Renowned Historian Lauds Sarah Palin, Tea Party and America

By M. Catharine Evans

Paul Johnson doesn't suffer from PDS like some others. Rather he sees Sarah Palin as a courageous leader and likes "the cut of her jib."

The celebrated British historian and journalist Paul Johnson expounded on American exceptionalism, the Tea Party and Sarah Palin in a Wall Street Journal interview this past Saturday. He's optimistic about this "marvelous country" and its ability to overcome the forces working to undermine its greatness. Johnson specifically credits conservative women as key players in shaping a new direction for the country in 2012.

Interviewed in his West London home the prolific author offered a buoyant, forward-looking view of the conservative forces emerging at this particular time in American history:

But in a sense I don't worry about America because I think America has such huge strengths-particularly its freedom of thought and expression-that it's going to survive as a top nation for the foreseeable future. And therefore take care of the world."

Pessimists, he points out, have been predicting America's decline "since the 18th century." But whenever things are looking bad, America "suddenly produces these wonderful things-like the tea party movement. That's cheered me up no end. Because it's done more for women in politics than anything else-all the feminists? Nuts! It's brought a lot of very clever and quite young women into mainstream politics and got them elected. A very good little movement, that. I like it." Then he deepens his voice for effect and adds: "And I like that lady-Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib."

The former governor of Alaska, he says, "is in the good tradition of America, which this awful political correctness business goes against." Plus: "She's got courage. That's very important in politics. You can have all the right ideas and the ability to express them. But if you haven't got guts, if you haven't got courage the way Margaret Thatcher had courage-and [Ronald] Reagan, come to think of it... It's the central virtue."

"The wonderful tea party," Palin's "got courage," and "this awful political correctness business" are sentiments American patriots have not heard from some of its own conservative leaders in quite a long time. If courage is the "central virtue" as Johnson suggests, the Republican establishment might do well to heed his words.