Sarah Palin. The Third Way:) NYT Op

Dateline Cambridge, MA, often ground zero for leftists acting stupidly:

Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it.
That is not how we’re primed to see Ms. Palin. A pugnacious Tea Partyer? Sure. A woman of the people? Yup. A Mama Grizzly? You betcha.
But something curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea Party event in Indianola, Iowa. Along with her familiar and predictable swipes at President Barack Obama and the “far left,” she delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment — left, right and center — and pointed toward a way of transcending the presently unbridgeable political divide.

We've seen the media fail to hear it over and over again, and lately, from an unexpected quarter, so I give this guy credit. Is she the new third way Tony Blair of America?:) The guy looks at her ideas and discovers Palinomics--market-driven not crony collusion--what a concept. The rule of law, a level playing field and transparency, a free market responsive to new job-creating ideas and consumer demand--why, it's the TEA party ethical populist approach, we the people not we the establishment. (You could call it the country class but that would invite the left's usual parochial blinkers) The Tea Party at least strikes some chords with Boston.

Democrats haven't been the party of the little guy for a long time. They ignore or impoverish poor communities, even as they own their votes. They're the party of big gov, of big union bosses, of the out of touch egghead elite who live their entire lives in places like Cambridge, opining in and out of big gov. These bossy parasites profit bigtime from lobbying and the taxpayer chumps who pay their salaries and pick up the bankrupt pieces at every level of government. This Anand Giridharadas gets quite right:

Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.
On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well-developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better. On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.

This is where I've tried to make compact with leftists too, with limited success:) --that local government is most responsive to we the people, that a government that tries to do everything does nothing well--and bankrupts us to boot, and that individual responsibility, both in living life and helping others, is most effective close to home--like this guy they so admire:)

That's not to say we don't care about others in the world. We may choose to achieve that as well through supporting individual initiatives as most fruitful for true progress.

There is no substitute for America as the protector of freedom, as what happens abroad affects us at home. We know to our cost as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and face new threats.

Yes, there is room in the race for Sarah Palin. America will be the better for it.

She knows America by heart.

More. Legal Insurrection's take. And Hillbuzz on the subject of Sarah...The Instapundit. TigerHawk...aaand the full Memeorandum thread.