Fair / 60° FEditorial: Throw Palin some questions overhand
Published 4:27pm Monday, November 23, 2009Monday, Nov. 23, 2009
Former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin is a phenomenon, coy about her 2012 political ambitions and selling a pile of “Going Rogue” books in the meantime. The media doesn’t know what to do with her. A Washington Post-ABC News poll shows 60 percent of Americans believe Palin is not qualified to be president.
Fifty-three percent “definitely” would not vote for her.
Yet she fills every channel, winning comparisons to Argentina first lady Eva Peron (in her Evita musical someone like Madonna will field dress a moose), could take Oprah’s place as a talk-show host and sassy enough to dismiss questions about quitting with a year and a half left in her term with, “Only dead fish go with the flow.” The media was as surprised by that July 4 announcement as when she joined the 2008 Republican ticket.
Her strong points are that telegenic charisma you can’t manufacture and her standing with real people outside the political establishment that thinks she’s an airhead. She didn’t go to an Ivy League school, she earned a journalism degree.
She resonates with several disgruntled sectors, from social conservatives taken for granted by Republicans to small-town rural Americans, who feel their desires are ignored and hunters, suspicious that Washington wants to take away their guns.
Plus, she’s the matriarch of a colorful clan that’s as messy as any family found in real life.
Rush Limbaugh reported that The Associated Press assigned 11 reporters to fact-check Palin’s book, compared to just two to fact-check the health care bill. Seems hard to believe any media are digging that deep. Most coverage has been like Sean Hannity’s hour, where they chatted about whether or not President Obama is a socialist and such blasts from the past as Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
What we haven’t heard is any re-examination of her record, like the “cold hard truth” piece last April, “Pipe Dreams,” by investigative reporter Joe McGinness, author of “The Selling of The President” Nixon in 1968 and 1983′s “Fatal Vision.”
America’s largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever, which she touted at the Republican convention and to CBS’ Katie Couric, does not and might never exist because, rhetoric aside, she was “one of the biggest obstacles in its path.”
As a former governor, Tony Knowles, a Democrat, told McGinniss, “It’s as if getting the gas pipeline built is only her second-highest priority. Her highest is making sure the oil companies don’t build it.” Before she became “the new darling of the newly disenfranchised far right,” McGinniss wrote, Palin “had been a bare-knuckle backwoods populist who’d built a career out of puffing up dragons she could then slay. Her tactic was first to demonize, then to defeat,” which explained how a young woman could rise so quickly under the radar from Wasilla City Council to John McCain’s running mate. She only became governor in 2006, when she “found herself eyeball-to-eyeball with Alaska’s most demonizable dragon of all – Big Oil.”
Palin “overlooked one salient fact,” that by excluding Exxon-Mobil, BP and ConocoPhillips, which controlled natural gas the new pipeline would need “if it were ever to pump anything more than hot air … She gained the short-term approval-rating points that made her seem attractive to McCain,” but all but assured the “pipeline to nowhere” would never be “anything more than her personal field of dreams.”
“There is a considerable gap between the image Sarah Palin tries to project and the reality that underlies it,” according to McGinniss. “Few noticed that her political skills were not matched by an interest in, or grasp of, policy. Even in November (2008), I thought it apparent that Palin had returned to Alaska feeling she’s outgrown it … She’d been at the white-hot center. How could she go back to the cold, dark edge? That she’d come to view her governorship as a distraction from her efforts to project herself onto the national scene became even more obvious later that month.” Palin, aided and abetted by her legislature, committed to paying up to $500 million to a foreign company – TransCanada, based in Calgary – to look into the possibility of someday building the pipeline.
She had to move on when her pipeline was doomed by distancing oil players rather than trying to bring them together.
Every time someone from the media comments on Sarah Palin, Palin derangement syndrome rears its ugly head. The Niles Daily Star is apparently not immune to this syndrome. in its editorial on Monday, the Star misses the appeal of Sarah Palin completely. She’s genuine. She is pro-life so she refused to abort her Downs Syndrome baby. She is brave. How many politicians would take on an incumbant governor of a state from their own party and beat him? She’s conservative, yet her husband is supportive and does tasks around the house many liberal women could only wish their husbands would do.
The Star cited only one source, Joe McGinness. Joe McGiness is hardly an expert on politics. He has written political biographies about the Kennedeys, but I could find no evidence he is an expert about Sarah Palin.
Why do many people dislike her? My theory is that she is one of us. She doesn’t have a degree from Harvard, her family is interesting to say the least, yet she is conservative. That is an affront to everybody who thinks all attractive women should be pro-choice.
Michael L. Waldron
Liberals are scared to death of Ms. Palin because she IS real. She has the unusual talent for a politician to make the complex simple, and the poll number showing that 53% would NOT vote for her? Perhaps among Democrats, but among middle Americans that number is vastly different. Again, Ms. Palin scares liberals. She is NOT from the New York-DC axis, nor is she from the LA-SF axis. The media coverage that she has recently received from interviewers has NOT been softball questions, as they were with BARACK OBAMA during his campaign. Palin has been villified in the liberal media for her lack of “Gravitas” or whatever other sins that she might have committed. No, she is NOT a Harvard educated lawyer. She is a college educated local politician who has risen through the ranks to lead a state. Yes liberals, Alaska is a state. It has been since 1959. Her greatest sin is that she is a conservative woman. Evidently women are all supposed to be liberals and pro abortion. Her life story is like that of millions of American women, and her ability to deal with problems will serve her well wherever she decides to go.