POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
What you are really asking here is: how stupid are American voters?
The very fact that Palin can enjoy a fair bit of popularity is rather an indictment of American democracy. The woman is plainly stupid. She's proven it dozens of times.
Of course, money plays just a huge role in her promotion, as it does in all American politics now, America being in many ways pretty close to a plutocracy.
All Palin has done, since quitting her fairly humble job as governor of a state with about the population of Cleveland half-way through its term, is collect millions of dollars for cheerleading. Her words never go beyond clichés, slogans, and the odd ghost-written joke.
You might dismiss her as the comic relief on the political rubber-chicken circuit, but the phenomenon truly is more serious than that.
She is being pushed from behind the scenes into being a presidential candidate.
Had she an ounce of sense, she'd know she is completely unqualified for high office, but she is as ambitious and egotistical as she is stupid, a dangerous combination indeed.
For the powers that be - the big-money and establishment people behind her - her kind of candidate, gullible and easily manipulated while keeping the public stirred up with empty slogans and dumb rhetoric, is desirable.
Bush was her forerunner, a remarkably mediocre man who let the Cheneys and Rumsfelds actually run things without being elected.
It is a dangerous new development in an American society whose democratic credentials are badly worn.
The world's only hope is that this woman is so overwhelmingly stupid she will not succeed beyond collecting millions from a minority of people who have more money than they know what to do with.
