Sarah Palin has had two years to do her homework, to absorb what’s important in international affairs, to see how things work in the lower 48 states, to roll up her sleeves and make meaningful contributions to some worthy enterprise, and to show the United States she is working hard to earn the nation’s respect.
She has done none of that. One other important requirement was that she finished her term as governor of Alaska showing herself to be a competent and in-charge leader accomplishing the important tasks at hand. Instead, she resigned from her office without being able to present any coherent explanation that exceeds personal self-pity and selfish motivation. She needed to demonstrate she was using her position as an executive to demonstrate her growth toward higher ambitions, but she failed completely. Perhaps the glare of the spotlights down south was just too much of an opiate to avoid.
She has spent her time engaged in constant self promotion appearing coast to coast promoting her notion of a conservative agenda as if all the important issues of our time can be reduced to simple slogans and that all issues can be defined in terms of good guys and bad guys defined in very black and white terms.
Sure, she has taken some horrible abuse by the media, but the gaffes she made during the 2008 election campaign and more recently are her responsibility. Knowing ahead of time the mainstream (which she sarcastically keeps calling “lamestream”) media would be tough on her, she needed to be prepared for how to handle tough questions while maintaining her poise. She continues to this day to belittle Katy Couric as if her question about what she reads was unfair. While perhaps Couric could have framed the question a bit more artfully, having listened to an interviewee presenting a lot of opinion, making broad accusations, and being rather lacking on specifics, asking her where she got her information and what helped her understand the issues was a perfectly legitimate question. She blew it.
Sarah Palin has put tremendous focus on blasting the media but to what aim? Has she provided clearer focus on how the media is biased and motivated the public to act upon that concern?
Again, Palin strikes out miserably. She continues to lambast the media as if out of some great sense of vengeance all the while not accepting that any greater ambitions beyond her incomplete term as governor of Alaska requires the media to present her to the public and she is doing nothing to engender good will from the press when she constantly antagonizes them more through insults than cataloging specific grievances. Her hubris suggests she can get her message out going around the media with lots of staged events and speaking appearances having one network in her pocket. That strategy is not helping her with anyone but her most dedicated faithful.
Her cozy relationship with Fox News and how that network gives her an open microphone where she can stand on her soapbox demagoguing her issues to death making sweeping accusations and trumpeting her own brilliance acting as an advocate of constitutional government and understanding American history. Clearly, the Fox News Network has an agenda to give her carte blanche to speak on issues as she sees fit. In interview situations, she is thrown softball questions and when a more difficult question is addressed to her or she does not answer a question fully, no probing follow up questions are advanced. Her Sunday, June 5th appearance on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace gave the appearance of a scripted performance. Generally on Sunday Morning news programs the guests of honor are present in the studio. Palin was in Arizona from a remote studio in front of a green screen allowing for Fox News graphics to be displayed behind her while Wallace posed his questions from the set of the Washington studio. The program gave the appearance of an interview that could have been edited. It appeared too scripted, and Chris Wallace who is one of the most aggressive interviewers in the business was conspicuously lax on follow up questions treating Palin with the kind of reverence generally afforded a head of state or major religious figure, not an ambitious, opinionated, ambitious politician.
Whether Palin chooses to run for President remains to be seen, but in the meantime she is sucking the oxygen out of the room for her fellow party candidates whose message is being obscured by the constant exposure she gets at the expense of her possible rivals. That she was in New Hampshire as a stop on her nebulous bus tour of the Northeastern United States on the day Mitt Romney announced his candidacy in the Granite State that same day.
The cold hard facts for Palin cannot be ignored. The majority of America can’t stand her.
Here’s here favorable versus unfavorable ratings from three major polls.
AP
Favorable… 36%
Unfavorable … 59%
Unsure… 5%
CNN
Favorable… 35%
Unfavorable… 59%
Unsure… 6%
Bloomberg
Favorable… 28%
Unfavorable… 60%
Unsure… 12%
More significantly the gap between her favorable and unfavorable ratings has continuously widened since the 2008 elections. Regardless how much a hard core group of Republicans continue to support her, the majority of Americans are against her for many reasons.
Palin’s recent screw up on Paul Revere’s ride and how she handled facing up to her error was quite revealing of her dreadful lack of character and obvious hypocrisy. One can’t view the video of her being questioned and not see a person gasping for an answer but appearing to wing it as she answered. She attempted to wed Paul Revere’s roll to that of preserving the right to bear arms speaking of his ringing bells to alert the colonists. When confronted with her error, she attempted to justify her answer was correct and that asking her the question was an ambush attempting to make her look bad. See what happens when ANY media besides Fox News gets a microphone in front of her?
Meanwhile, when Michelle Bachman visited Concord, New Hampshire earlier in the year, she confused the significance of Concord New Hampshire with that of Concord, Massachusetts in the American Revolution. She responded by joking that she had borrowed Barack Obama’s teleprompter, but when she was probed further, she refused to blame anyone but herself.
Given how often Bachman is compared to Palin, Bachman is absolutely more mature, experienced and prepared.
Face it, Sarah Palin is not intelligent, but oh how cautiously Republicans dance around that issue almost forcing themselves to always mention, “she’s actually quite intelligent” when questioned about her roll in the party. Not a single one of them sounded convincing and the sense of patronizing was so painfully apparent.
Two politicians, one her political rival in Alaska, fellow Republican, Lisa Murkowski, who Palin has attacked repeatedly with vicious personal attacks and sarcastic insults and Jeb Bush, surely one of the most universally respected Republicans, both have stated clearly they doubt Sarah Palin’s “intellectual” curiosity.
If enthusiasm alone were the ticket to great things, Sarah Palin would be quite an impressive leader, but the cold hard truth is no matter how much her supports spin perceptions or how much Fox News Network carries her baggage, she is a horrible embarrassment to the American political process. If subjected to the real rigors of media scrutiny which she avoids entirely, it’s obvious Sarah Palin would fail miserably. Each encounter brings her down lower and lower.
We have to conclude it would be interesting to see how she would do if she were to appear on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? Let’s propose some questions on American history and the U.S. Constitution on a 5th grade level and see how the Diva of Dullards would perform. How ironic it is that the two most notable interviews on Sunday, June 5 were of Sarah Palin in the friendly confines of Fox News and Lady Gaga on Sixty Minutes. Could anyone watch both interviews and not see Lady Gaga is not far broader minded, inquisitive, and intellectually superior to the Wasilla Wench?
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