(This post was first published in 2011. Unfortunately, it again seems relevant.)
A recent declaration by Sarah Palin that she doesn’t intend to shut up is the best news the Democrats have gotten in months. In her public life to date, everything that has come out of her mouth that hasn’t been uninformed in content and inarticulate in execution has been hopelessly bland and non-specific -- completely lacking in any indication that she has any but the vaguest understanding of basic principles of governance, conservative or otherwise. And there’s no reason not to expect that to continue.
Soon after the election, it seemed that the Palin phenomenon had ended -- that she had disappeared from the national stage for good, and, as conservative pundits and politicians had their inevitable what-was-I-thinking moment, the idea of her taking on the leadership role in the Republican party had receded further and further into the gloaming.
But no. She reappeared with a book, then a television show, and has managed to stay alternately on the fringes or in the forefront of public consciousness throughout. People who seem otherwise reasonably sensible are again saying things about her – things which, if they say them, they presumably believe them -- that are totally at odds with the evidence – the evidence she herself has supplied with her every public utterance.
An article by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal asks “what's behind the left's deranged hatred” of Palin. The answer is, it’s not deranged and it’s not hatred -- and it’s not just the left. It’s a simple recognition of that fact that she is the lightest of intellectual lightweights – an unschooled talking-point repeater totally lacking in statecraft skills and with no real understanding of “the American people” she repeatedly and thoughtlessly invokes. Granted, she has this in common with many politicians, maybe most, but still… this is the person that seemingly sane party strategists see as their leader?
The more relevant question, then, isn’t what's behind the left's deranged hatred of Palin, but what’s behind the right’s deranged infatuation with her. What has she said or done, or thought or written, that demonstrates to this constituency that she belongs at the top of government? Nothing about her stands up to detached analysis, leading to the conclusion that their support is, at bottom, emotional – schoolboy/schoolgirl crushes formed during the time of her initial public emergence that they haven’t gotten over yet. In any case, they continue to say things about her that are demonstrably not true. One pundit, for example, referred to Palin’s “obvious smarts” – a real head-scratcher, because if she has any smarts, to date, they’ve been anything but obvious.
The flip side of the conservative punditry’s inexplicable enthusiasm for Gov. Palin is the indignation with which they’ve reacted to the less-than-enthusiastic reception her initial selection received in many quarters, and their righteous anger at what they consider to have been unfair treatment in the press. Well, one pales at the thought of the lacerations these same people would be inflicting on Gov. Palin if she were a Democrat and been offered up by that party as its VP candidate. This person is a lightweight, not national-candidate timbre, is what Republicans would be saying – and much, much more – if Palin were on the other team. Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh and all the rest would have set new records for sneering.
To risk stating the obvious, Sen. McCain didn't pick Gov. Palin because he thought she would make a good vice president or a good president. He picked her because he thought it would help him win the election, and he didn't hesitate to put her the proverbial heartbeat away. Ironically, the calculation, cold as it was, that Palin’s selection would drive votes to the Republican ticket was remarkably clueless, and demonstrated the bizarre understanding McCain and his team seemed to have about actual voters out here in flyover territory. At the very least, the idea that this would bring women voters over to their side speaks loudly and clearly about their low opinion of women voters.
In the days and weeks after the election, Sen. McCain diplomatically declined to publicly implicate Palin in the failure of his ticket. But he has to know that her selection was a ghastly mistake that came perilously close to making a laughing stock of his campaign. As for Gov. Palin’s political future: The likelihood is that her refusal to “shut up” will lead, sooner or later, to her exit from the national political stage and a retreat to the television reality show hosting career that her cynical thrust at high office may have been aimed at all along.
