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Sarah Palin resignation reminds us of our ugly side
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While Sarah Palin's resignation caught everyone by surprise, what wasn't surprising was the reaction after the initial shock had passed. The reaction was as predictable as ever: If you didn't like Sarah Palin, you thought her decision to resign validated your view that she's an empty-headed trophy candidate who never seemed particularly serious or thoughtful.
If you were an unabashed Palin supporter you reacted with disbelief but stood behind her, thought she delivered a great address, even if it was a resignation, and you may have been one of many predicting "Palin in 2012."
At one point, there was MSNBC was talking about how Palin's political career was over; meanwhile, Fox News was talking about how she was a giant victim. And believe it or not, at that precise moment, CNN was talking about Michael Jackson. Call it the luck of the remote.
No one knows for sure --at least not at the moment-- why she resigned. Not even the ardent conservative pundits that regularly grace the TV for Fox News are in agreement. On Thursday night before her announcement, Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News:
Palin… has star power without any doubt. She has an extremely devoted following. But she is not a serious candidate for the presidency. She had to go home and study and spend a lot of time on issues in which she was not adept last year, and she hasn't. She has to stop speaking in clichés and platitudes. It won't work. It could work for eight weeks if you're the number two candidate, as she was last year. But even so, she got singed a lot in that campaign. You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you're running for the presidency.
On Friday after the announcement, Bill Kristol phoned into Fox News to say: "If I had to guess, we just saw the opening statement of the 2012 campaign." And he later expanded on that in a blog post for the Weekly Standard.
MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell reported:
Talking to people who are very close to Sarah Palin, I have been told that she has told her supporters that she is out of politics, period. She is fed up with politics. She doesn't like her life. She feels like she has to raise her family. She's sick of the commute from Wasilla to the capital and she really does not want to run for higher office. This is not the case where she is stepping down in order to figure the way for a presidential run. In fact, she has told some of her biggest backers in the national Republican Party that they are free to choose other candidates for 2012.
Other speculations read more like playing numbers at the roulette table: She's about to be indicted for some serious transgression; she's about to sign a contract with Clear Channel Nut radio and Fox News for millions of dollars; she's about to spend three years running for President, gallivanting around the country, making speeches (for which she can charge a hefty fee), and build up the campaign coffer while attempting a butterfly-from-the-cocoon makeover. Or maybe some combination of all three.
This we know: Her popularity ratings in Alaska have dropped significantly --even among members of her own party. Most political observers --the honest ones, anyway-- agree that she hasn't managed her public image very well since losing in November. Instead of laying some groundwork to further her political career, either for a Senate run in 2010 or a presidential run in 2012, she's been laying eggs. The Letterman controversy? She may have gotten a lot more mileage out of it by showing a lot more grace. Get a thick skin, say it was a distasteful remark but I've got more important things to worry about.
I'm no fan of Sarah Palin --never was. I didn't dislike her; I just never thought she was qualified. I still suspect that she was used by the Republican Party to electrify a based John McCain could never attract. By introducing Sarah Palin to the public last fall, Republican power brokers, John McCain and whoever else was behind the decision to choose her as a running mate violated a cardinal rule in salesmanship: Never overpromise; never under deliver. McCain gambled; he lost. She wasn't ready. She may never be.
There's no question she had the kind of elemental sincerity that connects with Middle America and she did that. The problem was that she didn't have the thick skin to survive the public scrutiny or the knowledge base to deal with the cynicism that comes with being under the microscope. I'm guessing she had no idea what she was getting into and never really figured out how to handle it. And maybe, if you're to believe Republican insiders from the presidential campaign, she never wanted to figure out how to handle it. She didn't want to be handled by McCain's people, she was gonna go it her own way and she simply had no background whatsoever for the hard question that would come from a skeptical media.
Yes, you can stomp your feet like a child and call it "the liberal media" but you'd be lying to yourself. I don't suppose you were calling them the liberal media when they spent more than a month running video clips of a minister delivering sermons that turned both heads and stomachs. But the minute Governor Palin went deer-in-the-headlights over a simple question from Katie Couric about which national publications she read, all of a sudden, you wanna call that an ambush.
To be honest, I'm not sure what irritates me more, the circumstances surrounding Sarah Palin or all the two-faced supporters complaining about how she was treated who. All they proved was that they can dish out but can't take it.
People on the right who want to blame the media, the left, George Soros --pick your conspiracy theory-- stop whining: Any hell Sarah Palin caught, fairly or unfairly, was no different than the beating Hillary Clinton got both as a First Lady and as a presidential candidate, and it was no different than what Barack Obama was subjected to by all his critics. How many of you who didn't like the Palin jokes were sending and receiving chain e-mails claiming that Obama was a Muslim, Obama was a socialist, Obama wasn't a citizen, or did you get the one with images of Obama in racist stereotype, while eating watermelon in that barefoot Negro kind of way? No problem there. Why? Because you didn't like the guy and you were glad to dump on him. Oh, but your girl Sarah? How dare they!
Same thing would be true with Hillary Clinton, who, incidentally, was pilloried relentlessly by David Letterman while she was first Lady and long before her husband's hanky panky in a dark, windowless corridor became public knowledge. You Sarah Palin fans: Bet you thought those Hillary jokes were funny, huh? And you defenders of Hillary, how often were you bashing Sarah Palin as a vacuous, pin-up poster designed to attract aging white Republican males fantasizing about bedding down a MILF?
The bottom line here is that what Sarah Palin reminds us of --again-- is that there are people on both sides of the political aisle, though diametrically opposed ideologically, are exactly alike: Sore losers and crybabies who refuse to admit they're both driving on the same two-way street.
Maybe the person with the thin skin isn't Sarah Palin; maybe it's you.
I want to feel sorry for Sarah Palin but I don't. She was earnest and motivated, and pretty much lost in the brutal backstabbing world of American politics. But she was the one who decide to jump in feet first. Conservatives are always talking about accountability. Well, put your money where your mouth is: She made a decision and it came with consequences, so stop playing the blame game. It's no different than a matter here in Sacramento, where I live, when the assembly speaker for the state legislature, a Democrat, claimed that conservative talk radio hosts were one reason California lawmakers were unable to cobble together a budget for a state horribly in debt. Those darned conservative talk show hosts were "terrorizing" Republican lawmakers into not voting for tax increases. Oh, stuff it Madame Speaker. Like Governor Plain, it doesn't matter who said what; none of it would've happened if you'd turned down the job Senator McCain offered you, just like none of it would've happened in Sacramento if lawmakers had done the job they were elected to do. Now take your medicine and shut up.
I've no idea why Governor Palin resigned and I don't much care. Sarah Palin turned out to be better as comedic fodder than as serious national candidate and if Republicans want to be taken seriously as a party in 2012, they'd be best to lose the baggage from the past and look to the future with a completely different face. Forget about Sarah Palin. Move on. (No pun intended if you're thinking of the advocacy group.) Sarah Palin ain't the future. Don't believe it? Put her out there in 2010 or 2012; if the Sarah Palin you love and admire today is the same Sarah Palin peering onto the national stage when the race for the Republican presidential nomination begins in earnest, you'll get laughed out of town and Barack Obama will clean her clock. That's not me waving the flag for President Obama; that's me saying the United States needs at least two viable and equally credible political parties and sorry, right now there's only one and it ain't the Republicans. Sarah Palin is one reason why.
Can she remake herself and overcome that? It's possible. Anything's possible in politics. A doofus governor who mangled the language somehow managed to become president; a novice Senator with a gift for eloquence managed to become president. With the kind of shallow voters we have in the United States who are more easily swayed by slick marketing campaigns and bumper sticker slogans than the nuances of complex domestic and foreign policies, even a comedian could get elected to public office. Hmmm, wait a minute…
With apologies to Letterman...
Reasons Sarah Palin is resigning:
Investigators found a human head inside a mounted caribou on her living room wall
Needs more time to keep an eye on Russia from her front porch
Don't tell me she went hiking on the Appalachian Trail too
Couldn't find the time to do her nails and actually work as the Governor of Alaska
Needs a couple of years to get her GED and learn to speak a single coherent sentence
Hasn't figured out she's somewhat detached from reality and deluded into believing she's presidential timber
Wanted to find out what happens if you put lipstick on a lame duck
Wanted to make all those lazy reporters in the liberal media put on their makeup instead of get drunk by the pool.
Apparently, now her husband is pregnant
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