A few thoughts on Sarah Palin

After Sarah Palin's most recent interview, pundits, even conservative ones, are pronouncing her hopes for the presidency dead. Oddly though, nearly everyone once did the same for Dennis Kucinich's ambitions to be anything beyond a one-term mayor of Cleveland, and he currently represents Ohio's district 10, an area including that very city. Likewise, after failing to win the presidency in 1960, Nixon obviously did end up as a president.

These people don't just lay down and die, damn it. Hell, according to Wikipedia even Jerry Springer thought about throwing his sleazy hat back into the ring as late as 2003. Palin is not about to give up. In fact, she's keeping herself on the countries news-screens, and intentionally or not, she may even be developing a means to gain popularity. Given the usefulness of even bad publicity, after all, her gray publicity might be even more usable than that. She's basically been arguing about a set of non-issues, such as the semantic propriety of the words "blood libel," and a decent spin-doctor could easily twist even greater negatives than that into positives.

For me, though, Palin does face at least one serious political problem: she seems to have made herself less of a politician and more of a personality, less of a statesperson and more of a celebrity. I no longer hear people talking about her policies--and some have certainly inspired discussion!--but about Sarah the person: the wife, the mother and, only thereafter, the Governor. This focus on Palin the person has successfully distracted us from any real issues of her administration, but in doing so, it has also elevated each question about her to one on our acceptance of both her and her entire administration. As a result, then, any complaint about any of her decisions may become a challenge, not simply to some small number of decisions, but of her overall competence, and an opponent wiling to "go negative" may be able to keep her on the defensive--and a candidate on the defensive tends to lose support. Just ask Barak Obama.

Furthermore, on a moral level, her elevation of herself to celebrity leaves us less able to make informed choices about government under her. Personally, I sympathize with Ms. Palin in a number of ways. Like us, she seems to face problems in her marriage, family and job, and, like us, she may take hard-to-explain steps to solve them. On the other hand though, I can neither agree nor disagree with most of her policies; after all, I simply don't know them! My daily paper and even my My Yahoo page (geared for an absolute news junkie) feature stories on the dramas of Palin's life but nothing about her decisions. Hell, in light of this ignorance, she may already be running the risk of losing voters due to a small but unshrinkable doubt about her candidacy.

Just some thoughts.....