Scary Sarah, Revisited
It’s not often that I and the NYT agree. So, I was surprised by Frank Rich’s editorial echoing my sense that Palin is the pick of the Bush cartel and McCain better watch his back. Check it out:
Op-Ed Columnist - Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain - NYTimes.com
SARAH PALIN’S post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate.
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The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.
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at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.
Meanwhile, over at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tony Norman echoes my theme of arrogant ignorance while helping us understand why CNN measures of on-the-spot voter reactions to the debate showed women far less impressed by her than men:
Sarah Palin, the classic schoolyard bully
She was the girl who always had just enough self-awareness to know when the boys were paying more attention to her than to other girls. Her specialty was flattering the alpha boys around her. Terrified of losing her exalted place, she quickly perfected the art of saying nothing of consequence. She rambled because the boys thought it was cute.
…Girls like Sarah Palin knew how to secure a place with the “in crowd.” After all, she was the girl with the iridescent smile who provided the laugh track for the meatheads roaming the halls pulling wedgies on those who would never qualify as “their kind of people.”
Like a lot of bullies, Sarah Palin talks tough when she’s surrounded by people of like mind and even less imagination; the more gullible the mob of admirers, the better. That has always been the case with demagogues. Sarah Palin subscribes to the same strain of American anti-intellectualism and fake populism as Huey Long, Spiro Agnew and other media-savvy scoundrels from the last century.
A friend of mine asked me whether I thought the leftist frenzy of anti-Palin activity was in any way sexist. I said I didn’t think so. Palin’s level of factual ignorance far surpasses anything I’ve ever witnessed in a candidate for national office. That, combined with her bible-thumping and war-mongering, makes her the scariest aspirant to the presidency I’ve ever seen.
But it might could be sexism that saves us. Women vote more reliably than men. Non-partisan women (by which I mean women who are not ideologically locked into one party or the other) may determine this election. While schooled by sexism to adulate arrogantly ignorant men, women have much more mixed emotions about arrogantly ignorant women. For every arrogantly ignorant woman who identifies with Sarah Palin, there may be ten or more who remember being snubbed, dissed, or bullied by cheerleading prom queens. They were sickened rather than charmed by Palin’s flirtatious winks. Let’s hope they take their resentment to the polls.
One last word and then I promise to blog about something else: Joe Six-Pack. Excuse me, but hasn’t that always been a derisive put-down of working class men? And isn’t Sarah Palin a millionaire? (Yes, in fact she is.) Why isn’t anybody jumping on this?
October 11th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Yes, Joe Six Pack is derisive, but Sarah Palin does not understand a word or term’s connotations. When she was preparing for the debate, she used to the teleprompter cortex of her brain to memorize terms like Joe Six Pack and hockey mom and was instructed to repeat them whenever she couldn’t kill enough of her allotted speaking time with winks and grins and the phrases she’d already mastered as governor, like “drill, baby, drill.”