Palin was undone by ignorance (Duh)

In his Forbes column, Reihan Salam argues that Palin’s resignation represents the end of the cultural warriors:

During the presidential campaign, much was made of Sarah Palin’s cultural populism. Largely bereft of substantive policy views on national issues, she was scrutinized on questions of cultural style, not least because of her compelling personal narrative. Millions of conservative voters identified with her deeply held social conservatism. Her sprawling family and infant son Trig captured the aspirations of millions of families who longed for tradition and stability. Many conservatives hoped that as a woman, Palin could recast the abortion debate. The pro-life movement, traditionally seen by those on the left and center as being hostile to working mothers, to an egalitarian understanding of gender roles and as a smokescreen for an agenda designed to hobble the advancement of women, hasn’t been helped by the movement’s dearth of female leadership.

Palin promised to represent a down-home feminism, one that Red America could embrace, while making the pro-life case through the power of her example, and not a hectoring, sectarian tone. As the country changes–as the number of churchgoers declines, as the white working class shrinks–it has long been clear that social conservatives will have to adapt to win over younger voters who’ve grown up in a very different cultural environment. And who better than the youthful, appealing governor of Alaska, a frontier state far from the Deep South?

A paragraph later, Salam concludes that after the convention, Palin became a cultural scold:

But from the moment Palin made her debut at the Republican National Convention with a powerfully pugilistic speech, she emerged as the second coming of Spiro Agnew, best known for his lacerating attacks against the nattering nabobs of negativity in the national press. Whereas John McCain assiduously avoided discussing social issues, Palin became the campaign’s mouthpiece for any number of culture war cliches. It was a sad commentary on the state of the exhausted conservative movement. As Republican support has faded, efforts to energize the conservative base have increasingly taken an Us vs. Them turn, one that pits true believers against the elitist left.

Salam’s argument strikes me as only partly correct. Yes, Palin’s attacks against cultural elites failed to attract new constituencies, such as independents and conservative Democrats. But Palin’s chief problem wasn’t that she was the second coming of Spiro Agnew, or even Richard Nixon. Her chief flaw was that she was the second coming of G. Harrold Carswell, Nixon’s Supreme Court nominee who was undone chiefly by his intellectual mediocrity. Can you say Katie Couric interview? No wonder that independent voters concluded that Palin wasn’t fit to be president: she seemed to lack a basic grasp of the issues. Her relative ignorance played into the stereotype of cultural conservatives, especially evangelicals: they are poor, uneducated, and easy to command. In an age of phony meritocracy, when candidates must be “fluent” in the issues, regardless of whether their positions are actually sound or wise, ignorance is a political death knell.