Human nature leads most of us to search for logic and reasoning in a series of seemingly connected events. That has surely led many to try and uncover the strategic genius behind Sarah Palin’s recent maneuvers that will catapult her to the Republican nomination in 2012. You can stop, there is no strategy.
Palin is unquestionably a phenomenon with an instinctual ability to capture America’s attention. But even though she has influence, she is not a leader. There is no plan to manipulate the anger and paranoia on the American right to advance her political fortunes; she merely reflects the hysteria because she believes it. She is irresponsible, but not cynical. While even her limited success is a sad commentary on the state of the American polity, Sarah Palin is not going to be president.
Whether it’s because she is picking a fight with David Letterman, resigning as governor of Alaska, pushing for higher carbon emissions, or claiming Obama wants to kill her Down’s syndrome baby, Palin has spent the summer in the headlines. Any politician would love to get her level of media attention and it’s natural to think there has to be some kind of plan or purpose for the media onslaught. But if you look at it closely, it’s more luck than strategy, intuition rather than evil genius.
Palin couldn’t have picked a better time to capture days worth of headlines when she made her resignation announcement on a Friday afternoon of the three-day Fourth of July weekend. Not much else was happening – and if there was a ‘plan’, it would have been the perfect time for her to announce she was leaving the governor’s job to pursue another political office or to build a political movement. She would have been marked as the frontrunner for the Republican nod in 2012.
But there is no plan because she simply abandoned her post because she didn’t want to do it any more. She stumbled into all the coverage by happenstance after delivering an incoherent statement that led to days of negative analysis and headlines and even George Will [a controversial conservative commentator] labeled her a quitter. The criticism may have endeared her further to the fringe on the right, but she is finished as a viable national politician.
But she can still command attention. It is easier to think that Palin doesn’t actually believe that Obama’s push for healthcare reform is masking a secret plot to exterminate unproductive members of society because to think that she does is terrifying. But that’s how you have to understand Sarah Palin – she’s not using the wing-nuts, she’s one of them. What do you have to believe about your political opponents to actually think their objective is to kill old people and children with learning difficulties?
Palin is fascinating, but not in a ‘look at the silly Americans’ kind of way. Her predominance represents the chickens coming home to roost for a Republican party that has embraced an anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism run amok. If Barack Obama’s life story says that in America, anyone can be president, Palin’s story would have been everyone can be president. Fortunately, this summer has proved that’s not true.
Ken Gude is the associate director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at American Progress
