How can someone be arrogant and naive at the same time?
One of the Huffington Post's regular contributors just put into words exactly how I felt watching Sarah Palin speak last night -- the anger and unease that I couldn't quite put my finger on. This is probably the most dead-on assessment of her entire tone and attitude that I've read so far:
"Many pundits in reviewing her polished performance claim to see an unflappable and gung-ho winner on stage. My honest-to-goodness visceral reaction was quite otherwise. What I saw on that stage was the personification of small-minded smugness, an utter lack of humility, a kind of self-righteous entitlement based on little more than puffed-up narrowness. She struck me not as plucky but, rather, as stunningly immodest--to the point of arrogance. Some people are arrogant and maybe deserve to be. They know it, and flaunt it, while everyone else thinks they are jerks. But there's another kind of arrogance, perhaps harder to spot at first, an arrogance that apparently doesn't even recognize itself as such, a sanctified, self-satisfied presumptuousness that flows from sheer naïveté about oneself and the world and manifests itself in giddy ambition."
(The Huffington Post: "Sarah Palin: The Face of Ugly Americanism" by John Seery/9.4.08)
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