Attention American feminists:

Put all fuming and angst aside for a moment and listen to how other liberals – usually of like-mind – regard Sarah Palin….outside the United States…in a most unlikely place, no less. 

It’s a very interesting story, a sort of backhanded compliment that raises .

The Hindu online edition of India’s National Newspaper has this opinion piece saying that the British love Sarah Palin, and telling why.

Strangely enough, a country which is not known to warm easily to outsiders with raving right-wing views seems to have fallen in love with Ms Palin after her gritty performance at the Republican Party convention last month as the running-mate of John McCain, the party’s presidential nominee.

Since that “electrifying” and “barnstorming” speech, she has been the only show in town with self-styled experts showering praise on her for everything from her finger-jabbing rhetoric and media-baiting one-liners to the choice of her dress that evening (in “contrast” to Hillary Clinton’s “frumpy” trouser-suits) and her “hypnotic” rimless glasses which have become the subject of some rather breathless internet chatter.

Britain, says Suroor, is in the grip of “Palinmania”.

While Hillary Clinton who is closer to the British idea of a cosmopolitan, liberal and politically sophisticated politician is intensely disliked in Britain, especially by members of her own gender, the gun-toting, anti-abortionist Ms Palin is a hit across the gender and political divide. Men find her glamorous, women admire her for putting “misogynists” on notice — as one woman commentator put it — and politicians of different hues like her for her brazen political incorrectness.

But, above all, it is her refreshing “otherness”—her slightly flirtatious style, muscular language…and the sheer pluckiness of a small-town woman daring to take on the Washington establishment — that makes her look so interesting to many Britons. The more she appears to be unlike them, the more they like her.

The backhanded compliments go on…and on.

Ms Palin’s politics, especially her views on social issues…are extreme even by the standards of the hang ‘em, flog ‘em variety of the British Right and have few takers in Britain. But, there is a sneaking admiration for her sheer chutzpah. And her “gritty flamboyance”, to quote one Palin-watcher, reminds many Britons of Margaret Thatcher who was hated for her politics but secretly admired by her worst critics for her steely, in-your-face style.

You can’t really say Palin has an “in-your-face” style, though to her opponents it may feel that way.

It is interesting how even a great many feminists have managed to find a soft corner for Ms Palin. Her personal life story — a mother of five juggling a large family and a demanding career, and succeeding — has impressed them and they are willing to overlook her politics to recognise what they believe is a quality that British women lack…Another woman writer — The Sunday Telegraph’s Anne Applebaum — hailed Ms Palin as someone who “almost uniquely …appears not to be bothered at all by this conflict [between family life and an active life in politics] — hence the interest she holds for women.”

And this is only about halfway through the article at this point. Intended or not, this is admiration from an unlikely quarter….feminists in Britain. Although feminists in America are more unlikely to write these words, or even think them.

Ms Palin’s appeal, her admirers argue, lies in the fact that — unlike Ms Clinton, for example — she is not an archetypal woman politician; and despite her strident right-wing views, because of which she has been accused of re-igniting America’s “culture wars,” it is not easy to cast her in strictly black-and-white terms in the Right / Left / Liberal / Conservative / feminist / non-feminist debate.

But her opponents in the U.S. have anyway. But consider:

Which side of this ideological divide does one place a woman who did not insist on long, paid maternity leave instead choosing to return to work so soon after delivering a baby? Was it “feminist” to back her unmarried daughter’s decision to have her baby? Was it “liberal” or “conservative” for her to play cruel sports such as go moose-hunting?

These are the questions we are asked to ponder before casting her as an unreconstructed reactionary.

Too late for the “before” part. But let’s consider these views.

Rebecca Johnson of Vogue magazine, who interviewed Ms Palin before she became famous, confessed in an article for a British newspaper that despite being a “liberal I’m blown away by Palin.” The argument, put forward by her and some other liberal/feminist supporters of Ms Palin, is that in order to understand what she is about in terms of her life-style and political and social choices it is important to understand where she comes from.

Isn’t this what we were asked to do, from the beginning, with Barack Obama? Yes.

Ms Palin, we’re told, is a graduate from “University of Life” and should not be judged by Ivy League’s academic standards. To do that would be as distorting as judging Barack Obama by standards that apply to conventional white politicians.

It’s interesting that this long and flattering article about Palin winds up negative at the end. But even that is revealing. The liberal feminists who admire Palin are safely on the other side of the Pond, and can’t vote.