What did we want from Sarah Palin? According to Christopher Hitchens, she was a “sop” to the far right of the Republican party, and he has proved willing to fabricate any number of positions for her to make her appear that way. A more balanced analysis would suggest the appeal she was supposed to have for the American voters was somewhat more varied and, as does every candidate in the age of spectacular politics, more revealing about the American public than Hitchens allows. He assumes, after all, that to be a member of the “far right” is bad, because it falls outside the mainstream. I would contend, to the contrary, that she tells us a great deal about the self-image of mainstream America.

Surely, to some extent, Palin’s role as the popular Governor of a western state made her an attractive choice for the McCain campaign. Four of the last five Presidents have ascended to that office from governorships, and yet the media have often portrayed Palin’s claims to executive experience as farcical, a consequence of two realities. Many of the attacks on Palin come as payback for her mocking of Obama’s elegantly scripted ascent from community organizer to presidential candidate without, apparently, having done anything besides endorsing the beliefs of leftist historical materialists, bargaining privately with international corporate business interests, and paying loquacious lip-service to a spirit of bipartisan, national unity. But one must also acknowledge the reality that Palin hasn’t yet completed a single term as Governor and, therefore, fails to meet even the Jimmy-Carter-minimum standard of executive experience before seeking higher office. Four years from now, presuming Palin seeks and wins reelection in Alaska, these objections will have evaporated. Clearly some Republicans believe such patient gestation will bear great fruit. Others, mistakenly, believed that it could bear fruit now and distinguish the Republican ticket from a Democratic ticket of two Senators.

But, as the name of Carter should remind us, we live in the age of spectacular politics, and this fact merits contemplation; indeed, it suggests the more profound potential appeal of Palin’s candidacy. That neurotic suicide of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, once wrote that the “logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” Perhaps this sounded plausible to someone who, like Benjamin, had watched the flaccid parliament of Weimar dissolve before the rhetorical pyrotechnics and goose-stepping rallies of the Nazis, but it was a short-sighted, naive, and dangerously misleading observation. Politics, in the narrow sense of the realm of leaders and laws, is as inherently aesthetic as every other aspect of human life. Who rules and how is determined by the interaction of a complete architecture of visions and images. The would-be leader embodies the form of a certain kind of human life that, more or less explicitly, expresses an idea of how human life in general ought to be lived. Who one is scripts what one does, and so, to come to see the form of a public figure’s self is to see how we might expect him to act. In a republic, we simply have a more fully regulated procedure than do other political forms for determining to which image we will give assent, and so the aesthetics of state politics gives birth to the cosmetics of the political campaign. Famously, Carter’s character of honesty, sincerity, and introspection squeaked him into office. Reagan’s image of war-hero-like confidence in the strength and genius of the American people swept him in only four years later.

There is nothing cynical in claiming that presidential elections and politics in general can largely be understood in terms of form and beauty, or aesthetics. Rather, it confesses the mysterious unity of truth, goodness, and beauty in reality. Nor does this fact in any way necessitate deception. To the contrary, it makes possible the necessary putting of trust in another; one cannot know every idea in a politician’s head, but one can glean the aesthetic form of his character and trust that it will show itself to be internally consistent in the face of unpredictable events.