Going Rouge (26 page)

Forum: What is Sarah Palin’s Future in American Politics?

Jane Hamsher, Christopher Hayes, Amanda Marcotte, Michael Tomasky

Jane Hamsher

When Sarah Palin called a hasty press conference on a July afternoon and gave a rambling, disjointed speech to announce her resignation as governor of Alaska, tongues instantly began to wag. Surely there must be a scandal, a criminal investigation of some sort looming in the background. Because nobody puts on this kind of erratic spectacle by choice, knowing that the announcement they are about to make will leap straight into banner headlines. No, there surely had to be something else weighing on Sarah Palin’s mind that day or she never would stood before the cameras in such a state. This was certainly not the composed woman who had made such an impact at the Republican National Convention less than a year ago.

Palin’s response was to promptly threaten to sue anyone who said as much. She apparently didn’t realize that the mistake they actually made was to give her far more credit than she deserved. Their conclusions were based on the presumption that this behavior was emanating from an otherwise normal, rational person. The story she crafted to explain her resignation, starring herself as the brave heroine who boldly refuses to half-ass the remainder of her term while her public beckons, was so thoroughly preposterous—so narcissistic and delusional—that nobody could imagine it hadn’t been cobbled together under duress.

Sadly, there was no guile there. No attempt to deceive, no rationale that lay beneath the surface. She really is what she appears to be: an ambitious woman with a flair for melodrama who thinks it’s the obligation of every governor to resign before the job’s over. And moreover, gosh darn it, that she’s the only one with the courage, the fortitude, and the moral fiber to do it.

To the surprise of almost no one not named Sarah Palin, her poll numbers took an instant hit. At the time she made her Norma Desmond–esque departure from the governor’s office, she was in a three-way tie with Mike Huckabee and Mitt Rommey among likely Republican primary voters who were asked which candidate they favored for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. Four months later, she trails Romney by eight points and Huckabee by eleven.

Few would dispute that Michael Jackson was a phenomenal talent, but as he made his way into adulthood his need to express himself in the pages of the
National Enquirer
soon eclipsed his talent. Whatever Sarah Palin’s talent for governance is, her inability to control that same impulse may soon overwhelm her political career too. Can she hold it together long enough to mount a political campaign? Will she shine as one of the leading lights of the Republican Party, or will her compulsive tango with the tabloids render her Wasilla’s once and future Kato Kaelin?

Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention, is the man credited with suggesting Palin for the vice presidential slot on the 2008 ticket. I asked him once why he had chosen her. He told me that the next Republican presidential candidate had to be pro-life and the next one and the next one. Because the people who staff the phones, make the calls, knock on doors, and do the grunt work to get out the vote for the GOP are antiabortion women, and they just couldn’t get worked up over John McCain. They well knew who Palin was, however, and when her name was announced as McCain’s running mate, they were dancing in the streets and weeping for joy. She’s a powerful symbol for them, and they showed up for her.

The Republicans are now engaged in doing what an opposition party is supposed to do—winding up their base and motivating a strong turnout for the 2010 midterms. It’s what the teabag rallies are all about. The political message may be incoherent, and much of the symbolism seems to have a not-so-subtle racial component, but the rallying cry is crystal clear: It’s us against them, and they suck. While liberal netizens cynically dismiss her as Caribou Barbie or Bible Spice, right-to-lifers in the GOP base see Sarah Palin as a woman wronged by the “liberal media.” She is their hope for the future.

Ultimately her compulsive attraction to tabloid melodrama may undermine any shot Sarah Palin might have at the presidency. People who will tune in to see Tom DeLay on
Dancing with the Stars
don’t necessarily want to see him in the White House. But don’t underestimate her ability to turn out true believers come election time, because while Rahm Emanuel busies himself with demoralizing the Democratic base, Sarah Palin will be tending to hers.

Christopher Hayes

A friend of mine who is the publisher of a very successful news site has a joke: In the future the Internet will consist entirely of Sarah Palin slide shows. Anyone who’s ever had occasion to look at traffic statistics for a news website understands what he’s saying. Few things draw in readers and garner clicks more reliably than articles (or, even better, pictures) of Sarah Palin. We can’t look away. We can’t stop talking about her even when we desperately want to. The very fact that you’re holding this book in your hands attests to that.

My first experience of this Sarah Palin effect came during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. As a progressive opinion journalist who routinely reports on conservatives, you come to develop a kind of practiced disassociative state when behind enemy lines. You’d never be able to gain any understanding whatsoever if you spent all your time arguing with and hectoring people at evangelical colleges or anti-immigration rallies, so it’s both psychologically and professionally necessary to put yourself in a state of mind where you simply listen.

On the night Palin gave her big debut national speech, I sat through the speeches that preceded hers in that same slightly removed state. Then Palin came to the stage. The crowd grew more and more raucous, and the room began to feel like a Roman Colosseum. When Palin went after the “reporters and commentators” in the “Washington elite” for having disparaged and condescended to her, the crowd erupted and began pointing and jeering at Tom Brokaw, sitting in the NBC booth. I watched all this still, I thought, with equanimity.

About a third of the way through the speech, when she delivered her infamous potshot at community organizers—“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities”—I suddenly felt like the room was 100 degrees. Realizing my face was burning with heat, I went to touch my cheeks, which felt feverish. I couldn’t for the life of me understand what was going on, and was about to get up for a breath of fresh air or water until it hit me: I was furious.

My father is a community organizer and spent years toiling in some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York, doing the painstaking, unglamorous work of attempting to build power among people who were routinely getting screwed over. And Sarah Palin had just spit in his face.

Despite my best efforts, she had gotten to me.

What I was experiencing was a strange kind of dislocation: Palin had managed to bypass one part of my brain and reach down deep into another. There are two kinds of politics: There’s politics of the prefrontal cerebral cortex, the politics of analysis and facts and discussion, and there’s politics of the limbic system, the sub-rational, emotional, ancient part of the brain that controls the bodily responses like the blood flushing my cheeks in that seat in the Xcel Energy Center.

As degraded as our politics may be, it’s impossible for me to imagine a politician as purely limbic as Sarah Palin ever managing to ascend to the White House. But democratic politics in a heterogeneous society like ours is inevitably tribal, and millions of Americans view her as their vessel and their chief. The political potency of someone who can provoke that kind of visceral reaction shouldn’t be underestimated.

Amanda Marcotte

Looking at the train wreck that is Sarah Palin, I find myself torn between my partisan desires and my love of country. Palin’s continued popularity with the Republican base has the potential to marginalize the GOP even further, as the public at large perceives Palin both as a bimbo and as a right winger who blows past “conservative” straight into militia separatist territory, with a side of speaking in tongues. As a Democratic partisan, I can only hope Palin takes the Republicans further away from the mainstream.

But as a patriot, I’m concerned about Palin’s future as a politician. It’s not impossible for the American people to have a collective brain fart and vote her into high office; we are the nation that gave Richard Nixon an overwhelming victory and saw George W. Bush as the conquering hero of 9/11. When I hear fellow liberals cheer Palin on with hopes that she’ll sink the Republican Party, I find myself cringing in fear. Let’s not cheer her all the way to the White House, I think.

But it seems that my greatest Palin hope (that she’ll ruin the Republicans) and my greatest Palin fear (that she’ll ruin the country) might both amount to nothing. Palin may try to spin her hasty resignation from the Alaska governor’s office as a political asset, but that doesn’t mean anyone else is under any obligation to believe her. Recent news stories about Palin doing things like signing up for LinkedIn, like any common job searcher, or sniggering jokes about her upcoming memoirs being written a tad too quickly send the message that the political and media establishment can’t take Palin seriously enough to let her have any power.

Palin has potential, lurking career-destroying scandals that could put the John Edwards affair to shame. If any of the many rumors floating around about her are true, she’s definitely toast. Remember, the same
National Enquirer
that broke the Edwards story has run with rumors about Palin having an affair, rumors that the mainstream media will cease ignoring if Palin stages a successful political comeback.

But for my money, the most amusing danger to Palin’s career comes in the form of her grandson’s father, Levi Johnston. Johnston is both a publicity hound and an endless fountain of amusing anecdotes about the Palin family that are incompatible with the humble American right-wing populist image Palin cultivates. Johnston has embarrassed the Palin family by mocking their social conservative front and by revealing that Sarah Palin openly spoke about how much more money she’d make as a professional celebrity than as a governor. Not the best things to have out there if you want a serious political career. The man has expressed interest in posing for
Playgirl
. That’s the sort of association that’s hard to live down.

Not that any of this matters to the hard-core conservative base that loves Sarah Palin. Their unchanging love is based not so much on who Palin actually is, but the role she plays, that of a Bible-thumping, moose-shooting beauty queen who really gets them. Luckily, the majority of the country isn’t quite as keen on embracing the fantasy.

Michael Tomasky

Stan Greenberg and James Carville, the Democratic pollsters, released a study in October 2009 in which they reported the results of a focus group they convened of hard-shell (and all white) conservatives in Georgia. You, I suspect, can predict all the things they didn’t like: Barack Obama, Democrats, liberalism, socialism, National Socialism (the Obama variety, natch), the media, being called racist, and so on and so forth.

As for what they liked... well, it was a short list. They didn’t like the Republicans (“old and out of touch.…Weak,” said one). They were okay with George W. Bush on a personal level but thought that Washington, that infectious redoubt of pencil-pushers and status-quo-ers, had made him soft (he “tried to reach across the aisle a little too much,” said one).

Ah, but there was one person they really liked:

You betcha... Spicy... Honest... Go girl... Forthright. Right up there... Says what she feels.

I just hope that Sarah Palin has Hillary’s backbone because she is going to need it and that is the thing. I would vote for her in a heartbeat. I love Sarah Palin.

I also admired Sarah Palin for being a professional woman and a great mom. She sacrificed and she was you know an Alaskan woman.... She was a real woman.... You know strong, courageous, almost like the pioneer women.

I think that she has the moral fiber. I believe she’s unselfish, really.... I don’t think that she’s a person who lies or, you know, she’s probably not going to be perfect, but I think she’s got the moral fiber.

The key words in these encomiums are
forthright
,
backbone
,
pioneer
(in its hardy literal meaning, not that gooey liberal “Shirley Chisholm was a pioneer” sense), and
moral fiber
.

These are the people—maybe not literally, but the kind of people—who attend the “tea party” marches. The kind who swooned last year when John McCain pulled Palin away from Russo-proximity and chose her for vice president, and who roared their approval when she said Obama was busy “palling around with terrorists.” I’m not a political scientist, and I haven’t undertaken an extensive crunching of the data, but even in the absence of empirical proof I think we can safely say that the space where the Palin-devotee set overlaps with the “dawn of socialism” set is fairly large.