"
Until two cruise ships steamed up to Alaska two summers ago, the record for the silliest statement by a journalist had been held by Lincoln Steffens, in his time a famous American radical. Sent in 1919 to see how Russia was doing under the communists, Steffens supposedly reported, "I have seen the future, and it works."
In 2007, several conservative journalists got off their cruise ships and met Sarah Palin. They saw the present, and she was a babe. 
The cruises were sponsored by the National Review and the Weekly Standard, journals of significant influence in conservative circles. The ships disgorged some top conservative editors and writers, who on two occasions were invited at the governor's mansion. Almost to a man, they were thunderstruck.
It is the height of chutzpah, you betcha, for a coterie of ideologues to accuse Palin's critics of political snobbery. It is also somewhat sad for a movement once built on the power of ideas -- I am speaking now of neoconservatism -- to simply swoon for a pretty face and pheromone-powered charisma.
But it is, I confess, just plain fun to see all these expense-account six-packers be so wrong. For some odd reason,
most Americans are not finding, as Barnes wrote, that Palin "exudes a kind of middle-class magnetism."
Instead they find her out of her depth and exuding an unfathomable -- not to mention
unearned -- self-confidence.
If it weren't for the Boys on the Boats, she'd be her biggest fan.
Lincoln Steffens was so blinded by ideology that he mistook an immense criminal enterprise for a benevolent government. The Boys on the Boats were similarly blinded.
They mistook personal magnetism for presidential qualities while
Palin, clear-eyed in a manner
depicted in countless movies, undoubtedly saw in them just what she wanted:
a way out of Alaska."
