Sarah Palin: What’s It All About?
P. Schultz
January 29, 2013
Below is a
link to an article by Chris Cillizza that was published in the Washington Post
on Sarah Palin and what she meant. Here is the concluding paragraph from that
column:
“The Palin story is, in the end, one of
tremendous talent misused. Like any number of playground greats
who never make the NBA or, when they do, wind up disappointing, Palin had
as much natural ability as anyone this side of Barack Obama or John Edwards,
but was unable to translate that talent into results once the bright lights
came on. That she never made good on her remarkable natural talents is a
sign of how the political process can chew up and spit out those who aren’t
ready for it.”
Well,
you get the point. As the tag line in A Bronx Tale has it: “Wasted talent.” That
is the sum and substance of the Sarah Palin story.
And
yet I cannot help but wonder whether that is enough. What if Sarah Palin was
set up? And what if, after a bit, she figured this out? And also figured out
that she had taken the bait? Katie Couric played her part in the set up, which
served Katie’s interests well, did it not? This might help explain some of the
behavior that Cillizza emphasizes in his column:
“It’s impossible to trace what began the transformation in
Palin but it’s a fair guess to say that her interview with Katie
Couric was the spark. Palin seemed to be either over- or under-briefed for
the interview and came off as standoffish and, worse, not up to the job for
which she was running.
“In the wake of that interview, Palin had a choice: Would
she acknowledge she was off her game and try to reboot with another (or several
other) major network interviews or would she bunker in, insisting the fault
lied with a “gotcha” media?
“We all know the path she took. Palin leaned hard into her
“lamestream media” attack and began turning on everyone, including the man who
had vaulted her to the national stage. In the process, she somehow lost the
mantle of reformer that made her so attractive to many voters in the first
place. She embraced a sort of anti-intellectualism in which her lack of
knowledge about foreign affairs was unimportant since it was a test put into
place by a media who wanted to destroy her.”
Well,
perhaps, it isn’t so hard to “trace…the transformation in Palin” as Cillizza
would like to believe. We don’t know, for example, what Palin was told leading up
to the Couric interview, whether she was misled about the tenor of it. And, of
course, it would serve the status quo quite well when Palin “lost the mantle of
reformer,” would it not? And perhaps she did embrace “a sort of
anti-intellectualism” but that was hardly unique to Palin. In fact, something
of the sort served both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush quite well, as I
remember it. What might the difference be? Perhaps the difference was that
Palin represented a threat to the status quo, while Reagan and Shrub did not.
I was not
and am not a fan of Sarah Palin. However, if “the man who vaulted her to the
national stage” had actually betrayed her, I could understand why she turned
angry and “wasted her talents.” Betrayal brings to the surface the most
powerful of emotions, rage most importantly. Ask any Vietnam vet. If this
happened, Palin did not “lose it;” she just decided she was not going to play
the game. If so, then I say two cheers for Sarah Palin.
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