Sarah Palin Has “GRITS”

John McCain served up a big plate of Alaskan grits when he selected Sarah Palin to be his vice- presidential running mate.

Alaskan grits? Let me ask you a question. When do know you’re in the South? When you’re served grits for breakfast without asking for them. I was thinking about this one cold January morning in Anchorage, Alaska. (There’s another kind?) It was a little after eight in the morning, and I was sitting down for a late breakfast in the restaurant at the Captain Cooke hotel. I was reviewing my notes and documents before meeting with a client when the waitress asked me if I wanted coffee. “Sure,” I replied, and moments later she reappeared with the coffee and a bowl of grits. So I looked out the window into the cold dark night of a late January morning in Anchorage and thought, “I don’t think I’m deep in the heart of Dixie. What’s going on here”? Then it came to me in a blinding flash of enlightenment. The Alaska Pipeline.

In 1960, shortly after statehood, Alaska was remote, poor, and barely populated. By 1980, Alaska was booming and the population of Anchorage was pushing 200,000 people. The pipeline had changed everything. Oil workers flowed into the state from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and other parts of the vast and far- flung Oil Empire to build one of the signature engineering projects in American history. Most of them went home a long time ago, but, along with the pipeline, they left grits. And that’s not the only thing they left, they also left a big part of the grit-eating culture.

They left a culture of mega-churches, NASCAR, big families, beauty pageants, deer huntin’, fishin’, the NRA, soldiers airmen and sailors, military families, a fierce patriotism, and a distaste of abortion. But, above all, they left a loathing of the “nanny state” with its hoard of government agents peering into every nook and cranny of your life and business, telling you that they know better than you how to live your life, raise your children, and that their regulations, not the Ten Commandments are the blueprint of salvation. This is a surprisingly Libertarian culture with more than a whiff of secession in the air. (Remember where they come from.) And it grafted quickly onto the cranky culture of the old Alaska.

Now, as I said, John McCain has just served up a big plate of this. A no-nonsense Miss Congeniality with a husband, who owns a small business, five kids, and a job. Will the NOW crowd and global elite chow down oh this instead of Brie and Chablis? I doubt it. But how about ordinary women and men just trying to stay in the working class, let alone make it into the fabled middle class? How about Americans who work hard at often unromantic jobs, hoping they won’t be downsized or off-shored by a surprisingly incompetent, remote and selfish corporate elite, who often live and work in a far and distant land, and who couldn’t care less about ordinary American people? We’ll just have to wait and see.