YEAH, NO ONE EVER SAID ANYTHING MEAN ABOUT, UM, THE CLINTONS OR OBAMA OR DUKAKIS OR ...

According to Ross Douthat's New York Times column today, if you go to an Ivy League school, no one in the press ever says anything mean about you:

Palin's popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal -- that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal -- that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

This ideal has had a tough 10 months. It's been tarnished by Palin herself, obviously....

But it's also been tarnished by the elites themselves, in the way that the media and political establishments have treated her.

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith....

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You'll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You'll endure gibes about your "slutty" looks and your "white trash concupiscence," while a prominent female academic declares that your "greatest hypocrisy" is the "pretense" that you're a woman....

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin's gender and her social class.

Right. If Palin had been an Ivy Leaguer, there would have been no snickering whatsoever about her femininity -- ask Hillary Clinton, whom the entire nation has always treated with kid gloves, and about whose daughter no one ever made jokes.

And no one ever dared to distort Barack Obama's religious history -- because he's male and an Ivy Leaguer. Or say unpleasant things about alleged changes in style of dress ("earth tones") by male Ivy Leaguer Al Gore. And Michael Dukakis was a male Ivy Leaguer, so no one ever mocked his looks in, say, a helmet, or spread scurrilous rumors about his wife (say, on the subject of flag burning) that wound up being spread further by his opponent in the presidential race. Nor would any reporter have dared to imagine her in a public forum raped and murdered -- the Dukakises' class status and his Ivy League background exempted them from that sort of nasty talk. Oh, and no one ever dared to distort John Kerry's war record, because he was posh and male and an Ivy Leaguer, too.

Only Palin has to take this kind of guff. Only Palin!