Deconstructing Palin……

I’d do it myself, but it appears to have already been done for me:

Anyone who has watched enough early morning Sunday TV will recognize some of the appeals to dog-whistle listeners within:

Palin wants to be a celebrity and was willing to act out what she understood to be a politician’s role in getting the prerogatives of fame. When Bill Kristol’s Cruise Ship of Fools Neocons breezed into Juneau, Palin had aged out of the beauty-queen pageantry competitions that seem to have been her formative social training, her unwillingness or inability to handle the tedium of actual governance had her underlings trembling on the edge of revolt, and her attempts to reclaim Modern Supermom status on her own or by proxy weren’t going so well. It was… providential!… that Someone should send unto her a Messenger, trailing clouds of astroturfing calculation, proclaiming that Sarah Palin could be chosen to stand among the Elect. For lo, all her life she had been journaling, recording both the firewood-stacking and the prayers that were the Aleph and Omega of her Real American™ small-town red-state life—and at last her determined piety was rewarded! Prosperity Gospel, unbelievers!

For in her latest incarnation, Sarah Palin represents an American stereotype at least as old as the Chatauqua circuit and as new as the American Idol wannabes who get showcased in the early episodes of each new season for their combination of fervent conviction and utter lack of talent. She wishes—she feels entitled—to be Famous, in the way a thirteen-year-old writing fanfiction understands “famous”: Everyone should know her name, and want to be just like her, and love her not for her talents or her achievements but just because she’s Sarah. After all, God wants her to be happy, and how can she be happy if she’s not famous?

The beauty queen analogies are particularly apt if you ask me-think of Saint Sarah as a 1980’s version of Miss California.

Palin/Prejean

I haven’t seen many comments about the similarities in the behavior of these two beauty queens.

Both expect to be treated with deference by journalists, and accuse the most milquetoast of old, male interviewers of bias.

They’re both conservative fundamentalist megachurch attendees.

Much of what they say is later proven to be a lie.

Both quit their day job to cash in.

Both have big skeletons in their closets, if you believe Levi Johnston.

Both have a gay blogger nemesis.

I think if you try to understand Palin as a beauty queen, it really explains her behavior as AK Gov—it was just a title to her, and she loved the ceremonial aspects while she dodged the real work. That’s also why I don’t really take her seriously as a candidate. She’s never going to do the work to win enough primaries to get the GOP nomination. Her campaign will look a lot like Rudy Guiliani’s—well financed, based on a few minutes of fame, and ultimately unable to engage with primary voters.

 

And finally, what of those vaunted “qualifications” my commenters keep talking about? I’ll let Marc Ambinder explain for the fortieth time:

President Sarah Palin. That’s an ankle-snapping stretch. But to be the GOP nominee? That’s merely a strain. I think she can make a comeback. From where she comes back, I’m not sure. The truth is that Palin’s threshold problem is sobriety. Americans don’t think she’s experienced enough to be president. Palin has displayed no evidence that she accepts this judgment. A few Randy Scheunemann epistles on her Facebook page do not convey the experience. A mid-summer’s dalliance with Death Panels made her look foolish, or worse. The key to a comeback is to change something about yourself, and Sarah Palin is making it too easy for us because nothing seems to need changing. If populism fuses with cultural conservatism, Palin can probably win a Republican nomination, or — because the rules of the GOP nomination process still favor the establishment — a spot on a third party ticket.
 
She’s still the Panglossian archangel of the anti-intellectual strain in conservatism? She blows off evolution and asserts that humans can eat meat because animals are made of meat. Evolution might reply that if Sarah Palin didn’t exist, God would have had to invent her. The conviction that she’s the talisman for a vital center in American politics? Check. The ability to capture the patronizing — and yet pornographically attentive — focus of the establishment media? Check. The preternatural skill at making the other side feel good about making the other side feel bad? All there.
 
Somehow, Palin is supposed to represent a revanchist populism that has its lineages in Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryant. Why? Because she angers the media elites. She’s from Alaska. She’s… Well, that’s really the case. That’s all there is. Put aside for the moment that Jacksonian Democracy preceded Jackson and was grounded in a technological revolution, rather than a sense of anger at banking or financial elites. Palin’s resume is thin. What distinguishes her from other Alaskan politicians is not that she worked to get the state off the dole, but that she relied on the dole a little bit less. She was a pragmatist, not a conservative. Her sole claim to the Bryant-Jackson mantle is that she can ape the talking points of modern movement conservatives and do so with a twang that annoys liberals. Her hagiographer, Matthew Continetti, writes that she has not “tied her pointed criticisms of the Obama agenda and the liberal media to a larger argument about how ordinary people with common sense can rescue the American economy and revitalize American democracy. Palin has Jacksonian instincts, but she still hasn’t forged her own political persuasion.”

 

That’s curious. Her “pointed criticisms” of the Obama administration aren’t revolutionary. They usually begin with an out of context quote from Ronald Reagan and end with a clever allusion to the faith she has in the American people to do what’s right. The reason why there is no larger argument is because no larger argument exists. Sarah Palin is as much a personal vessel as Barack Obama. Her appeal, as Continetti must recognize, is much more limited than this, even though, to him, it is quite considerable. There is absolutely no evidence that the American people are looking for a candidate whose principle attribute is her willingness to pretend to know less than she really knows.

It’s limited because — and this ain’t the media’s fault — the American people don’t generally think Palin belongs on stage with other presidential candidates. If that’s the truth — and that is what the polls show — then it would behoove Palin to address that concern. The Palin Populist Persuasion is self-limiting, since it praises “common sense” over problem-solving, which necessarily requires a will to suspend common sense when it doesn’t work. (Common sense, in this recession, would dictate a massive additional stimulus from the government. But that’s not going to happen, for reasons of pragmatism and politics.)

 

 

So save your self time and money and buy the Cliff Notes version of her book instead: 

 

 

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