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After years of being the Democrat Party’s ‘Exhibit A’ for everything that’s wrong about right-wing politics in America, Sarah Palin has won praise from one of the left’s most respected intellectuals.

Noam Chomsky, who’s written over 100 books, has said the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee was right about Barack Obama’s 2008 election slogans.

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“I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‘hopey-changey’ stuff, she was right,” the noted linguist told Democracy Now.

Chomsky says he agrees with the Tea Party favourite that Obama’s “Hope” and “Change” messages were just marketing pabulum.

“[It’s] understood by the people who run the political system, that it’s no great secret that the U.S. electoral system is mainly a public relations extravaganza to keep away from issues,” he said. “It’s sort of a marketing affair. And the people who run it are the advertisers.”

Chomsky adds that this was self evident, because the Hope/Change message won a marketing award before the election was even over.

“If you go they were reporting how executives were really excited that they had this new model how to delude people. They used to use the Reagan-model now [they] can use the Obama-model.”

Chomsky has never been a fan of Obama, declaring early in the president’s campaign that he was mostly smoke and mirrors. In a 2008 in an interview with Avi Lewis, Chomsky explained why the slogans were very alluring to the population but essentially meaningless.

“Well that’s Barack Obama. He has his way, he presents himself — or the way his handlers present him — as basically a kind of blank slate on which you can write whatever you like,” he said during the interview.