by Ben Smith
Politico.com
Thomas Frank noticed in the Jour­nal today that Sarah Palin used an odd source for a quote in her announce­ment speech attrib­uted only to a “writer.”

“We grow good peo­ple in our small towns, with hon­esty and sin­cer­ity and dig­nity,” she said, draw­ing from a once-powerful, now for­got­ten mid-century con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nist named West­brook Pegler.

It’s an odd source because Pegler, who moved fur­ther right as his career went on, ended up very, very far out. Frank notes that he talked hope­fully of the assas­si­na­tion of Franklin Roosevelt.

He was also known for what Philip Roth described as his “casual dis­taste for Jews,” which had become so evi­dent by the end that he was bounced from the jour­nal of the John Birch Soci­ety in 1964 for alleged anti-semitism. Accord­ing to his obit­u­ary, he’d advanced the the­ory that Amer­i­can Jews of East­ern Euro­pean descent were “instinc­tively sym­pa­thetic to Com­mu­nism, how­ever out­wardly respectable they appeared.”

It’s unlikely that Palin wrote the speech or dug up the quote, though it’s pos­si­ble. The line does come from a strand of con­ser­v­a­tive pop­ulism that isn’t par­tic­u­larly native to McCain or his usual rhetoric: The only other source for that Pegler eas­ily avail­able online is a 1990 book by Patrick Buchanan.

In any case, it won’t calm Ed Koch any.