White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Sarah Palin as Joan of Arc

September 15, 2008 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

 

You see Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska; I see Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who vanquished the English in France and facilitated the crowning of Charles VII as King of France, thus ending English claims to the French throne.

Like Palin, Joan was an invigorator: She inspired the French to fight the English. When she failed to win over the generals and the nobles, she went over their heads to the people of France. Soon she had liberated Orleans, after a string of victories, and cleared the way for Charles’s investiture at Reims. Even before his ascent to the French throne, Charles had made the teenager co-commander of his army.

There is dispute over whether Joan actually fought or just carried the French standard in battle. No matter. She electrified the French. And although the 100 Years War dragged on for another generation, Joan had shaped the future of the French nation, giving it a sense of national identity that it had lacked:

She galvanized all levels of French society, revitalized a sick and cautious political establishment, and ignited the new feelings of nationalism in the French army and the peasantry. Essentially, what Palin has done so far for the Republicans.

Joan believed that she was the instrument of God; that she had heard voices from the age of 12, urging her to expel the English from France. Unfortunately, the voices were to be her death knell. She was captured by the English, who handed her over to the Ecclesiastical Court in Rouen, which tried her for heresy. She was convicted and burned at the stake. She was just 19, but she had changed the course of European history.

Later, the Roman Catholic Church decided that it had made a terrible mistake and denounced the trial, finding her innocent after the fact. But Joan was not canonized for another 500 years.

Look at Palin and see the “Maid of Orleans”: She has fought the Republican establishment and energized the rank and file of the party. And that is probably where the similarity ends, although she seems to be quite certain about God’s purposes.

The speculation in Washington is: When will the Palin bubble burst? So far, she has been repeating the same speech on the stump and has only granted one television interview.

The strategy of keeping Palin from the public is beginning to wear thin. And even John McCain himself seems to be hankering for the recognition that he is the nominee for the presidency not the trophy vice presidential candidate from Alaska.

Yet for McCain, it is also all about Palin. If he wins the presidency, she will be credited with attracting women and blue-collar voters to the Republican standard. If she falls apart in the next month, through a combination of hubris and ignorance, she will take down the McCain candidacy.

Also, the speculation in Washington is that Barack Obama’s forces are retooling for an assault to coincide with the one and only vice presidential debate. It is a debate fraught for both the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and for Palin.

Biden is given to talking too much and he knows too much, which is sometimes a disadvantage. He will be struggling to appear neither avuncular nor condescending. Palin needs to memorize talking points on every issue and stick to them. This is a dangerous tactic, but it is her best option. And it more or less worked in her interview with Charles Gibson of ABC.

Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the late senator from Washington state, who I interviewed on many occasions, answered the question he thought you should ask not the one you asked. He did this especially on television, as I found out when I was part of a panel on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Palin’s strategists will probably also try to give her a disarming one-liner that she can repeat frequently, which George W. Bush did with “fuzzy math” in debating Al Gore. People tend to remember the one-liner and forget the rest of the question.

Although Charles ennobled St. Joan and her family, he resented the fact that she had done what he had failed to do against the English aggressor. History may be repeating itself with John McCain.

 

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Barack Obama, Joan of Arc, Joe Biden, John McCain, Republicans, Sarah Palin

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
Go Green on the High-Tech Bandwagon

Go Green on the High-Tech Bandwagon

Llewellyn King

The newly seated Democrats in the House have lessons to learn, but none more than not to tell people what you’re going to take away from them. That was the great mistake Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made when she laid out her Green New Deal. It sounds like big stick from big government. She said everything should […]

The Deadly Hurt of Loneliness — It Kills

The Deadly Hurt of Loneliness — It Kills

Llewellyn King

For some Valentine’s Day is a day not of love but of profound, despairing loneliness. The candies, cards and flowers from kind people can sometimes serve to open a void of despair, a black hole of unhappiness for them. They are people made lonely through disease. Some lonely for life. And loneliness kills. That is […]

New Tech Bonanza Will Be the Digital Takeover of Cities

New Tech Bonanza Will Be the Digital Takeover of Cities

Llewellyn King

Benjamin Franklin was the first to deploy street lighting. He put candles in a four-sided, glass case for his lights. The engineering took a giant leap forward in England, when William Murdoch lit his home with coal gas lights in 1792. Today street lighting is taken as a given, like waterborne sewage. But it’s also […]

Want to Be President? Then Learn the Politics Trade

Want to Be President? Then Learn the Politics Trade

Llewellyn King

Mark Twain once observed that no one would try to play a fiddle in public without some prior instruction in the instrument, but no one had such hesitation when it came to writing. Clearly, many candidates these days think you can run for president without any political experience or with precious little. The unqualified and […]

Copyright © 2019 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in