Don Lemon of CNN compares Sarah Palin to the character Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady. I’ve heard this comparison made before, and it’s quite an appropriate one, though Lemon does not fully explore it.

After all, Henry Higgins’s idea in My Fair Lady is that Eliza can be made to fit in with the upper class without receiving any education beyond how to talk properly–that is, she needs no education in anything other than sounding educated.

The Higgins view is, I fear, also true of Palin. She doesn’t need to actually learn anything more about economics or foreign policy to be accepted by the mainstream press; she only needs to learn to sound like it.