Guest Opinion: 'Pro-life Sarah has wiped the smile off liberal faces'

The feisty vice-presidential candidate takes her faith seriously, says England's Nick Thomas.

LONDON (UK Catholic Herald) - It appears that the first effect of Sarah Palin's adoption as the Republican vice-presidential candidate last week, and of her beautifully crafted acceptance speech, was to give John McCain a lead over Barack Obama in the polls. But this was undoubtedly because the GOP convention put the Democrats' to shame with its air of confidence, the willingness of its nominees to talk in specifics about policies - and the fact that it happened after its rival.

Polling shows any electorate at its most asinine: people jumped by a canvasser, or cold-called at home, speak off the tops of their heads and might well vote in a way contrary to the impression they give come an election. Also, the swing voters - the ones who make headlines in the run-up to an election, and the only ones the pollsters care about - can easily swing back. Still, the Republicans have scored a victory of sorts, just by putting across the message that they have a war hero supported by a sassy working mother, pitted against an intellectual snob backed by a grey Washington insider. And the conviction that what America needs now is a commander-in-chief, not a social engineer, could well stick all the way to November 4.

In all the broad-brush razzmatazz that attends the autumn of any American administration, the question of religious conviction among the candidates is, at the moment, a side issue, debated only by interest groups and pundits. But it will start to count, not just because it matters personally to many American voters how their leaders are motivated in their spiritual lives, but because this election has brought new rules of engagement to American politics.

This race is not just about foreign involvement and tax rates and the size of government; it is also about how, and whether, the political machines, with unprecedently sophisticated media at their disposal, respect the individuals who cast the votes. As in any democracy, the informed and opinionated American voter is in a minority, but hitherto it has been a minority that swung elections by a process of intellectual trickle-down, because people have a tendency to listen to those in their community who are better educated and more articulate than they. But now the United States faces a situation in which a groundswell of public opinion might react against the overwhelmingly liberal consensus of the intellectual elite, and elect a Republican ticket notwithstanding a less than glittering Bush presidency, with its mishandled military adventures and economic woes.

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In discussing a polity even as vast and diverse as our own, let alone that of the United States, the use of clichés and buzz-words is unavoidable. In this case we must invoke the concept of "core values", and this is where the religious convictions of the two teams come into play. But this also illustrates a fundamental difference between our two countries. Here, where a constitutional monarchy is inextricably linked with a Christian denomination that was the creature of politics, and whose bishops have automatic seats in the legislature, Joe Public assumes that politicians are wishy-washy agnostics unless they profess otherwise, and tends to jeer at the overtly devout. The United States is a secular republic with religious freedom guaranteed by the slave-owning, liberal humanist freemasons who founded it, but with a constitution that excludes religion even down to school assembly, and yet in which the faith of an aspiring politician can be a major issue. It's hard to judge which dispensation is more confusing to an outsider.

This, though, is where the Republicans have the philosophical edge on their home turf, for the American anomaly of thriving churches under secular rule expresses perfectly the ideal that the government of a free people keeps its nose out of anything that is not its concern; and when government starts to nudge and niggle at the "core values" of its constituents, to suggest that they are unsophisticated, ill-thought-out, and will be overtaken by the evolution of ideas, it starts to forfeit their trust.

And so to the candidates. John McCain says that life begins at conception; Barack Obama cannot alienate the liberal elite whose 1960s feminist cant still informs his party, and fudges. Joe Biden, a Catholic, knows what he believes, but says he will not impose his beliefs on others, which is odd, when, as a Democrat, he is quite prepared to tell Republicans they're wrong on foreign or economic policy, which actually are only matters of opinion. But Sarah Palin, dragged from Catholicism by her parents when she was 12, a former Pentecostalist and now part of the growing number of "post-denominational" Christians in the United States, still knows that abortion is wrong, and says so. She has all the makings of a cradle Catholic who might come home. And if a McCain/Palin ticket were to succeed, and held the power to legislate in Congress, Roe v Wade could be history, and the pandering relativism of modern political discourse supplanted by an honest discussion of right and wrong. That would reflect the instincts and beliefs of the majority of Americans, and on its own it should be enough to make any American Catholic, indeed any Christian Jew or Muslim, vote Republican.

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But anyway, I like Sarah Palin. I like the fact that she bucked her own party's grandees to become Governor of Alaska, and can infuriate the blinkered placemen around her by refusing to accept that "it can't be done" or "we don't do things that way". Comparisons with Margaret Thatcher are irresistible. And if John McCain wins in November she will probably, because that's the way of things in the United States, be the Republican candidate for President to succeed him. Good luck to her. I can't resist a smirk on the reflection that it is America's conservative party that has put a woman in this position, despite all the egalitarian posturing of its Leftist rival. Yet, if she makes it to VP, Sarah Palin will be only second-in-command, whereas we elected our first female head of government 29 years ago. And as for an American Benjamin Disraeli... but that's another subject.