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Sarah Palin: Character was destiny

The blockbuster Steve Jobs news was such that Sarah Palin’s announcement that she will not be running for president caused barely a blip. It was good news, though, and I’m reasonably certain this ends her career as a national politician. Which is also good news, because she was a mess, but it leaves me with […]

The blockbuster Steve Jobs news was such that Sarah Palin’s announcement that she will not be running for president caused barely a blip. It was good news, though, and I’m reasonably certain this ends her career as a national politician. Which is also good news, because she was a mess, but it leaves me with an overall feeling of disappointment at what could have been.

I was in Alaska not long after she had been elected governor, and it was so great to hear Republicans talking about her. I remember riding around Anchorage with a grassroots GOP activist who had volunteered on her campaign. He was ecstatic over her David-vs-Goliath triumph. You have to understand, he explained, how corrupt the party is here. She took them on, and damned if she didn’t beat ’em. He was a true believer, and hearing the story of Palin’s rise from him, it was hard not to be one too.

When John McCain made her his running mate, I was all in for Sarah. Based on what I knew about her at the time, it seemed to me that the country — and certainly the GOP — could use an outsider like her to bring fresh thinking and new energy to an exhausted post-Bush party. She immediately drew hateful, even deranged criticism from liberal cultural elites like the Chicago divinity school prof who infamously wrote that Palin’s “greatest pretense is that she is a woman.” The unhinged overreaction from people like this professor — and they were seemingly legion in those early days of Palin’s candidacy — confirmed every conservative’s stereotype of the way liberal elites see them and the things they love and esteem, and sealed the emotional bond between many conservatives and the Alaska governor. Palin later became notorious for waging stupid, crude class warfare on the stump, but it should be remembered that she by no means fired the first shot.

And then she gave that first TV interview, to Charles Gibson, which was more or less a disaster. She came across as intellectually incurious and completely unprepared to be vice president. The Katie Couric interview confirmed that this wasn’t just a one-off bad performance. Palin might be resented by liberal elites for what she stands for, but being hated by the “right” people is not a qualification for the vice presidency. As much as I wanted to keep believing in Palin, it was becoming crystal clear that she was not who I thought she was, and who I wanted her to be: a thoughtful, practical conservative populist who was able and willing to take on the entrenched interests in Washington, Wall Street, and the GOP.

Palin’s post-2008 career has only confirmed her mediocrity as a political figure. There’s no need to go into the details here. They are all too familiar. Her populism degenerated into folksy mummery (in Daniel Larison’s arch phrase). If nothing else, leaving the Alaska governorship to become a Fox News celebrity was proof that she did not have what it took to merit national office. In a review of her autobiography “Going Rogue,” I noted:

It’s like this: Palin spends seven pages dishing about her appearance on Saturday Night Live, but just over one page discussing her national security views.

Palin positions herself as a populist, but her populism is entirely cultural. She never misses an opportunity to tell us how weepy she gets when she thinks about our country and its military. She fires the governor’s mansion chef, who is bored because her kids won’t eat his fancypants food. She swoons over a meal of homemade blueberry pie from “hardworking, unpretentious, patriotic” Alaskans — unlike, one presumes, those uppity Berkeley snobs who prefer tarte Tatin at Chez Panisse.

A little of that goes a long way, and I wouldn’t begrudge Palin a bit of it if her populism had any economic substance. Early in Going Rogue she talks in detail about how Exxon exploited the people of Alaska in the Exxon Valdez disaster. And her experience tangling with oil companies taught Palin about how big business colludes with government to create a crony capitalism that harms the common good.

And yet, she’s incapable of understanding how the uncritically pro-business economic agenda she touts makes this possible.

“In national politics, some feel that big Business is always opposed to the Little Guy,” she writes. “Some people seem to think a profit motive is inherently greedy and evil, and that what’s good for business is bad for people. (That’s what Karl Marx thought too.)”

Karl Marx! Well, say no more! Along those lines, Palin’s economic program amounts to nothing more than tax-cutting, deregulating and the endless repetition of shopworn GOP talking points.

This is the Republican Party’s great populist hope?

In other words, Palin turned herself into a right-wing celebrity, but only that. Her trajectory brings to mind Ross Douthat’s observation the other day:

These policy failures have been exacerbated by the weird celebrity culture that Fox News creates around conservative politicians, which can make Republican presidential campaigns feel like cable news auditions. Thanks to Roger Ailes’s network, the right’s populist folk heroes have career incentives to choose superficiality over substance — the better to follow in Huckabee’s and Palin’s footsteps, and segue into a career as host of “Bachmann Overdrive” or “9-9-9 at 9.”

This is the irony of Fox’s impact on Republican politics. In a sense, the network’s shows have given right-wing populism a larger megaphone than it’s ever had before. But by turning populism into mass entertainment, they’ve made it less and less likely that a conservative populist will ever actually deserve to win.

Ross also made a good point about Palin-as-Media-Figure earlier this year:

The media often acts as though they’re covering her because her conservative fan base is so large (hence the endless talk about her 2012 prospects), when they’re really covering her because so many liberals are eager to hear about, read about and then freak about whatever that awful, terrifying woman is up to now.

Anyway, it’s a shame that things turned out this way for Sarah Palin. She might have been a worthwhile contender had she never been tapped by the McCain campaign, and had spent years governing Alaska. The terrific speech she gave last month reveals the kind of politician she might have become. But probably not. Her greatest limitations are not things you overcome by gaining experience. They are intrinsic. The Greeks were right: character really is destiny.

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