sarah Palin:

In the past two weeks she has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn't, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts.

I do, however, disagree on one point: that we don't know what Palin stands for. I think this is wrong. We know exactly what she stands for: herself. Palin strikes me as a person almost entirely of pure ambition, not grounded in anything that gives her serious cultural or ideological shading. Though she is a conservative, there are many examples that give me the hunch that she is willing to bend her values if it's necessary to achieve power, or that simply makes her look like a pragmatist and not ideological: She has, way before she became the veep nominee, said very positive about Obama and what he represents; she has questioned the Iraq War and whether or not we have an exit strategy; she has not used her position in Alaska to further a hard anti-abortion agenda. And, now that she needs to play to the red-meat base, she gives the base what it wants. She changes into the persona she needs to be for the role she is playing. Her own religious beliefs and conservative values, in political terms, strike me more as a means to an end than anything else. She is really an empty vessel, content to be filled with whatever substance is necessary to achieve power, power that is desired, ultimately, for it's own sake. That's what she stands for.