More Palin-tology

By Kathy G.

All right, already -- shortly after Sarah Palin was chosen, I decided it wouldn't be such a great idea to go after her on this blog. For one thing, she's not really the main event -- McCain is, and I thought it would be best if we trained our fire on him. For another thing, I worried that if liberals, Democrats, and the netroots launched an all-out attack on Palin, it would only make her stronger, because the backlash would create sympathy for her. This is a dynamic that often occurs with right-wing pseudo-populist politicians like Bush, Nixon, etc.

But then, two things happened. One is that Palin turned out to be worse beyond my wildest imagination. Seriously, I thought that, however extremist her views were, she was likely to be a pretty shrewd and talented pol -- as Digby put it, Mike Huckabee in pumps. The schools Huckabee attended were not any fancier than the ones Palin did, and like she, he comes from a small red state not connected to any of the country's major media or power centers. And yet, Huckabee acquitted himself very well in interviews and in the debates, and ended up being one of the last men standing against McCain.

Well, obviously, for Palin, it didn't turn out that way. At all.

The second thing that happened is that I found myself fascinated by Palin. Appalled, definitely. Full of intense loathing for her, sure. But also fascinated -- by her strange, reactionary notions; her weird family life; and the dramatic contrast between the hugeness of her ambition and the stark limits of her skill set. Above all, I'm astonished by the enormous contradictions between her retrograde views about gender and her own overwhelming will to power.

So I'll 'fess up -- I have something of an obsession with the woman. And I figure I might as well write about her. Writers often write best about the things they feel most strongly about, after all.

My husband suggested I post some of the things I wrote about Palin last night in some emails, so here goes.

About Palin's now more or less legendary interview with Katie Couric: wow. Just -- wow. It deserves to be eternally ensconced in the Urban Dictionary, next to the definition of "FAIL."

I keep thinking we've sounded the depths of this woman's ignorance and gibberish -- but then I keep finding out I'm wrong.

There's this, for example: "I'm a feminist who, uh, believes in equal rights."

As opposed to that other kind of feminist, who doesn't believe in equal rights!

There are so many other hilarious idiocies and intensely cringe-inducing moments in this interview that I won't bother recounting them all. But one of the odder things about Palin is that her answer to almost every damn question is so bizarrely Alaska-centric.

You're running for Vice President of the United States, lady -- act like it!

I'm not the person who came up with this (I read it somewhere else -- a blog, maybe? a listserv?), but  I'm half-way convinced this is all one huge Andy Kaufman-esque stunt cooked up by Tina Fey. Sarah Palin can't really exist -- or maybe the real Sarah Palin was kidnapped by the writers of Saturday Night Live, and they've secretly replaced her by Tina Fey. All as part of an elaborate plot to elect Barack Obama.

Or as a commenter on, I believe, Eschaton, said: Sacha Baron Cohen has got to be involved in this somehow.

An email correspondent of mine semi-defended Palin, saying that she felt sorry for her, because Sarah can't help being stupid, after all, and it's really the fault of the McCain camp for choosing someone so ill-prepared.

In response, I said "Donnez-moi un break!"

Part of being a grown-up is having some minimal level of discipline and self-knowledge. If Palin didn't have such a monumental ego and such a shockingly lazy, incurious mind, she would have clearly understood that she simply didn't (yet) have what takes to succeed in politics at the national level.

In five or eight or ten years, maybe. It would have taken lots of time and plenty of hard, grueling work, but if she played her cards right, she might have gotten there. But instead she showed the maturity, judgment and discipline of a 15-year old.

I don't buy the argument that it's "not her fault" or "she couldn't help it" at all. She's an adult woman who had full agency here -- nobody put a gun to her head.

Most Americans don't have the brains, or skill, or whatever it takes, to make it to the top of their chosen field. But I'll bet the majority of them wouldn't accept a position that clearly was way, way beyond what their skills and experience would prepare them for.

True, Palin does not appear to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, and she can't be blamed for the fact that she (apparently) doesn't have a naturally quick mind. But she is responsible for her own massive intellectual incuriosity and laziness.

I don't have a glimmer of sympathy for this woman. She's one of my least favorite types of people: an antifeminst woman who nevertheless is quite happy to use all the hard-fought gains feminists have won for her own self-advancement. She doesn't appear to have any sense of gender solidarity whatsoever. What she seems to want is to use the ladder feminism built to climb all the way to the top, and then to kick away the ladder so that no other woman can succeed.

Palin is a thoroughly vapid individual and a small-minded bigot -- a nasty piece of work who bitchily and gratuitously insults community organizers and favors policies such as mandatory childbirth for pregnant 12-year old rape victims. She will get no sympathy from this corner -- only schadenfreude.

Comments

[mary b]

She reminds me of what she probably is, a beauty pagent mom. Out for herself at the cost of her children. Hasn't she already demonstrated that, by putting her whole family on national stage to benefit, ummm, only herself?
Kind of like that cheerleader mom in Texas who tried to bump off her daughters rival mother. She wants to be perfect at everything except, she's sooooo stupid, self-centered, an egomaniac, and, well, stupid!
McCain is just worse, as he'll do anything, I mean anything, to win. At great cost to U.S. citizens as well as the rest of the world.

[mary b]

She reminds me of what she probably is, a beauty pagent mom. Out for herself at the cost of her children. Hasn't she already demonstrated that, by putting her whole family on national stage to benefit, ummm, only herself?
Kind of like that cheerleader mom in Texas who tried to bump off her daughters rival mother. She wants to be perfect at everything except, she's sooooo stupid, self-centered, an egomaniac, and, well, stupid!
McCain is just worse, as he'll do anything, I mean anything, to win. At great cost to U.S. citizens as well as the rest of the world.