Palin-Thatcher Comparision Update--WSJ Joins the Club

Commentator Fred (see comments on the previous post) will no doubt be pleased to discover that a Maggie Thatcher-Sarah Palin comparison appears today in another "overly partial newspaper," this time a truly conservative one. In a commentary in today's Wall Street Journal online, Barbara Amiel, a columnist for Macleans', the Canadian weekly newsmagazine, and a former senior political columnist for the Sunday Times of London, writes about the Thatcher-Palin analogy, with the cautionary note that it was the old boys' club of the Tory establishment that finally brought Prime Minister Thatcher down. She imagines that "Mrs. T" would have given the following advice to Governor Palin:

"Mrs. Thatcher would have recognized the guns aimed at Sarah Palin as the weapons of the left with feminist trigger-pullers. She also would have known that Mrs. Palin has less to fear from East-Coast intellectual snobs in egalitarian America than she had to fear from her own Tory base in class-prejudiced Britain. She would have told her to stand her ground and do her homework. Read your briefs, choose advisers with care, and, as she once said to me, my arm in her grip and her eyes fixed firmly on mine, 'Just be yourself, don't ever give in and they can't harm you.'"

Good advice for any politician, male or female, I should think. John McCain has certainly followed it, sometimes even to the chagrin of his Republican colleagues.