On the Eve of Sarah Palin's Autobiography
N_Fiddledog @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 2:38 pm
Sarah's autobiography comes out tomorrow, doesn't it? In anticipation of the inevitable bash threads, I want to get a jump on em, and post my favorite - so far - opinion piece from the, they claim centrist, I claim left-leaning DailyBeast.
$1:
Leave Palin Alone
An uncle of mine used to have two male dachsunds. Whenever we went to visit him and his family, one dachsund made straight for my leg, while the other rushed for my brother’s. As soon as each one had secured his position, they proceeded to rub against the object of desire until they ejaculated, after which they dragged themselves into a corner and fell into a deep sleep.
Sarah Palin is surrounded by frisky liberal dachsunds, who are so excited by the prospect of rubbing their critical faculties against her every move and utterance that on the eve of the publication of her autobiography, the sound of scrambling paws and frenetic squeals is everywhere. Frank Rich, who recently compared Palin to Stalin because of her attempt to expel a moderate New York Republican from the party ranks — it’s called democratic politics, my smug, sanctimonious pundit friend — must be snoring his afternoons away.
But, then, Rich probably does not regard Palin as having democratic instincts. That would be a strange interpretation of this fascinating, repulsive, refreshing, depressing, simple yet puzzling figure. The fact is that Palin is the democratic person par excellence. The astounding hatred of her could well be a displaced aversion to the rising tide of American democracy in general, in which hectoring mobs and comedian-statesmen increasingly drown out rationality, individuality, and wit.
I share much of the revulsion against Palin, which has several obvious sources. (Full disclosure: Palin and I possess the good fortune of having the same world-class book editor, Adam Bellow.) Palin presumed to be a heartbeat away from the White House when she was patently unqualified to hold any consequential political position; she would not accept defeat gracefully; and she has spent her post-election time making personal attacks and spreading malicious rumors—e.g. “death panels”—in order to exact revenge on the politicians and journalists she feels betrayed her.
In this personal sense, Palin is the very antithesis of a true populist candidate. A true populist challenges privilege and inherited connections with the sheer democratic strength of character. Character seems precisely to be what the undignified Palin lacks.
Or is it?
Fame used to be an exceptional circumstance in American life, now it is more like a permanent beckoning condition. The possible onset of fame—via blogs, Twitter, YouTube, etc.— has become the exemplary American hope. Everybody wants to know other people’s fame-stories because just about everybody feels that, sooner or later, fame will come their way. Consider the obsession with the Gosselins, or with Balloon Boy’s father. Fame, or the hunger for fame, magnified their appetites and flaws, and deranged them.
Sudden fame struck Palin like a hurricane. Her attempt to tell what she considers the true story of fame’s deformations is no doubt driven by a pathetically relentless narcissism. It might also be the true story of what happened. Whatever its literal integrity, her story will possess an undeniable emotional truth, flattering or unflattering to the author.
The “elites” really have had at Palin—one of the richest aspects of her odyssey is that she was manhandled not just by liberal elites, but by conservative elites, too. The spectacle of her daily humiliation by moral showoffs like Rich, who stand before the mirror lovingly combing their political virtue, makes you cringe. For the revelation of Palin’s pettiness and vindictiveness was disappointing mostly because for one fleeting moment she did seem like the antidote to the clubbiness, and the cowardice, and the cautious careerism that make our politics and our journalism so mediocre.
As a political prospect, Palin is terrifying; as someone who embodies an American story, she is fascinating. She is Huck Finn in reverse. Instead of fleeing civilization and lighting out for the territory, she started in the territory and lit out for civilization. What she discovered is that civilization—our politics, and our media—is even more feral, less bound by morality, and more unforgiving than the wilderness she had come from. We know this dirty little secret of civilization theoretically—cynicism about everything is our American meat and milk. But we rarely come across a public person whose experience of it is so raw and uncontrolled.
Sometimes it seems as though Palin were being punished for her realization about what passes for civilized behavior. Just because she and some of her sleaziest defenders absurdly blame her downfall on “liberal persecution” doesn’t mean that liberals didn’t seize on her outsiderness once she stumbled and pounce all over her.
True outsiders often discombobulate the liberal mind. The source of liberal values is the idea that life’s quick changes make us all fundamentally outsiders, and that any social and political arrangement has to take the outsider, not the cozy insider, as its moral starting point. (See the liberal philosopher John Rawls’ profoundly beautiful conceit of the “veil of ignorance” in his “Theory of Justice,” in which Rawls imagines men and women creating a social contract based on their mutual vulnerability.) But powerful liberals are rarely outsiders, and so true outsiders shake their sense of self. Plenty of liberals must have felt a few minutes of alarm when Sarah Palin first appeared on the scene and challenged their authenticity. Then she imploded, and they tore her apart, perhaps in savage relief at finding their virtuous identities still intact.
I don’t share any of Palin’s politics, except her recent about-face supporting benefits for gay couples. (Too bad she can’t muster the same Christian generosity in support of a solid Christian idea like gay marriage.) Some of her positions, like her religious opposition to health-care reform and her opposition to stem-cell research, strike me as just shy of sociopathic.
But all the piling-on seems to me intended to cancel out her humanity. She is being turned into an object, and in this sense, her very presence has exposed a certain ugly attitude among the liberal elites that has always cast such a long shadow over liberal politics.
About 50 years ago, the (elite) liberal intellectual Lionel Trilling put it well: “We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”
Palin may have disgraced herself through her ignorance, childish fantasy of power, and lack of dignity as a vice-presidential candidate. But the vicious attacks on her have the effect of making even a caustic lefty nostalgic for her original promise: to explode the bubbly ego of hypocritical liberals whose “enlightened interest” and “wisdom” amount to a bullying consolidation of their entitlements. The more liberal "wisdom" that is wreaked on Palin with such self-celebration, the more "rogue" she really seems.
There I’ve done it. I’ve defended, sort of, the dangerous slouching beast from the north country. Bring on the attacks! Just watch the pants, please.
An uncle of mine used to have two male dachsunds. Whenever we went to visit him and his family, one dachsund made straight for my leg, while the other rushed for my brother’s. As soon as each one had secured his position, they proceeded to rub against the object of desire until they ejaculated, after which they dragged themselves into a corner and fell into a deep sleep.
Sarah Palin is surrounded by frisky liberal dachsunds, who are so excited by the prospect of rubbing their critical faculties against her every move and utterance that on the eve of the publication of her autobiography, the sound of scrambling paws and frenetic squeals is everywhere. Frank Rich, who recently compared Palin to Stalin because of her attempt to expel a moderate New York Republican from the party ranks — it’s called democratic politics, my smug, sanctimonious pundit friend — must be snoring his afternoons away.
But, then, Rich probably does not regard Palin as having democratic instincts. That would be a strange interpretation of this fascinating, repulsive, refreshing, depressing, simple yet puzzling figure. The fact is that Palin is the democratic person par excellence. The astounding hatred of her could well be a displaced aversion to the rising tide of American democracy in general, in which hectoring mobs and comedian-statesmen increasingly drown out rationality, individuality, and wit.
I share much of the revulsion against Palin, which has several obvious sources. (Full disclosure: Palin and I possess the good fortune of having the same world-class book editor, Adam Bellow.) Palin presumed to be a heartbeat away from the White House when she was patently unqualified to hold any consequential political position; she would not accept defeat gracefully; and she has spent her post-election time making personal attacks and spreading malicious rumors—e.g. “death panels”—in order to exact revenge on the politicians and journalists she feels betrayed her.
In this personal sense, Palin is the very antithesis of a true populist candidate. A true populist challenges privilege and inherited connections with the sheer democratic strength of character. Character seems precisely to be what the undignified Palin lacks.
Or is it?
Fame used to be an exceptional circumstance in American life, now it is more like a permanent beckoning condition. The possible onset of fame—via blogs, Twitter, YouTube, etc.— has become the exemplary American hope. Everybody wants to know other people’s fame-stories because just about everybody feels that, sooner or later, fame will come their way. Consider the obsession with the Gosselins, or with Balloon Boy’s father. Fame, or the hunger for fame, magnified their appetites and flaws, and deranged them.
Sudden fame struck Palin like a hurricane. Her attempt to tell what she considers the true story of fame’s deformations is no doubt driven by a pathetically relentless narcissism. It might also be the true story of what happened. Whatever its literal integrity, her story will possess an undeniable emotional truth, flattering or unflattering to the author.
The “elites” really have had at Palin—one of the richest aspects of her odyssey is that she was manhandled not just by liberal elites, but by conservative elites, too. The spectacle of her daily humiliation by moral showoffs like Rich, who stand before the mirror lovingly combing their political virtue, makes you cringe. For the revelation of Palin’s pettiness and vindictiveness was disappointing mostly because for one fleeting moment she did seem like the antidote to the clubbiness, and the cowardice, and the cautious careerism that make our politics and our journalism so mediocre.
As a political prospect, Palin is terrifying; as someone who embodies an American story, she is fascinating. She is Huck Finn in reverse. Instead of fleeing civilization and lighting out for the territory, she started in the territory and lit out for civilization. What she discovered is that civilization—our politics, and our media—is even more feral, less bound by morality, and more unforgiving than the wilderness she had come from. We know this dirty little secret of civilization theoretically—cynicism about everything is our American meat and milk. But we rarely come across a public person whose experience of it is so raw and uncontrolled.
Sometimes it seems as though Palin were being punished for her realization about what passes for civilized behavior. Just because she and some of her sleaziest defenders absurdly blame her downfall on “liberal persecution” doesn’t mean that liberals didn’t seize on her outsiderness once she stumbled and pounce all over her.
True outsiders often discombobulate the liberal mind. The source of liberal values is the idea that life’s quick changes make us all fundamentally outsiders, and that any social and political arrangement has to take the outsider, not the cozy insider, as its moral starting point. (See the liberal philosopher John Rawls’ profoundly beautiful conceit of the “veil of ignorance” in his “Theory of Justice,” in which Rawls imagines men and women creating a social contract based on their mutual vulnerability.) But powerful liberals are rarely outsiders, and so true outsiders shake their sense of self. Plenty of liberals must have felt a few minutes of alarm when Sarah Palin first appeared on the scene and challenged their authenticity. Then she imploded, and they tore her apart, perhaps in savage relief at finding their virtuous identities still intact.
I don’t share any of Palin’s politics, except her recent about-face supporting benefits for gay couples. (Too bad she can’t muster the same Christian generosity in support of a solid Christian idea like gay marriage.) Some of her positions, like her religious opposition to health-care reform and her opposition to stem-cell research, strike me as just shy of sociopathic.
But all the piling-on seems to me intended to cancel out her humanity. She is being turned into an object, and in this sense, her very presence has exposed a certain ugly attitude among the liberal elites that has always cast such a long shadow over liberal politics.
About 50 years ago, the (elite) liberal intellectual Lionel Trilling put it well: “We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”
Palin may have disgraced herself through her ignorance, childish fantasy of power, and lack of dignity as a vice-presidential candidate. But the vicious attacks on her have the effect of making even a caustic lefty nostalgic for her original promise: to explode the bubbly ego of hypocritical liberals whose “enlightened interest” and “wisdom” amount to a bullying consolidation of their entitlements. The more liberal "wisdom" that is wreaked on Palin with such self-celebration, the more "rogue" she really seems.
There I’ve done it. I’ve defended, sort of, the dangerous slouching beast from the north country. Bring on the attacks! Just watch the pants, please.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- ... lone/full/
xerxes @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 3:30 pm
It's a good point, but the simple fact of the matter is that, Palin has become a media whore and if she doesn't want to be attacked on a daily basis, she needs to either stop telling easily disproven lies on a daily basis or in print, or toughen up and realise that it comes with the territory.
Crazies have been calling Obama a Grandma murdering Muslim Commie Fascist for the better part of 2009 and he hasn't issued blanket threats to sue the media or use his "Department of Law" (an actual Palin quote)to shield him from criticism. Nor has he turned the criticism into a giant pity-party like Palin has.
Though, it's not a bad article you posted. But I take your centrist blog and raise you an outright left winger: Matt Taibbi.
$1:
Palinoia
Since Sarah Palin’s new soon-to-be-bestseller is finally coming out, I thought now was as good a time as any to put out an article about Palin’s resignation I wrote this summer but never published. In the piece I predicted that the book would be called I, SARAH PALIN, GOES WASHINGTON, but it turns out it’s actually called GOING ROGUE; AN AMERICAN LIFE (an early article I read about it contained a misprint that left me confused for days as to why Sarah Palin would head into a presidential campaign with a book called GOING ROUGE). When she resigned this past summer I was her freakout/resignation would end up helping her, and that the inevitable platitude-rich bestseller would be step one… anyway, here’s the piece that we never put out.
***
If you didn’t know any better, if you didn’t know what that you were watching wasn’t an overdose of strong uppers but simple garden-variety stupidity mixed with severe stress, you’d have thought Sarah Palin’s breathless, rambling resignation speech a few weeks back was one the great public performances in the history of recreational narcotics – a masterpiece on par with Dock Ellis’s 1976 LSD-aided no-hitter and Britney’s seminal 2007 MTV Awards “comeback” performance.
The speech was a tour de force of Palinism, a dozen-plus feverish minutes of strident paranoia and passionate incoherence that in the end only just barely managed to achieve their ostensible rhetorical purpose – an announcement that John McCain’s erstwhile train-wreck running mate was stepping down as governor of Alaska in order to set the bloodthirsty tabloids working on the most intriguing political mystery story in years.
Why did Sarah quit? This is the question that the national political press will surely spend a good part of the next two years debating, until Palin inevitably resurfaces in February of 2011 buoyed by her inevitable hot bestseller (I, Sarah Palin, Goes Washington), by the inevitable rave reviews at whatever no-show, dingbat job she ends up taking (Liberty University Athletic Director? American Idol judge?), and by the fifty or sixty million in quietly-collected search committee money we all know is already being arranged.
Until that time comes, we’ll all be left to wonder just why exactly Sarah Palin quit her day job when the playbook seemed so obviously to call for eighteen more months of gubernatorial pseudo-rectitude in preparation for the presumed 2012 assault on Mount Obama; whether it really was just a case of premature media burnout, as she seemed to imply, or whether some darker reason forced her hand.
Clues were scarce at first. In the initial surprise announcement, made against a backdrop of swarming bugs and paddling lake fowl outside her Wasilla, Alaska home on July 3, Palin seemed almost monomaniacally focused on the tabloid circus that had become her daily existence, mentioning hostile press coverage over a dozen times. In the most weirdly tasteless and uncomfortable part of her speech, she even contrasted the Iraq war veterans she’d recently visited overseas to her media antagonists, implying that these patriotic soldiers were too busy getting shot for the good of the flag to “waste time” crucifying a hardworking Republican governor. “We can all learn from our selfless troops,” she said. “They’re bold, they don’t give up, they take a stand and know that life is short so they choose to not waste time” on “superficial wasteful political bloodsport.”
The governor, without a doubt, was by the end getting it in every orifice from a variety of highly creative antagonists never dreamed of before August 29, 2008 (the Anno Domini in the Palinoid calendar, marking the date she was named to the presidential ticket by the ever-regretful John McCain), including a bevy of emboldened in-state enemies who had slapped her with no fewer than 18 ethics complaints since last year. “Some say things changed for me on August 29,” she said. “I say others changed.”
In fact things have been tough all around since we last saw Palin on the big stage last fall, playing the role of the overmatched anchor round the neck of the probably doomed-already McCain candidacy. After the November catastrophe she and her family became a favored paparazzi target, especially after daughter Bristol squeezed out her apparently unwanted love child and promptly became a creepily outspoken advocate for abstinence (the world anxiously awaits baby Tripp’s unavoidable teenage breakdown upon reading, in the People magazine archives, Bristol’s disturbing tirade against the drag of motherhood).
Palin also engaged in an uncomfortably heated spat with David Letterman that managed somehow to make both sides look bad, while so severely mismanaging her relatively modest responsibilities as an off-year presidential hopeful (missing a series of promised engagements) that the national Republican party had to send officials to Alaska for a sort of intervention, to straighten out her calendar and prevail upon her to answer her telephone.
While a lot of this stuff was undoubtedly annoying and some of the ethics complaints in particular were absurd (in one of the 18 cases she was criticized for wearing a jacket with the logo of her husband’s snowmobile race sponsor), Palin’s reaction to all of it, particularly the media criticism, was way out of proportion to reality, far beyond the usual “the liberal press is out to get us” bullshit that more psychologically healthy conservative politicians will sling in public either out of calculation, or just for the fun of it.
In fact, Palin’s obsession with her critics appears really to have advanced beyond even Nixonian levels – culminating in an extraordinary letter written by her attorney Thomas Van Flein to various news organizations the day after her resignation that seemed to be evidence of a major paranoid episode.
The rambling four-page letter amazingly threatened legal action against any reporter who implied that Palin was facing a federal investigation into whether or not she embezzled funds from a sports complex construction project in her hometown of Wasilla. Palin’s intent was to head off speculation that she had resigned in advance of a pending investigation – a story that to date had mostly been pushed by a little-known blogger in Alaska – but the letter instead only heightened interest in the obscure story and guaranteed that it became a major national headline.
Moreover Van Flein’s letter, which was directed at Palin-unfriendly news organizations like the Washington Post, MSNBC, and the New York Times, read like a late-stage Lenny Bruce rant, full of arcane details humorlessly offered in Palin’s defense and lots of hideously leaden sarcasm directed at her enemies. The letter’s sneering footnote broadside at Village Voice investigative ace Wayne Barrett, who had written about the Wasilla story, sums up the Palin frame of mind in the last days of her governorship:
“[Barrett’s story is] written in the style of one pretending to be amazed that so many people in a small town like Wasilla appear to know one another, support one another, and take on big projects together. Apparently that is uncommon in New York…”
What was remarkable about the Van Flein letter wasn’t so much that Palin seemed really to believe she could head off bad press by blanket-threatening the entire national political media with a lawsuit, but that she took this extraordinary step just weeks after another similarly damaging story had broken that should have woken her up to the p.r. dangers of such nutty-ass paranoid behavior.
Just a few weeks before, CBS News had published a series of emails written last year between Palin and McCain chief campaign strategist Steve Schmidt, in which Palin tried to order Schmidt to proactively issue a false press release about her husband Todd’s membership in a secessionist political party.
Apparently Palin during the campaign last year heard someone shout at her in a ropeline about Todd Palin’s membership in the Alaska Independence Party (AIP); she immediately blew this up in her mind to a major threat and directed Schmidt to issue a press release saying that his seven-year membership in the party was an “error,” the result of checking a box on a ballot by mistake, a clearly absurd if not actually insane excuse. As the lone grownup in the equation Schmidt unhesitatingly pulled rank and told her to shut the fuck up, noting that Todd had been in a secessionist party and it was useless to deny that fact, sensibly advising her to just smile and say “Todd loves America” if it ever came up again.
But Palin didn’t let it go, and sent a letter back to Schmidt continuing to deny the obvious facts about Todd’s membership and demanding that Schmidt relent (“I still want it fixed”), making the curious decision to CC the letter to five completely extraneous campaign workers, including a junior staffer from Palin’s own office in Alaska who had absolutely no input on campaign decisions. This was like a campaign trail version of Mommie Dearest, with poor Schmidt playing the role of the director hauled into the diva’s trailer to get reamed for showing too many of her wrinkles onscreen.
Viewed alongside some of the other Palin scandals – the alleged intervention to attempt to get a former brother in-law fired from the State Police, the apparent firing of the Wasilla librarian after she refused to consider censoring books – all of this points to a serious gash in the Palin psyche, one that overreacts to imagined enemies and is willing to go to wildly irrational lengths to head off even the mildest threats. Taken as part of this larger pattern, Palin’s surprise resignation almost seems like a kind of self-flagellating strike against her critics, as if she is trying to punish the world for targeting her by depriving us of the one valuable thing she thinks she has to offer us – her career.
And here’s the really scary part: it worked. Palin’s paranoid ramblings and self-pitying tantrums on the way out of office not only didn’t injure her chances for national office, they actually appeared to help, as polls taken in the week after her resignation showed that 71% of Republicans were now prepared to vote for her for president in 2012. Just as she had during the campaign last fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of fucked-overness.
Nobody understands this political reality quite like Palin, even if she doesn’t actually understand it in the sense of someone who thinks her way to a conclusion, but merely lives it, unconsciously, with the unerring instinct of a herd animal. Palin’s supporters don’t judge her according to her almost completely nonexistent qualifications for serious office, they perceive her as they would a character in a Biblical narrative, a Job in heels with cross-eyes and a mashed-potato-brained husband who happens to spend a lot of time getting shat upon by Letterman and Maureen Dowd and the other modern-day Enemies of Christ.
On some level Palin understands better than any of us that what’s important to her base isn’t how well she does her job or even what she does with her time before 2012, but who her enemies are and how loudly she beats the drum against them – and when the news comes out that these foes have recently driven her to such distraction that she even started losing her hair (reportedly necessitating a recent emergency trip to personal hairdresser Jessica Steele), it elevates her conservative martyr credentials to previously unimagined levels.
As a national candidate she seems to us normal/rational observers mortally wounded, but as a conduit for middle American resentment she may actually have gained in stature, and don’t be at all surprised if she doesn’t emerge with the status of something like a religious figure when they roll the rock back for her inevitable candidacy three years from now.
Of course there’s another way of looking at this too, especially in light of exiled Bristol Palin cheerful-lunkhead baby-daddy Levi Johnston’s recent revelations that, while living with the Palin family over the winter, he had heard Sarah Palin talk about cashing in on her fame via million-dollar book deals and other opportunities. “She had talked about how nice it would be to take some of this money people had been offering us and you know just run with it, say ‘forget everything else,’” Levi said.
It may be that the notoriously work-averse Palin (whose gubernatorial office hours grew steadily shorter as this year went on, according to reports) realized that in the current cultural climate, she could have it all without having to bother with the actual work of politics. She could turn her resignation into the supreme expression of conservative principle, seeming to show such high distaste for government that she can quit an executive job in a nervous panic and still get high marks from her base for ideological leadership – a hilariously contradictory and idiotic situation only possible in a country willing to go past a certain intellectual point of no return.
THE MOST DELICIOUS moment in the recent Palin brouhaha, after all, was her classic fuckup in the days after her resignation, when she slipped up while arguing that as president she wouldn’t have to deal with the persecution she faced as Alaska governor. “I think on a national level your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said, apparently unaware that there is no federal “Department of Law.”
This amazing gaffe reminded everyone of what we might have to look forward to in 2012, when the Republican Party may well nominate a woman who would lose at Trivial Pursuit to a Chilean sea bass, who makes George W. Bush look like Sir Isaac Newton. What’s incredible about Palin isn’t that she has a few gaps in her knowledge base, but that she doesn’t know anything about anything at all; she moreover doesn’t seem to feel the need to make sure one idea follows the next when she talks, instead just blurting out random unconnected bits and pieces of deep-seated resentment and persecution complex. Even ideological consistency is an alien concept to her (she wears her religious fundamentalism on her sleeve, but lets her unmarried daughter shack up with a human hard-on in the next room over) and she appears to resent the notion that it shouldn’t be.
All of which makes Sarah Palin the perfect leader for the inevitable pushback against the Obama era, when America in a vague and superficial sort of way decided to celebrate the values of culture, tolerance and knowledge. The other America doesn’t read and doesn’t remember anything it didn’t learn in the last five minutes; it’s angry and unhappy but doesn’t want to think about why, and knows only that it wants someone to pay the price for what it feels.
These people don’t want a president who reads Urdu poetry, they want a president who thinks Urdu is a Swedish dog food and doesn’t care if you know it. Just like them, Sarah Palin is now an unemployed loser who lost her job and her status thanks to forces beyond her comprehension and thinks she knows exactly whom to blame – laugh at her now if you like, but see if her humiliating exit doesn’t turn out to be the hole card that wins her the Republican nomination.
Since Sarah Palin’s new soon-to-be-bestseller is finally coming out, I thought now was as good a time as any to put out an article about Palin’s resignation I wrote this summer but never published. In the piece I predicted that the book would be called I, SARAH PALIN, GOES WASHINGTON, but it turns out it’s actually called GOING ROGUE; AN AMERICAN LIFE (an early article I read about it contained a misprint that left me confused for days as to why Sarah Palin would head into a presidential campaign with a book called GOING ROUGE). When she resigned this past summer I was her freakout/resignation would end up helping her, and that the inevitable platitude-rich bestseller would be step one… anyway, here’s the piece that we never put out.
***
If you didn’t know any better, if you didn’t know what that you were watching wasn’t an overdose of strong uppers but simple garden-variety stupidity mixed with severe stress, you’d have thought Sarah Palin’s breathless, rambling resignation speech a few weeks back was one the great public performances in the history of recreational narcotics – a masterpiece on par with Dock Ellis’s 1976 LSD-aided no-hitter and Britney’s seminal 2007 MTV Awards “comeback” performance.
The speech was a tour de force of Palinism, a dozen-plus feverish minutes of strident paranoia and passionate incoherence that in the end only just barely managed to achieve their ostensible rhetorical purpose – an announcement that John McCain’s erstwhile train-wreck running mate was stepping down as governor of Alaska in order to set the bloodthirsty tabloids working on the most intriguing political mystery story in years.
Why did Sarah quit? This is the question that the national political press will surely spend a good part of the next two years debating, until Palin inevitably resurfaces in February of 2011 buoyed by her inevitable hot bestseller (I, Sarah Palin, Goes Washington), by the inevitable rave reviews at whatever no-show, dingbat job she ends up taking (Liberty University Athletic Director? American Idol judge?), and by the fifty or sixty million in quietly-collected search committee money we all know is already being arranged.
Until that time comes, we’ll all be left to wonder just why exactly Sarah Palin quit her day job when the playbook seemed so obviously to call for eighteen more months of gubernatorial pseudo-rectitude in preparation for the presumed 2012 assault on Mount Obama; whether it really was just a case of premature media burnout, as she seemed to imply, or whether some darker reason forced her hand.
Clues were scarce at first. In the initial surprise announcement, made against a backdrop of swarming bugs and paddling lake fowl outside her Wasilla, Alaska home on July 3, Palin seemed almost monomaniacally focused on the tabloid circus that had become her daily existence, mentioning hostile press coverage over a dozen times. In the most weirdly tasteless and uncomfortable part of her speech, she even contrasted the Iraq war veterans she’d recently visited overseas to her media antagonists, implying that these patriotic soldiers were too busy getting shot for the good of the flag to “waste time” crucifying a hardworking Republican governor. “We can all learn from our selfless troops,” she said. “They’re bold, they don’t give up, they take a stand and know that life is short so they choose to not waste time” on “superficial wasteful political bloodsport.”
The governor, without a doubt, was by the end getting it in every orifice from a variety of highly creative antagonists never dreamed of before August 29, 2008 (the Anno Domini in the Palinoid calendar, marking the date she was named to the presidential ticket by the ever-regretful John McCain), including a bevy of emboldened in-state enemies who had slapped her with no fewer than 18 ethics complaints since last year. “Some say things changed for me on August 29,” she said. “I say others changed.”
In fact things have been tough all around since we last saw Palin on the big stage last fall, playing the role of the overmatched anchor round the neck of the probably doomed-already McCain candidacy. After the November catastrophe she and her family became a favored paparazzi target, especially after daughter Bristol squeezed out her apparently unwanted love child and promptly became a creepily outspoken advocate for abstinence (the world anxiously awaits baby Tripp’s unavoidable teenage breakdown upon reading, in the People magazine archives, Bristol’s disturbing tirade against the drag of motherhood).
Palin also engaged in an uncomfortably heated spat with David Letterman that managed somehow to make both sides look bad, while so severely mismanaging her relatively modest responsibilities as an off-year presidential hopeful (missing a series of promised engagements) that the national Republican party had to send officials to Alaska for a sort of intervention, to straighten out her calendar and prevail upon her to answer her telephone.
While a lot of this stuff was undoubtedly annoying and some of the ethics complaints in particular were absurd (in one of the 18 cases she was criticized for wearing a jacket with the logo of her husband’s snowmobile race sponsor), Palin’s reaction to all of it, particularly the media criticism, was way out of proportion to reality, far beyond the usual “the liberal press is out to get us” bullshit that more psychologically healthy conservative politicians will sling in public either out of calculation, or just for the fun of it.
In fact, Palin’s obsession with her critics appears really to have advanced beyond even Nixonian levels – culminating in an extraordinary letter written by her attorney Thomas Van Flein to various news organizations the day after her resignation that seemed to be evidence of a major paranoid episode.
The rambling four-page letter amazingly threatened legal action against any reporter who implied that Palin was facing a federal investigation into whether or not she embezzled funds from a sports complex construction project in her hometown of Wasilla. Palin’s intent was to head off speculation that she had resigned in advance of a pending investigation – a story that to date had mostly been pushed by a little-known blogger in Alaska – but the letter instead only heightened interest in the obscure story and guaranteed that it became a major national headline.
Moreover Van Flein’s letter, which was directed at Palin-unfriendly news organizations like the Washington Post, MSNBC, and the New York Times, read like a late-stage Lenny Bruce rant, full of arcane details humorlessly offered in Palin’s defense and lots of hideously leaden sarcasm directed at her enemies. The letter’s sneering footnote broadside at Village Voice investigative ace Wayne Barrett, who had written about the Wasilla story, sums up the Palin frame of mind in the last days of her governorship:
“[Barrett’s story is] written in the style of one pretending to be amazed that so many people in a small town like Wasilla appear to know one another, support one another, and take on big projects together. Apparently that is uncommon in New York…”
What was remarkable about the Van Flein letter wasn’t so much that Palin seemed really to believe she could head off bad press by blanket-threatening the entire national political media with a lawsuit, but that she took this extraordinary step just weeks after another similarly damaging story had broken that should have woken her up to the p.r. dangers of such nutty-ass paranoid behavior.
Just a few weeks before, CBS News had published a series of emails written last year between Palin and McCain chief campaign strategist Steve Schmidt, in which Palin tried to order Schmidt to proactively issue a false press release about her husband Todd’s membership in a secessionist political party.
Apparently Palin during the campaign last year heard someone shout at her in a ropeline about Todd Palin’s membership in the Alaska Independence Party (AIP); she immediately blew this up in her mind to a major threat and directed Schmidt to issue a press release saying that his seven-year membership in the party was an “error,” the result of checking a box on a ballot by mistake, a clearly absurd if not actually insane excuse. As the lone grownup in the equation Schmidt unhesitatingly pulled rank and told her to shut the fuck up, noting that Todd had been in a secessionist party and it was useless to deny that fact, sensibly advising her to just smile and say “Todd loves America” if it ever came up again.
But Palin didn’t let it go, and sent a letter back to Schmidt continuing to deny the obvious facts about Todd’s membership and demanding that Schmidt relent (“I still want it fixed”), making the curious decision to CC the letter to five completely extraneous campaign workers, including a junior staffer from Palin’s own office in Alaska who had absolutely no input on campaign decisions. This was like a campaign trail version of Mommie Dearest, with poor Schmidt playing the role of the director hauled into the diva’s trailer to get reamed for showing too many of her wrinkles onscreen.
Viewed alongside some of the other Palin scandals – the alleged intervention to attempt to get a former brother in-law fired from the State Police, the apparent firing of the Wasilla librarian after she refused to consider censoring books – all of this points to a serious gash in the Palin psyche, one that overreacts to imagined enemies and is willing to go to wildly irrational lengths to head off even the mildest threats. Taken as part of this larger pattern, Palin’s surprise resignation almost seems like a kind of self-flagellating strike against her critics, as if she is trying to punish the world for targeting her by depriving us of the one valuable thing she thinks she has to offer us – her career.
And here’s the really scary part: it worked. Palin’s paranoid ramblings and self-pitying tantrums on the way out of office not only didn’t injure her chances for national office, they actually appeared to help, as polls taken in the week after her resignation showed that 71% of Republicans were now prepared to vote for her for president in 2012. Just as she had during the campaign last fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of fucked-overness.
Nobody understands this political reality quite like Palin, even if she doesn’t actually understand it in the sense of someone who thinks her way to a conclusion, but merely lives it, unconsciously, with the unerring instinct of a herd animal. Palin’s supporters don’t judge her according to her almost completely nonexistent qualifications for serious office, they perceive her as they would a character in a Biblical narrative, a Job in heels with cross-eyes and a mashed-potato-brained husband who happens to spend a lot of time getting shat upon by Letterman and Maureen Dowd and the other modern-day Enemies of Christ.
On some level Palin understands better than any of us that what’s important to her base isn’t how well she does her job or even what she does with her time before 2012, but who her enemies are and how loudly she beats the drum against them – and when the news comes out that these foes have recently driven her to such distraction that she even started losing her hair (reportedly necessitating a recent emergency trip to personal hairdresser Jessica Steele), it elevates her conservative martyr credentials to previously unimagined levels.
As a national candidate she seems to us normal/rational observers mortally wounded, but as a conduit for middle American resentment she may actually have gained in stature, and don’t be at all surprised if she doesn’t emerge with the status of something like a religious figure when they roll the rock back for her inevitable candidacy three years from now.
Of course there’s another way of looking at this too, especially in light of exiled Bristol Palin cheerful-lunkhead baby-daddy Levi Johnston’s recent revelations that, while living with the Palin family over the winter, he had heard Sarah Palin talk about cashing in on her fame via million-dollar book deals and other opportunities. “She had talked about how nice it would be to take some of this money people had been offering us and you know just run with it, say ‘forget everything else,’” Levi said.
It may be that the notoriously work-averse Palin (whose gubernatorial office hours grew steadily shorter as this year went on, according to reports) realized that in the current cultural climate, she could have it all without having to bother with the actual work of politics. She could turn her resignation into the supreme expression of conservative principle, seeming to show such high distaste for government that she can quit an executive job in a nervous panic and still get high marks from her base for ideological leadership – a hilariously contradictory and idiotic situation only possible in a country willing to go past a certain intellectual point of no return.
THE MOST DELICIOUS moment in the recent Palin brouhaha, after all, was her classic fuckup in the days after her resignation, when she slipped up while arguing that as president she wouldn’t have to deal with the persecution she faced as Alaska governor. “I think on a national level your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said, apparently unaware that there is no federal “Department of Law.”
This amazing gaffe reminded everyone of what we might have to look forward to in 2012, when the Republican Party may well nominate a woman who would lose at Trivial Pursuit to a Chilean sea bass, who makes George W. Bush look like Sir Isaac Newton. What’s incredible about Palin isn’t that she has a few gaps in her knowledge base, but that she doesn’t know anything about anything at all; she moreover doesn’t seem to feel the need to make sure one idea follows the next when she talks, instead just blurting out random unconnected bits and pieces of deep-seated resentment and persecution complex. Even ideological consistency is an alien concept to her (she wears her religious fundamentalism on her sleeve, but lets her unmarried daughter shack up with a human hard-on in the next room over) and she appears to resent the notion that it shouldn’t be.
All of which makes Sarah Palin the perfect leader for the inevitable pushback against the Obama era, when America in a vague and superficial sort of way decided to celebrate the values of culture, tolerance and knowledge. The other America doesn’t read and doesn’t remember anything it didn’t learn in the last five minutes; it’s angry and unhappy but doesn’t want to think about why, and knows only that it wants someone to pay the price for what it feels.
These people don’t want a president who reads Urdu poetry, they want a president who thinks Urdu is a Swedish dog food and doesn’t care if you know it. Just like them, Sarah Palin is now an unemployed loser who lost her job and her status thanks to forces beyond her comprehension and thinks she knows exactly whom to blame – laugh at her now if you like, but see if her humiliating exit doesn’t turn out to be the hole card that wins her the Republican nomination.
Akhenaten @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 3:34 pm
xerxes xerxes:
Crazies have been calling Obama a Grandma murdering Muslim Commie Fascist for the better part of 2009 and he hasn't issued blanket threats to sue the media or use his "Department of Law" (an actual Palin quote)to shield him from criticism. Nor has he turned the criticism into a giant pity-party like Palin has.
ridenrain @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 3:40 pm
Akhenaten Akhenaten:
xerxes xerxes:
Crazies have been calling Obama a Grandma murdering Muslim Commie Fascist for the better part of 2009 and he hasn't issued blanket threats to sue the media or use his "Department of Law" (an actual Palin quote)to shield him from criticism. Nor has he turned the criticism into a giant pity-party like Palin has.
I'd better report that to the white house snitch line immediately!!
One more time....
N_Fiddledog @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 4:42 pm
xerxes xerxes:
Though, it's not a bad article you posted. But I take your centrist blog and raise you an outright left winger: Matt Taibbi.
I needed toothpicks for my eyes to finish it, but I'll see your lengthy, lefty rant, and raise you a little YouTube cutesie.
Edit
Oh hey, wait, I just posted, looked up, and saw Bill Whittle. I'm a huge fan. Bet it's even better than the one I posted. Gotta check that out.
Lemmy @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 4:51 pm
Anyone who really wants to read this book should wait a month. It'll be in the $1.99 bargain-bin at Chapters by Christmas.
Zipperfish @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 5:03 pm
A great sequel to her less well-known "Sarah Palin: Geez, I Sure Fucked That Up"
N_Fiddledog @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 5:04 pm
Lemmy Lemmy:
Anyone who really wants to read this book should wait a month. It'll be in the $1.99 bargain-bin at Chapters by Christmas.
Maybe, but they're selling Dreams From My Father next to the Scotties Little Softy.
Lemmy @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 5:16 pm
N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:
Maybe, but they're selling Dreams From My Father next to the Scotties Little Softy.
A better comparison to Palin's book would be "Ferraro: My Story" by Geraldine Ferraro. I wonder how that one sold?
BartSimpson @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 5:18 pm
A couple things:
"Department of Law" or "The Law Department" has long been an insiders' nickname for the US Department of Justice much the same as 'Foggy Bottom' is a nickname for the US Department of State.
I am not surprised at the blind hatred for Palin by the left and I'll not waste any time arguing about it. What DID surprise me in the last election cycle was how the left preened on and on about John McCain...until the race shaped up to be McCain vs. Obama. At that point McCain became 'senile', 'a fuddy-duddy', 'racist' 
, and essentially the target of much unfounded vitriol from the same people who'd been cheering him on just before the Republican nomination had been cinched up.
So I do agree that Palin should toughen up and start paying less attention to the braying jackasses of the left. Especially if she wants to be President in 2013.
Zipperfish @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 5:38 pm
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
A couple things:
"Department of Law" or "The Law Department" has long been an insiders' nickname for the US Department of Justice much the same as 'Foggy Bottom' is a nickname for the US Department of State.
I am not surprised at the blind hatred for Palin by the left and I'll not waste any time arguing about it. What DID surprise me in the last election cycle was how the left preened on and on about John McCain...until the race shaped up to be McCain vs. Obama. At that point McCain became 'senile', 'a fuddy-duddy', 'racist' , and essentially the target of much unfounded vitriol from the same people who'd been cheering him on just before the Republican nomination had been cinched up.
So I do agree that Palin should toughen up and start paying less attention to the braying jackasses of the left. Especially if she wants to be President in 2013.
"Department of Law" or "The Law Department" has long been an insiders' nickname for the US Department of Justice much the same as 'Foggy Bottom' is a nickname for the US Department of State.
I am not surprised at the blind hatred for Palin by the left and I'll not waste any time arguing about it. What DID surprise me in the last election cycle was how the left preened on and on about John McCain...until the race shaped up to be McCain vs. Obama. At that point McCain became 'senile', 'a fuddy-duddy', 'racist'
, and essentially the target of much unfounded vitriol from the same people who'd been cheering him on just before the Republican nomination had been cinched up. So I do agree that Palin should toughen up and start paying less attention to the braying jackasses of the left. Especially if she wants to be President in 2013.
Maybe some. I thought McCain was a class act to the end.
CanadianJeff @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 5:44 pm
Believe it or not I was watching Palin today on Oprah and I have to admit that she sounded pretty bad BUT not as bad as I expected. However what she had to say was highly irrelevant and most of us had vastly moved on.
A great example is how she went on about how she was disappointed she wasn't allowed to speak at the press conference after the election loss. She said she wanted to say that America should stand united regardless of the loss and that was more important. In other words she wanted to say exactly what McCain said.
Everything she talked about was in the past. That and she went on about how she was getting sued in Alaska as governor every time she said anything about morality or politics by the white house and how she went to work everyday simply to defend herself against the lawsuits.
It's all old news and some of it really isn't even true. It's true that she had numerous investigations in her past regarding how she had let go various employees and public servants without anything but personal feelings but as far as I've looked up she didn't have anyone breathing down her neck every single day with lawyers at the end of her term.
Basically this is all just a run up to a 2012 election I think that she wants to be a contender for. But I suppose we will see.
edit: Bart if you'll forgive me I do agree with you for the most part but I do think it needs to be said that at least some of that scorn was earned in the way McCain acted during the election. At times it felt like he had turned his back on the moderate side to embrace the hard south voters. Palin was most certainly a bad choice to say the least. He could have run his campain a hell of a lot better IMHO.
N_Fiddledog @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 10:35 pm
Apparently the Oprah Palin vids keep disappearing from YouTube, but for as long as they're up here's a couple.
There's some more clips here...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- ... prah/full/
N_Fiddledog @ Mon Nov 16, 2009 11:03 pm
CanadianJeff CanadianJeff:
It's all old news and some of it really isn't even true. It's true that she had numerous investigations in her past regarding how she had let go various employees and public servants without anything but personal feelings but as far as I've looked up she didn't have anyone breathing down her neck every single day with lawyers at the end of her term.
I think you're talking about Troopergate there, aren't you? Yeah, there's many more instances of organized harassment than that. The more recent one's are the twenty trumped up ethics violations. I think by last count 19 had been thrown out.
Here's the way I heard it... There's this cabal of anti-Palinites up in Alaska. They're made up of bloggers and a radio talk show host. They're the ones who were feeding the MSM all those crazy stories during the election which later turned out to be false. After the election they didn't relent. They had meetings (I've seen pictures), and organized to continue the attack. One of the things they did was they started to file ethics violations.
In Alaska anybody can do that. You don't have to pay anything. The official you're filing against however has to pay for his or her own defense. It's kind of like those bogus human rights claims we saw here in Canada against Ezra Levant. I believe I heard Sarah was half a million in debt as a result. When it was still just 13 complaints I heard the state of Alaska was in the hole 1/3 of a million.
These women making the complaints are loons. Here's one of them calling into an Alaskan radio talk show.
Here's a vid that follows the whole campaign of harassment. It's a little hard to follow, because the crazy ladies filed DMCA takedowns against the video maker for posting their pictures. He had to edit those out.
It's also complicated, because the troopergate thing is mixed up with the ethics complaint cabal thing. Basically when they're talking about Krouse, and Elton, they're talking troopergate. The rest is ethics ladies.
If you type names like Jeane Devon, or Valerie Jennings into Google you can discover more. One of them has been on Rachel Maddow.
You can get some info from the Palin side on the ethics harassment here...
http://www.conservatives4palin.com/2009 ... -card.html
xerxes @ Tue Nov 17, 2009 1:02 am
$1:
I needed toothpicks for my eyes to finish it, but I'll see your lengthy, lefty rant, and raise you a little YouTube cutesie.
Hmm, I didn't think it was that long...