I quite like Sarah Palin

Last month's poll was about which of a number of people or ideas most insulted the intelligence of readers, and David Milliband won. Sarah Palin came joint second. I've lost count of the number of people who've told me how grating, ignorant, Dame-Edna-at-Moonee Ponds she seems, and of how they think less of America for her.

Well, and if you've done this I like you greatly, they're wrong. The cloud of condescension and near-hatred, much of which has descended true to form from women in recent weeks is, I think, misplaced. Palin may be someone who hasn't easily adapted to a national spotlight, but she's clearly smart, and a very attractive candidate to a certain sort of populist.

Her mix of contemptuous rage and batty vulnerability is a mix of two of the most important elements on the American right. If she says what she thinks, much in the way that Dana (another presidential candidate who got slated by the same people, but not my mum or sister) did a few years ago in Ireland, all to the good. She seems quite grounded.

I do not think that she was a worse choice of vice-president than, for instance, Joe Lieberman would have been. She was more interesting than Jack Kemp, and less heavily wrong than Al Gore. She is also no Dan Quayle, who, on the campaign trail, had moments of not being Dan Quayle. Lieberman would have agitated to commit his country to a policy more hawkish and disastrous than that of Dick Cheney had he been Vice-President, and Gore was just wrong about the scale, duration, causes and requirements of global warming, which is a fact-based point many climate change people now go quiet about.

So a woman who shoots wolves from helicopters, chooses life over abortion when she can, who seems to have a vaguely ordinary marriage, and who made her way with the oil companies whilst appearing to have the normal grasp of politics and foreign affairs of people with a life shouldn't be dismissed. You try letting wolves run around near your backyard, living without oil, or running a pristine life, or working your way through a whole edition of Foreign Affairs magazine. Bet you can't.

That she worked on TV, or appeared in beauty pageants or hung around playboy parties in New York in the eighties (and I have that on good authority from a woman who was at some, though she may be misremembering) or taught aerobics like many normal ambitious women is also not a disqualification. Schwarzenegger and Ventura did sillier things and they were actually reasonably good governors who were taken seriously. In fact, for many women, and probably not a few men, Palin's life to date is more understandable than hanging around politics in the hopes of some backbench bit-part at the expense of your life. Palin seems a woman in full.

Europeans can't see her strengths. Some honest feminists, like Camille Paglia, for instance, are able to. I think that she has been deeply wounded as a candidate by the palpable media contempt for her, and by her unsuitability per se for the presidency at this time. Her faith (she is some sort of Pentacostalist renegade from Catholicism) and her family, who appear normal, have also been used against her.

Yet if McCain goes down to defeat, as seems increasingly likely this morning, he'll go down because of George Bush, the economy, the Iraq lies, his own disastrous campaign, or public disgust at the seven-hundred billion bill, or because of Obama's superb organisation and campaign--not because of Sarah Palin. She, by all appearances, will still have a life, and I respect that, though you can never know a person through the media.

My poll's over. Palin didn't win in my tiny micro-election, and I have a feeling that she won't win in the American election. Her possibility of preferment I guess may still be alive if there is some unlikely bust-up in the electoral college. Good luck to her though. She reminds me of a good many of the strongest women I've known.