September 11, 2021

[AE.Politics] Hey, Aren't You The Pail From Palin Around?

I have very mixed feelings about writing this because I would love little more than to write off Sarah Palin as a relic of the past, a political non-entity who has nothing to do with the present or future of US politics.

Basically the only person I'm more eager to see the last of in the political arena is Donald Trump, and therein lies the rub: the future of either or both of them owes so much to her past as John McCain's running mate, where a quirk of fate and a couple of bad decisions elevated her star much further, much faster than it ever would have ascended on her own.

Palin was in many ways the archetype, if the not the architect, of the Trumpian drift of the Republican Party. It's not that the right never pandered to Rural (pronounced "real") America before her. It's not that they never displayed an anti-intellectual streak or insisted that folksily-delivered illogic could outmatch expertise if you called it "common sense" before her. 

But her starring turn as a not-ready-for-mainstream player accelerated the realization on the right that they didn't need to moderate their worst impulses.

Back during the 2008 campaign, Palin sat for a multipart interview with Katie Couric that was meant to be her introduction to a curious electorate. She somewhat infamously declined to do any preparation for them, gave a series of defensive and often rambling non-answers, and then tried to portray Couric -- a skilled interviewer who was visibly pitching a few softballs and throwing her lifelines -- as a hostile "media elite" who had been out to sink her.

These interviews are generally credited with having cemented the electorate's impression of a newcomer on the national stage, and not in her favor.

Palin's boosters love to spread the meme that voters who rejected her were "fooled" by Tina Fey's unflattering impressions of her on Saturday Night Live, but while it's true that Palin herself did not say she could see Russia from her house, it's also true that she said this:

"We have trade missions back and forth. We... we do... it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where... where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is... from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to... to our state."

And it is likewise true that when asked what newspapers she reads, she answered "all of 'em, any of 'em that have, have been in front of me over all these years".

This question in particular was derided by her camp as a "gotcha", as though it were a difficult question or one that had an obvious but wrong answer, and not an easy serve that gave her the chance to correct an impression that she was disconnected and ill-informed about national politics and give some insight into her interests and influences as a politician.

I referred back to this interview answer over the course of the Trump years because it's the style of answer that he loves: non-specific and expansive to the point of obvious hyperbole.

While fumbling this easy lay-up definitely counted against Palin with the public, as recently as 2019, Katie Couric expressed the opinion that her sit-down with Palin wouldn't have hurt her if they'd happened a decade later. She attributed it to what she described as a kind of reverse snobbery of anti-intellectualism, which is true, but I don't think it's the only factor.

In today's political climate, too much of the GOP base is invested in the idea that there's a "liberal media" that is at war with conservative politicians (and by extension, conservative voters) and when they see somebody floundering the way Palin did, what they see is courage under fire.

That aside, I'm inclined to agree with Couric, with one proviso: I don't know that the GOP would have drifted to this extreme without Palin blazing the trail that Trump marched down.

Sure, she and John McCain lost, but she never actually went away, did she? And if you think about, that's about the Trumpiest thing a failed politician can do.

And because she never went away, she was around to fire off a semi-coherent response to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's comments about Texas governor Greg Abott.

https://www.twitter.com/therecount/status/1435986151177953281

The Recount characterized Palin's rant here as "word salad", which is certainly nothing new for the former Alaska Governor and none-time vice president of these benighted states who basically pioneered what became the signature Trump style of political speech: get up and spout absolute nonsense peppered with a mix of the right buzzwords and denunciations of the right people, so that when you're finished no one can actually engage substantively with what you said because you haven't said anything of substance, and yet the people who are already on your side are nodding along and even fired up, because they heard everything they were looking to hear.

Listening to even the short clip, where Palin ludicrously attacked another woman's feminist credentials, when Palin holds herself up as a "true feminist" and attacks Representative Ocasio-Cortez as a fake one, what sprang to my mind was another one of her answers from that 2008 interview series.

When Couric asked Palin if she considered herself a feminist, her answer began:

"I do. I'm a feminist who believes in equal rights and I believe that women certainly today have every opportunity that a man has to succeed and to try to do it all anyway."

When Couric followed up by asking her how she would define a feminist, Palin said:

"Someone who believes in equal rights. Someone who would not stand for oppression against women." 

The emphasis in that quote is my own. If you take these two answers together, you see how Palin defines feminism. A real feminist isn't fighting for anything, because she recognizes that there's nothing left to fight for. She would fight, if hypothetically there ever were any reason to, but she knows that there isn't, so she doesn't.

If you read through the transcript I took those quotes from, you can see this attitude was fully on display as Couric coaxed a rare specific answer from Palin, about the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would go on to become the first bill signed into law by President Barack Obama. Palin was against the act, which was meant to guarantee equal pay for women doing the same work as men, on the basis that she believed giving women greater means to sue their employers for discrimination would only benefit greedy lawyers. She believed that the existing anti-discrimination laws were sufficient, and did not explain how women suing under their auspices was different from women suing under the new law, in terms of the benefit to trial lawyers.

Her stance here is the typical mask of a reactionary who is eager to appear to be a good guy, to be on the right side of history: sure, she's all for equal rights, but as this is the land of the free and the home of the brave, everybody already has equal rights, and so anybody who is still talking about fighting for them must necessarily be looking for special rights, or else they're the pawn of somebody -- like those greedy lawyers -- with an ulterior motive.

To Sarah Palin, being a feminist is way more like being a Daughter of the American Revolution or -- perhaps more accurately -- a Daughter of the Confederacy than it is about being an activist. It's about remembering battles fought in the past, not doing anything so gauche as fighting for changes today today. True progressives -- who are conservatives like Palin -- understand that there are no more worlds left to conquer in the fight for equality, and so only fight to keep things exactly the same.

Thus to the Sarah Palins of the world, in invoking feminism in terms of an ongoing struggle, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is playing politics and what's more, she's playing dirty, because everyone agrees that women should have equal rights and thus in the absence of a brave truth-teller of Sarah Palin's caliber, the "fake feminist" side will win by default.

After all, as Palin pointed out nearly thirteen years ago, women are now allowed to try to have it all.

What more could anybody ask for than that?