Sarah Palin's Faux Populism

By Jim Hightower, AlterNet. Posted September 11, 2008.

Living in a small town and being able to field dress a moose does not make
Palin a populist, no matter how much pundits want to pretend it does.

It was not my intention to be writing about Sarah Palin, since everyone with
a laptop, a No. 2 pencil or a red crayon seems to be covering that beat. But
then came the pundits:

"She's a populist," gushed Karl Rove on Fox TV. Weird, since this right-wing
political slime and corporate whore loathes, demonizes, mocks, fears and
tries to destroy real populists.

"Perfect populist pitch," beamed CBS analyst Jeff Greenfield right after
Palin's big speech at the GOP fawnfest in St. Paul. In his less infatuated
moments, Greenfield surely must realize how ludicrous his comment was, since
once, long ago, he co-authored a book that had "populist" in the title, so
he has at least had a brush with the authentic people's movement that the
term encapsulates.