QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:12 A.M. ET:  Newsweek is running a remarkably fair piece on Sarah Palin this week, with a superb cover photo.  Steve Bannon, who made the new, positive film on Palin called "The Undefeated," is quoted in the article, as follows:

“I call her a McLuhan-esque character,” Bannon says. “She is saturated in media, and yet nobody knows her story. It’s hidden in broad daylight.”

Bannon, 57, was reared in a working-class Catholic family in Richmond, Va., and served in the Navy before making his way to Harvard Business School. There and later, working in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs, he acquired a lasting skepticism of the Eastern establishment. “At Harvard, and then on Wall Street, I noticed something: guys had academic credentials, and quantitatively, they’re very smart,” he says. “But I still never met anybody as smart as my grandfather, and he was a guy who went to the third grade. That’s kind of what I see in Sarah Palin—this combination of lived experience and intellectual curiosity. At Harvard, they didn’t have the lived experience; they avoided it. And by the way, that permeates the elite culture today.”

COMMENT:  That is absolutely spot-on.  I've seen it myself, especially in Hollywood, which has sawed itself off from the rest of the country.  I've seen it in universities, largely populated by people who've never been outside school walls.  I saw it in reporting from Vietnam, when I was on The New York Times – often smug reports written by Ivy League graduates who thought they knew more than Creighton Abrams.  I've seen it in the cultural establishment, which considers itself just a little bit better than those flyover people out there.

At the University of Chicago, in my day, it was accepted that the best students the place ever had were the veterans, right after World War II.  They had lived real lives.  They had seen tragedy.  They had matured.  And they had an adult perspective honed by experience.

We need that experience today.

(Hat tip on the above quote to reader Chris Corbett.)

July 12, 2011