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Thankfully, I’ve mostly (mostly!) managed to steer clear of Cable News’ 25/8 “coverage” of Sarah Palin’s impending resignation. But the parade of punditry aside, there have been some interesting things said on this score.

Exhibits A and B are columns from the NYT’s Ross Douthat and the WSJ’s Peggy Noonan.

In his column “Palin and her Enemies”, Douthat makes the case that Palin’s appeal was as much about her class–her role as an antidote withdrawl to the East Coast Ivy League elitism of the Obama circle–as her ideology, and that her retreat from politics marks a defeat to a particular vision possibility of success in American life:

“…she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone cangrow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.”

As you know, I’m no fan of Mrs. Palin, but Douthat’s point is well-taken, and I wouldn’t want an American politics without either the meritocratic or the democratic ideals.

Douthat then goes on to the popular conservative passtime of cataloguing the elitist (and sexist!) attacks on Palin:

“Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.”

(Notice the internecine McCain-hating, thrown in free of charge). In all seriousness, though, there is as much truth here as there is exaggeration: Palin was hypocritically attacked by a segment of the feminist left for not being authentically female; though I see no reason why Palin’s slutty flight attendant look should be off-limits–nobody spared Joe Biden’s hair plugs.

On substance, I think it’s perfectly consistent (and correct) to hold the position that I just so happen to hold (because I’m perfectly consistent and correct): Sarah Palin and her family have been mistreated by the media, elites, the left, and the media elites of the left (Andrew Sullivan is OBSESSED with the idea that Bristol Palin’s actually gave birth to Sarah Palin’s youngest son), AND that Sarah Palin is annoying, incurious, dangerously underqualified for national politics, and a noose around the neck of the Republican party.

Which is more or less what Peggy Noonan thinks, and expresses in epitaph form far more ably than I could. Forgive me while I quote giant swaths of it:

“She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why. In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity.”

Boom! She also responds more or less directly to the Douthat argument:

“She’s not Ivy League, that’s why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don’t have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism.” This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it’s included in U.S. News and World Report’s top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named “Abe,” and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!”

And:

“”The media did her in.” Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it’s arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.”