Palin Paranoia Decoded

Tunku Varadarajan:

Palin has “star power,” the real thing, rather like Ronald Reagan or Princess Diana did (and Bill Clinton, on a good day, still does). It is what Paul Newman had when the camera lingered on him: It didn’t matter whether he was acting particularly well. It is a quality that causes people to sit up and take notice—and even to feel a bond.

“Substance,” here, is beside the point, and this enrages a certain spectrum of the intelligentsia. As for Barbara Bush, her husband had not one iota of star power; her son had a little, but his qualities—non-eloquence, an Everyman outlook, a red-state appeal—are Sarah Palin’s, too… a closeness that may embarrass Barbara Bush more than a little, and really sting.
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But the truth is that Palin disconcerts us because she seems to have no mask at all, no change of gear. She’s utterly forthcoming, even regarding her family, which is normally a sacred preserve of privacy. Perhaps it’s frightening to meet such people for those of us who value propriety and discretion first of all. So we don’t like her because we are afraid of that level of openness. It just terrifies us. Could we endure a president who is mask-less?
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Since Palin’s political attraction isn’t immediately comprehensible to the ruling class, she terrifies that class, for whom there is no torture worse than not being able to comprehend. I’m convinced that her run for the presidency is her way of baiting these people—her enemies.

In effect, she’s a strong, beautiful, ungovernable woman who is scaring the pants off a whole lot of people—scaring the pants, to be sure, off Frank Rich, and off dear old Barbara Bush.

I couldn't have said it better. It's the same reason that the "ruling class" is freaked by the Tea Party.

Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU's Stern Business School. He is a former assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal.