Joe Klein on Palin’s small-town myth

In the latest Time magazine, Joe Klein comes closer than anybody to grasping Sarah Palin’s mythic appeal.

Here’s the nut of the piece. Find more of my thoughts down below…

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We haven’t been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But Palin’s embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins.

She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness — updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin’s story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids — with a significant assist from Mr. Mom — hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can’t imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream.

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In a rather beautiful piece of writing, Klein suggests that Obama’s own life story, while compelling, is “not yet mythologized” and reflects the values of “a country that is struggling to be born — a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity.”

Indeed. This is the heart of America’s culture war. Urban progressives believe in a multi-racial democracy, modern and complex and cosmopolitan, but essentially fair.

Conservatives, on the other hand, generally believe that traditionalism — the values of our small town past — will serve us best going forward.

For the moment, it seems that the comforting vision of Palin is outweighing the hopeful change of Obama.