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HALLI CASSER-JAYNE - bio
RED, WHITE 'N TRUE™
A POSTCARD TO THE EDGE
Posted, September 12, 2008,  12:01 p.m

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There are a lot of people who live on the edge that think that their America is everyone’s America. Think of the edge of the West: California; the edge of the East: New York; the edge of the Midwest: Chicago. And let us not forget the edge of the Mid-Atlantic, Washington, D.C..

The ‘edgers’ like to think of themselves as smarter than the ‘others,’ surely better educated, and absolutely more sophisticated. Their progressive views are the only ones that count. Those who come from the ‘other land’ are tolerated, but not taken seriously. They are categorized in the 'edgers' brain as rednecks, country folks, peckerwoods, crackers and other names that I won’t mention here.

James Carville, Democratic Party strategist, himself an ‘other,’ a Georgia-born cracker but having moved to Washington, D.C. now an 'edger'  once said of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: “Philadelphia at one end, Pittsburgh at the other, Alabama in the middle.”

Who are the people who live in “Alabama?” They are 'the others,' hard-working, God-fearing, gun-totin’, Americans who proudly wave the American flag from their porches not just on the Fourth of July, and put family and country above all else.

Sarah Palin is an ‘other.’ A good old Church-going girl who condemns abortion and thinks moose are for eating and not simply to look at, and hails from that other world Alaska that home on the range where the moose and the caribou play.

And that is why she has so confounded the Democratic Party, who yes, has many ‘others,’ in its rank and file, but the others have never ruled the party, unless, of course, they became transplants to the edge.

I am an edger who long ago moved to the Otherland and came with that edger disdain for the inhabitants of this other world. It didn’t take me long to discover that though some weren’t afforded the quality education that I was fortunate to have, and who hadn’t been out of the good old U.S.A., they did have one thing that seems to elude those who live in the edge these days….good old commonsense. There is a heartiness to “country folks,” a grit and grizzle. And definitely, they have their priorities in the right place. Faith, family, country, honor; can someone please tell me what’s wrong with that?

Yesterday, Sarah Palin was called a “cocky whacko” by former Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) now a political Independent who helped spearhead with former Bush 2000 campaign New York co-chair Rita Hauser and former Congressman Jim Leach "Republicans for Obama."

A women of faith is now considered a “whacko?” Why does this make me think of Boston and witch burning and…

There is so much confusion and too much disdain circling around Sarah Palin except by those who live in the heartland. Once again the country has become caught in a fight that is not of its own making as this country’s two major political parties attempt to marginalize the electorate in order to gain power.

The Poster Girl of ‘The Others’, Sarah Palin has chosen politics as the venue through which she feels called to help others better their lives. But should the edgers be tearing Governor Palin down – and they are making every attempt to do so – because she has different beliefs than theirs? Debate of ideas is appropriate in a political season, but disdain of a candidate for her personal beliefs for the sake of a win?

Would the edgers not serve the country better, if not, in the case of the Democrats, serve their party better by taking a different tack in the case of Sarah Palin? Our national dialogue has come to a screeching halt because ‘the others' views became not different, but stupid. It is time for the edgers to stop looking down to the others and start dialoguing with them.

Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee was caught some months ago making a speech at a hoity-toity fundraiser in San Francisco in which he voiced his personal views of the others.

"It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," Obama said before an audience of edgers.

“They” are Sarah Palins, and they deserve better than what they are getting in the face of Palin’s nomination by the Republican Party to be John McCain’s second in command.

While the argument that Pallin isn’t qualified for the job has the same validity that Barack Obama hasn’t the qualifications to be president, the edgers have thrown every arrow they can in their efforts to topple Governor Palin’s candidacy. Guns, God, breasts, motherhood, cronyism, former beauty pageant entry, moose eater, caribou killer, bang-bang they are trying to shoot Alaska’s number one huntress dead.

But Palin wears one heck of a flak vest, and the bullets never quite seem to penetrate. They just entrench the others to stand by their girl, even those who don’t share her love of moose burgers, or her anti-abortion stance.

Charles Gibson of ABC News interviewed Ms. Palin in her first sit-down with a member of the press. The Democrats have, of course, been making hay out of the Governor’s lack of foreign policy experience.

Gibson was in a difficult position to be sure. He had to be tough on Governor Palin, treat her as he would any other politician he might be interviewing. He also had to appear respectful of Mrs. Palin.

Tough he was, but disdainful as well. Some reports called him professorial in his approach, as if he were administering a pop oral quiz to a student, always an adversarial position.

But was that approach appropriate? Would Gibson have dared to take that approach with say, Barack Obama? No, and he didn't when he interviewed Obama who was then accused of being short on foreign policy experience in 2007.

Sarah Palin isn’t a student, or a kid, but the Governor of one of only fifty American states. And now she is the Republican Party’s nominee for vice-president. Surely simply facilitating questions of Governor Palin in the context of an interview would have been more appropriate.

But Gibson is an edger, an old ivy leaguer, a graduate of Princeton University who built a career out of employing an “others” folksy demeanor. But he didn’t get where he is because he’s a nice guy. Last night he showed the core of who he is, an elitist, a supercilious bore, an edger.

Election after election the Dems put up their presidential contenders but rarely do they win. Why? Because the party lives in a myopic bubble, on the edge, where they have no feel for the real America, the Other Land. Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, all edgers who just don’t understand the America that is the Other Land, the land, by the way, where elections are won.

Why was LBJ, a cracker, and Jimmy Carter, a Georgia red neck and Bill Clinton, a peckerwood able to win the presidency? Not because they were from the south, but because they were from the Otherland and understood it and the people who inhabit it; they were men who were and are others to the core.

Today, according to press reports, Barack Obama is changing tactics tired of watching his poll numbers suffer in the wake of Palin’s candidacy. He’s going to start getting tough on the McCain-Palin team.

But that might not be enough for those values voters as some call the folks in the middle. You can fool some people some of the time, but you can’t fool those ramp eatin’ folks in West Virginia, or the moose burger eaters in Alaska, or the scrapple eatin’ lovers in the Alabama section of PA with a tough-guy stance.

The people of the heartland of America know the real deal when they see it, and to them Sarah Palin is the real deal. She’s one of them. And she may not be as well-traveled as other candidates, or as well-educated a student from one of those eastern upper-crust schools, but the others value knowing what to them is the most important truth: that Sarah Palin, that women from the 'Otherland,' will protect and serve them and America with honor and integrity and with God at her side if she is fortunate enough to become the United States' next Vice-President, even if she has to move to 'the edge' to do it.

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