Does Obama love us? Palin and Perry at a sea change

I think it is fair to say that President Barack Obama loves Norway more than he does Kentucky, loves France more than Georgia and doesn’t love Texas at all.

He sees himself as a citizen of the world, as they used to say in the 1950s, and feels at home in the world at large. Quite often, more than he does here in the Land of the Free. And there is an unsettling sense that he sees himself as a world sovereign — a caliph, Khan or Kennedy — whose task it is to bring final conquest on behalf of the rest of the world to those rural and regressive pockets in the American heartland where they still listen to George Jones and Hank Williams.

The first lady as well, with her BFF Carla Bruni-Sarkozy ... she has a hit tune out now and will soon be in a Woody Allen movie, it has been reported; Bruni, not the first lady ... and hugging on the queen and all, which apparently no one — frog, wog, bloke, moak or mandarin — has ever done since the beginning of humankind. But I doubt she could pick out the first lady of Texas, Anita Perry, in a police lineup.

Which gives full justification to the recent action and passion of rustic heartland upstarts like Susan Lynn of the Tennessee General Assembly and Rick Perry.

The president is operating out of a fundamental misunderstanding of history, which might be called the New York view: that the tenor and temperament of America today is the same as it was when Eisenhower handed the keys over to Kennedy. It is a static view of history, but history is dynamic, not static. The South and Texas were still honorably submissive in 1960 to the will and whims of New York & Co. as per the conditions of conquest set in 1865. No longer. And so today Perry speaks up. Last week he wrote a letter to the EPA asking it to withdraw its finding that greenhouse gases threaten Americans, alleging the findings are based on manipulated data. Sarah Palin opposed points of the Copenhagen agreements as well, with an editorial in The Washington Post.

We may have reached a sea change this last week. William Shatner appeared on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show on Friday to read a few excerpts from Sarah Palin’s new autobiography, Going Rogue. Shatner early on got in front of the zeitgeist with Tina Fey, Katie Couric, Frank Rich, David Letterman and the MSM Others in their search-and-destroy mission after the popular Alaskan governor. But this time, Palin was in the wings and suddenly walked out to read from Shatner’s recent autobiography. Captain Kirk has missed his true calling; that of a great comic. Palin and Shatner left the stage arm in arm and the audience roared.

A threshold was crossed: For the first time major, mainstream advertisers are treating Palin fairly. Late night entered the mainstream where Palin has always been. Marketing-wise, you might say that Sarah Palin has arrived. Obama could be only a backdrop now in 2010 and 2012 while the important debate rises between the two factions of Republicans, as it was in the recent election at NY-23 where Perry and Palin supported the Conservative Party candidate.

Dan Balz has a convincing essay in The Washington Post this week making the claim that the future of the Republican Party rests with the governors. He cites Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, Perry, Palin, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty and others. But Palin and Perry are speaking to the public while the others are speaking to the faithful. They are being brave when it is time to be brave, which is now.

Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.