Newsweek put Sarah Palin on the cover this week so that it could make fun of her in an essay by Christopher Hitchins. He rips her apart in the course of trying to make a point against populism and how it always betrays the “hicks” it pretends to represent.

Yet in two television appearances, the former governor of Alaska this week displayed a lot better manners than her liberal critics have shown toward her.

Cartoonists especially have portrayed her as some kind of illiterate and religiously misguided gun nut. But on television, she came across instead as someone with a good deal of sense and restraint.

The young man who got her daughter pregnant has tried to embarrass the Palin family, but she has refused to reciprocate. The Palins made a mistake by putting that guy in front of a national audience last year. They are not the first parents who misjudged a friend of one of their kids.

Palin wrote a book, “Going Rogue,” which she is now promoting. Not having read the book, it would be wrong to judge it, a viewpoint that her detractors don’t seem to share.

Palin supposedly is coy about any presidential ambitions. That’s a subject for another day. For now, among all the suits and stuffed shirts on the national stage, she is a refreshing presence. And compared to her most determined critics, such as Newsweek, she is showing far more class. (hh)