Palin's Back

Yesterday on KCRW's Left, Right and Center Arianna Huffington was exasperated during a discussion of the intricacies of Obama's soon-to-be trillion dollar stimulus package. Although the majority of the country favors it and trusts him to do the right thing, Arianna feels there should be an informed national discussion. She's right. And what's preventing it? She says it's the mass media's obsession with cheap celebrity news, particularly the unending silliness around Alaska's and Illinois' fifth rate governors and Palin's tawdry brood of miscreants. Palin, of course is drumming up as much publicity as she can, as it is now a lucrative family business.

Arianna's right, of course-- and neither Ken nor I have had anything to say about Palin and her trailer trash soap opera for months-- until... today. And, basically, all I want to say about how today is "Make it go away." Palin unclogged (hyperbolic, extremist right wing filmmaker vs ignorant, extremist right wing governor):



David Frum is always insistent that, though a rightist, he isn't a lout, xenophobe, homophobe, racist, hatemonger, religionist fanatic, Know Nothing or any of the other cohorts of Bush's and Rove's crumbling right-wing coalition. He insists he's respectable. His wife was on O'Reilly's GOP propaganda infomercial Thursday, along with defeated Republican ideologue Rick Santorum. And the topic: Palin. O'Reilly senses Palin means revenue and loves stoking that fire. If Santorum embarrassingly admitted that Palin "doesn't have a well informed worldview," which would be of no concern to an O'Reilly since he sees that as his own job anyway, Frum had a more devastating analysis. "However nastily and treacherously Palin's media handlers may have behaved after the election, their only error during the election was to offer too much access to Palin, not too little. Those handlers faced a daunting problem: Their party's nominee for vice president could not respond to questions without embarrassing herself. The handlers who kept Pain under wraps knew what they were doing."

Their party, someone might remind him, is also his party. Frum points out that Palin is as much a mess and an embarrassment to his political party as she was during the election campaign.

Now Palin is hiring her own handlers, making her own decisions, speaking freely. And if anything, the results are even worse than they were in 2008.

Watch the Ziegler interview yourself, and you will see what I mean. Ziegler represented a new and subtle kind of danger for Palin, the overly friendly interview. Ziegler's questions were all traps, no less dangerous for being set unwittingly. Palin stumbled into every one.

Again and again, Ziegler invited Palin to engage in self-pity and self-excuse-- and again and again she accepted.

She tells us she was a victim of sexism. She tells us she was a victim of class prejudice. She complains about her media treatment-- then insists she never watched any of it. She deplores the unpleasant personal comments directed against herself, while offering up some equally unpleasant personal comments of her own. She repeatedly shades the truth in order to escape blame for her own mistakes. (She won't for example let go of our claim that there was some insult to Alaska embedded in Katie Couric's simple question: "What do you read?")

A smart politician rebuffs all invitations to speak about his or her own hurt feelings. It's not just that such talk sounds whiny and weak, although it does. Much more seriously, such talk betrays a self-involvement that alienates voters almost more than any other personal quality. Through the 2008 election, Barack Obama repeatedly said "It's not about me. It's about you." Exactly so! But Palin's replies to Ziegler make clear that for her, the election was about her. The next election will be even more so, because she has collected so many more grievances along the way.

Unlike Frum, Democrats are keeping their fingers crossed that Palin will be the Republican nominee in 2012. So is the media-- right across the board.