I’m fairly certain the photo I’ve planted alongside this article has been altered in some fashion to make Mrs. Palin even more provocative than she actually is, which I suppose is pretty silly given the seriousness of someone ostensibly aspiring to the highest office in the land. I use the word ostensibly, because I don’t believe she truly aspires to anything beyond just being Sarah Palin, which at the rate we are going holds out the prospect of being pretty ambitious all by itself. And I used the picture because she’s holding a pool cue, indicating an affection for billiards, one of my other great interests along with movies, golf, Cracker Barrel restaurants and Reggae music. What, you didn’t notice that she was holding a pool cue?
In a very real, very American sense, she’s already bigger than the Seven-plus Dwarfs who actually are vying for the Republican presidential nomination next year. And we have a real American hero and former presidential nominee to thank for it: John McCain.
It’s difficult to imagine any confluence of events that might have transpired to have elevated her to the iconic status she enjoys today other than Senator McCain making the uber-desperate move in 2008 to pick her as his running mate on the Republican ticket. I’m still not sure whether we should spank him or thank him, but either way we’re saddled with this Palin public persona that defies explanation and seems as unstoppable as the buses she sits astride as she shuttles around the country.
I remember 40 years ago when comedian Pat Paulsen would announce his candidacy for president to the broad chuckles of just about everybody in the land. Listening to Sarah Palin provide a pageant-worthy exposition on Paul Revere’s previously well understood role in American Revolutionary War history would have been considered grand comedy at one time, but nowadays winds up being debated and parsed endlessly by genuine journalists who ought to know better. Palin’s ability to make the institution she seemingly disdains, the “Lamestream Media,” fall all over itself in affording her coverage is nothing short of laughable. If such a diverse group can collectively despise someone, it would probably be Sarah Palin, but the ardor with which that sentiment prevails is contrasted mightily by the reality that she need only snap her fingers – metaphorically speaking – and the great behemoth of national media attention is shifted her way faster than kiss a duck.
Major news organizations are spending tens of thousands of dollars poring over two years’ worth of e-mails presumably in hopes of finding some juicy dirt to splash on the Palin juggernaut, but in the end it’s the media that winds up looking silly. With the nation facing as much peril and upheaval as most of us can remember in our lifetime, the media focuses relentlessly on a faux superstar who will not be the Republican nominee and may not even be trying to become it, but rather is just having a good deal of fun expanding the breadth and scope of her curious fame at the expense of the media knuckleheads who traipse around behind her caravan.
The media no doubt wants to ignore her, to say this is not a legitimate presidential contender, nor a public office holder of any description whatsoever, so we will afford no coverage of her antics. And yet the dynamic of fame in 21st century America hardly permits such a haughty stance. To say that she is the Paris Hilton of American political life just may be an understatement and it might even be slanderous, but I’m just not sure which of the two should be the most offended.
- T.S. O’Connell
