AT last the American Right and Left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised Going Rogue as “well-written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only “parts” of it.
On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in the Washington Post while confessing that she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it.
Going Rogue will hardly be the first bestseller embraced by millions for talismanic rather than literary ends. And I am not recommending that others follow my example and slog through its 400-plus pages, especially since its supposed revelations have been picked through 24/7 for a week.
But sometimes I wonder if anyone has read all of what Palin would call the “dang” thing. Some of the book’s most illuminating tics have been mentioned barely — if at all — by either its fans or foes. Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves.
The book’s biggest surprise is Palin’s wide-eyed infatuation with show-business celebrities. You get nearly as much face time with Tina Fey and the cast of Saturday Night Live in Going Rogue as you do with John McCain. We learn how happy Palin was to receive calls from Bono and Warren Beatty “to share ideas and insights”. We wade through star-struck lists of campaign cameos by Robert Duvall, Jon Voight, Naomi Judd, Gary Sinise and Kelsey Grammer, among many others.
Equally revealing is the one boldfaced name conspicuously left unmentioned in the book: Levi Johnston, the father of Palin’s grandchild. Though Palin and McCain milked him for photo ops at the Republican convention, he is persona non grata now that he’s taking off his campaign wardrobe. Is Johnston’s fledgling porn career the problem, or is it his public threats to strip bare Palin family secrets as well? “She knows what I got on her” is how he put it. In Palin’s interview with Oprah last week, it was questioning about Johnston, not Katie Couric, that made her nervous.
The book’s most frequently dropped names, predictably enough, are the Lord and Ronald Reagan (though not necessarily in that order).
Easily the most startling passage in Going Rogue, running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith and trust in God. But Palin did not write her letter to God; she wrote the letter from God, assuming His role and voice herself and signing it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father”. If I may say so — Oy!
The question journalists repeatedly asked last week — What are Palin’s plans for 2012? — is a red herring. Palin has no obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the China shop of American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline, all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn’t as a sitting governor. No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.
The fact-checking siege of Going Rogue — by the media, Democrats and aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike — is another fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions.
The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause.
Just look at the stops and the faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional — the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in 2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced in the Hitler-fixated “tea party” movement (which she endorses in her book). It’s a politics of victimisation and sloganeering with no policy solutions required beyond the conservative mantra of No Taxes.
After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her to start studying the issues. If Going Rogue and its promotional interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during her months at liberty.
Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for not asking Palin “one policy question”, but when Barbara Walters did ask some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is “dithering”) or ran aground. Her argument for why “Jewish settlements” should be expanded on the West Bank was that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead”. It was unclear what she was talking about — unless it was the “rapture” theology that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a precondition for the return of Christ.
The discredited neocon hacks who have latched on to Palin as a potential ticket back into power have their work cut out for them. But it’s better for Palin’s purposes to remain as blank a slate as possible anyway. Matthew Continetti, the author of the just-published Persecution of Sarah Palin and her most persistent cheerleader after William Kristol, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that her role model for 2012 should be Bob McDonnell, the new Republican governor-elect of Virginia, who won on “a bipartisan, centre-right approach”. What Continetti means is that Palin could still somehow fudge her history as McDonnell did; his campaign kept his career-long history as a political acolyte and financial beneficiary of Pat Robertson on the down-low.
But no matter how much Palin tries to pass for “centre-right’, she’s unlikely to fool that vast pool of voters left, right and centre who have already written her off as unqualified for the White House. The GOP establishment knows this, and is frightened. The demographic that Palin attracts is in decline; there’s no way the maths of her fan base adds up to an Electoral College victory.
Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with 65 per cent giving her serious presidential consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike Huckabee. Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot centre of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black President and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. As Palin thrives on the ire of the left, so she does from the disdain of Republican leaders who, with a condescension rivalling the sexism they decry in liberals, belittle her as a lightweight or instruct her to eat think-tank spinach.
The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not self-destruct, she will doom GOP hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than Palin and defies partisan labelling. If Obama can’t tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her torch.