I suspect that the issue is that great unmentionable in America: social class. We don't like to think we have social classes in the United States, although of course we do have them.
Palin identifies with the proletariat, the blue collar and lower middle class. Her husband held blue collar jobs, her speech patterns are slangy and inelegant, and having a child out of wedlock as her daughter did is more typical of the lower classes.
Recognizing her natural constituency, Palin speaks against the elite, as she does in this quote from the Broder column, which Broder took from the Wallace TV program:
I'm never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I'm not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I'm going to fight the elitist, because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America feel like we just don't get it, and big government's just going to have to take care of us. I want to speak up for the American people and say: No, we really do have some good common-sense solutions. I can be a messenger for that.Do you hear echos of Andy Jackson, or perhaps Harry Truman in what Palin says? I believe I do. Of course her words drive establishment conservatives like David Brooks of The New York Times or Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal crazy. They are some of the elitists of whom she speaks, and good ones at that. And yes, they do believe they know more about how things work and how to make them work better, and perhaps they sometimes do.
