WASHINGTON – This image fits Josh Green’s piece perfectly, but the sentimentality in both ring false. Because there is nothing in the story of Sarah Palin that should induce such shallow thinking in place of objective reality that tells a very different tale, some of which peeks through in Green’s piece. Part of which is told in Sarah Palin’s Facebook missive written to Pres. Obama about American business that sucks up to Nikki Haley and South Carolina.
[…] Listen, it’s her life and her fortune and she is free to do what she wishes with it. And there’s no telling what the future holds for anyone in America. But she had and has more raw political talent than anyone I’ve ever seen, and, alas, as phenoms go, it looks like she is headed for a Darryl Strawberry-like playing career. – John Podhoretz, “Palin and the Curse of a Thin Skin”
Green’s “tragedy” of Sarah Palin is understandably getting a lot of attention. That’s because few ever did any homework on Palin before she blew her career up on a simple Katie Couric question about her newspaper and magazine reading habits. That was just for starters, with the crescendo of crushingly bad responses coming when Mrs. Palin chose to put herself above the Tucson shooting tragedy victims by invoking “blood-libel.”
In a moment that should have inspired selfless performance, Sarah Palin chose the opposite. This is the crux of Sarah’s lack of character and the single element that reveals the person she has become to date, which if it is rendered a “tragedy,” as Green suggests in his piece, it’s by her own hands. Everything in her life has been through what she crafted herself, which is what drew me to cover her in the first place.
The Palin derangement crowd never cared about her career, which is why they ignorantly attacked pieces I wrote on Sarah Palin that were rooted in reality in what she was doing throughout the health care debate that took her into the midterms where she became one of those primarily responsible for the Republican rout. It had its roots in her career in Alaska. From Green:
After taking office in December 2006, she kept her word and hired Tom Irwin, and other members of the Magnificent Seven. They devised a plan to attract someone other than the oil companies to build the pipeline, and they bid out the license to move ahead with it—to the deep displeasure of the oil producers, who vowed not to participate. Palin came under serious political pressure. Although she doesn’t mention it in Going Rogue, the Associated Press discovered that Vice President Dick Cheney called her at least twice that month. According to her aides, Cheney urged her to make concessions, but she didn’t.
That spring, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act sailed to passage, helped along by criminal indictments in the Veco scandal, which were handed down just as the bill came up. Still, Palin was the deciding factor. A new pipeline plan had seemed unlikely when she took over, but she kept the legislature focused on the task.
She kept herself focused, too: though priding herself on her well-advertised social conservatism, she was prepared to set it aside when necessary. Rather than pick big fights about social issues, she declined to take up two abortion-restriction measures that she favored, and vetoed a bill banning benefits for same-sex partners of state workers.
It was Sarah Palin’s character flaws that did her in. This is the fundamental missing element in Green’s “tragedy” write-up. It’s also what makes the piece so weirdly emotional, never a good thing in political writing or analysis, though we all succumb to it at times, which Green clearly has with Sarah Palin.
It makes an easy pitch for Andrew Sullivan:
I guess it’s counter-intuitive to argue that Palin, deep down, is a bipartisan progressive reformer, foiled by a cynical McCain campaign, trying to galvanize the base. But it’s also – from every single thing we know about her – untrue. The only consistent thing about her is not bipartisan reformism, but a will to power, fueled by resentment of whomever foiled her last. More paranoid and vengeful than Nixon, more divisive than Buchanan, more deceptive than Clinton, more delusional than George W. Bush, more psychologically unhinged than any candidate for the vice-presidency in modern times, she is what she always has been. And Josh’s attempt to resuscitate her reputation is about as persuasive as the soft-lens, North Korean-style portrait attached to the story.
It’s hard to believe that Sullivan would ever find anyone he despises more than Hillary, but he has in Sarah Palin.
I think Sarah Palin lies somewhere in between Green and Sullivan’s concoctions.
Podhoretz concludes that Palin “had and has more raw political talent” than he’s seen, but that she basically doesn’t know what to do with it, how to manage it. However, comparing Palin to “Darryl Strawberry-like career” is eerie considering his weaknesses are substances, while hers is the nurturing of her own public persona, with their own common bond the insecurity of ego’s grip.
The “raw political talent” Palin has is the equivalent to what happens when charisma and looks combine to produce what is called in Hollywood as the “it” factor, which is not predicated on any underlying talents, intelligence or anything else, but simply what happens when certain humans meet the camera to ignite in our eyes.
What the analysis so far is missing is a magnifying glass on Sarah Palin’s character. The innate ability of any human being to sense a greater purpose than self or celebrity and to give their life and their all to manifesting something on a wider scale than for their own benefit. A call that supersedes ego, media fixations and victimology, which Sarah Palin simply hasn’t shown or doesn’t have in the first place, maybe doesn’t even understand is missing.
The foundational tenet of character resides in courage to see yourself in the mirror as you are and define yourself through the truth you seek, not the sound bite that renders merely the sound of fleeting applause or the squeals of fans who think you can do no wrong. It is the ability to know when you’re wrong and the humanity to admit it and in that moment of grace teach others the frailty of human exaltation which always falls shattering in the light of our inevitable imperfection.
Sarah Palin’s “it” factor when coupled with her enormous ego, which is couched in language of “thin skin” but is nothing more, reveals not a “tragedy,” nor a venomous conglomeration caricature of Nixon-Clinton-Buchanan-Bush, but simply a small person given a wide landscape that she simply hasn’t the strength of character to navigate or the humility to request help to mine.
None of this obliterates that Sarah Palin remains the first woman on a national ticket to have the sex appeal equal to any male candidate, which has carried her equally ignorant, arrogant and insecure counterparts even further than she, because the old boys’ network backed them regardless of their naked buffoonery.
Lingering nevertheless is the hauntingly real history of Sarah in Alaska when she was able to tame herself and deliver for the people, with there absolutely no reason she couldn’t do it again. But it would require serious effort and commitment to excavating her character to unleash what’s so far taken hold of her public persona that’s killed her political soul.
Image credit: Robert Hunt
Taylor Marsh is a Washington based political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics, foreign policy, and women in power. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.