Have We Misunderestimated Her?

email

print

del.icio.us

The sad irony of Sarah Palin is that she is the more appropriate object of Barack Obama's criticism. More so than even John McCain.

Barack Obama describes John McCain as "Bush's Third Term", a reincarnation of his destructive policies and positions. That may be so. But Sarah Palin, as it turns out, is Bush's media incarnation.

Her collossal incompetence, grandiose hypocrisy, and the record of cronyist corruption that we can expect from a Conservative notwithstanding, Palin gave a very decent speech tonight. The Conservative base is (somewhat) excited about its candidates.

This is because voters are ultimately driven by the visceral, not the factual. Compounded by a media narrative that prepared us for a blundering imbecile, the deliverance of a halfway-decent speech has begun to innoculate the traditional media from criticizing Palin on her professional record.

Just like Bush.

Despite his stature as a pampered scion of an elite political dynasty, the man who had wrecked everything from a business to a baseball team, Bush's failures became his folksky charm. Republicans skillfully turned the media's accurate criticisms into fertile ground for a faux-populist backlash; to top it off, the bar became so low that whenever he spoke a complete sentence without mangling it, it became proof of his brilliance.

Whether Sarah Palin can emulate Bush's success, or whether her record will ultimately catch up with her and McCain is obviously unclear. But it would be wise to never underestimate the power of focus groups and a compelling traditional media narrative, however detached from reality they may be. Reality is just another marketable commodity in election season.

read more

n n