A post at Bookroom Worm exploring the attacks on Ann Romney is getting a lot of attention:

This transcends Leftist feminist sensibilities and touches upon a core issue in statism — namely, who raises the children? …. I am the counterweight to the state. Therefore, I am dangerous. I am subversive simply by existing. My love for my children is a dominant force that works its way into their psyches and that trumps the state-run schools and the state complicit media world. Some mothers, of course, are entirely in sync with schools and media. They happily reinforce the statist message. But those of us who don’t are a powerful anti-statist force and we must be challenged…. The Left’s problem with Ann Romney is that she represents the triumph of the individual. No wonder they hate her so much.

That may be part of it.

I also look to a more basic reason, the same reason why they hated Sarah Palin so much:

Why do they hate her so much? She’s happy. Unhappy people can’t stand happy people. As others have noted, Obama rallies are not happy events. Neither is the Obama campaign. There is an angry tone, a desire for revenge against those who supposedly have done the people wrong, a settling of old scores. While Obama preaches hope, the “subtext” of his campaign is anger and frustration. For all the times I have seen Obama on television, only once or twice have I seen him laugh. The mainstream media is no better. Is there a single happy person at MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC (well maybe not ABC), CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, or elsewhere in the bastions of the elite media? Palin’s happiness simply is something that cannot be tolerated by the unhappy people who run traditional news organizations.

The line runs rather directly from Sarah Palin hatred to Ann Romney hatred. Read this Judith Warner column from September 4, 2008, about her “adventure” attending a Palin rally: No, it wasn’t funny, my morning with the hockey and the soccer moms, the homeschooling moms and the book club moms, the joyful moms who brought their children to see history in the making and spun them on the lawn, dancing, when music played. It was sobering. It was serious. It was an education. “Palin Power” isn’t just about making hockey moms feel important. It’s not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck. Then read this Judith Warner column from April 13, 2012 (emphasis mine): That the Democrats felt such a need to throw [Hilary] Rosen under a bus suggests to me that they, like the Romney campaign itself, are guilty both of knee-jerk cynicism in regards to female voters and of being out of touch. We all know, on the one hand, that there’s a certain portion of the population that feels not just left behind but generally dissed by what they identify as the evolution of attitudes and mores in our era: they’re the Sarah Palin constituency. Finding happiness through a stubborn refusal to accept the state as master not as servant. It’s a philosophy which once could have been described as liberal, but now is denigrated by people who consider themselves liberal. I think there’s something to that.



