It’s time to see Sarah Palin for what she is – a pop phenomenon. Hers is a niche market, hiding in nooks and crannies throughout the country, but it’s large enough to make a dent on mainstream culture; sort of like Country music. Idle talk about her having a prayer of being elected President in 2012, while not totally ridiculous on its face, is so far removed from any foreseeable reality based on modern electoral history as to be easily dismissed out of hand. Simpleton populists with no interest in national policy outside of biblical concerns don’t tend to get very far in electoral politics (Bush, dim as he was, came from the heart of the GOP establishment, and was never a populist). That’s not to say that she can’t have an impact. In fact, it looks like she may well end up determining the Republican nominee in 2012 either by outside influence or by entering the race outright. Her standing with a significant portion of the Republican base is that impressive.
But as buttoned up white people throughout the heartland line up to get a glimpse of her on her book tour, it’s about time we all realize that Sarah Palin is less a presidential player than a pop princess with a twist. The twist is that this is not a phenomenon driven by the media centers in New York or Los Angeles, directed at self-professed hipsters across the country. No, Palin is a rock star for the terminally unhip. These are the people the media usually ignores and sometimes sneers at. As a group they are whiter than mayonaisse, not highly educated, not burdened with gobs of disposable income and with religious convictions tending towards fundamentalism. It’s not a demographic that will typically eat up the latest pointless, meta-celebrity fad (Lady Ga Ga, for instance) just because they need somewhere to spend their allowance. They are resentful of the coasts that look down on them for being backward rubes and their resentment is justified, since I live on one of those coasts and I can tell you that we do look down at them. We gazed in awe when they complained about the government meddling in their Medicare. We shivered when they spoke about George Bush like he was a messenger of God (really Jesus, since God the Father has an ironically subordinate role in their belief system). And we wonder with more than a little justification what they really, REALLY, think about Barack Hussein Obama.
So they are ridiculed and marginalized and are, like the great mass of this country, living paycheck to paycheck, wondering how Wall Street bankers, New York bankers, Eueeuuurrrooopeeeaan bankers, made off with all the loot while they were left holding the bag. So here comes Sarah, a woman who actually attended several institutions of higher education, but wisely refused to let anything corrosive to her faith sink in. She resisted the indoctrination of the elites at Matanuska-Susitna College (see? we can’t help mocking them), and stayed true to Sarah, the regular gal who only ever dreamed of doing God’s work at ESPN. She IS one of them, the only difference being she was savvy and ruthless enough to scrape her way to the Governor’s mansion in Alaska, armed only with a hunting rifle and heaping snowdrifts of chutzpah. She’s got glamour, spunk and requisite amounts of blind faith, and the folks who think evolution is a cruel hoax just eat her up like Krispy Kremes. She’s the living embodiment of everything that Steve Coogan so shrewdly parodied in Hamlet 2, with the song “Rock Me Sexy Jesus”. It’s that consummately American pairing of piety and sex appeal that the rest of the world, and frankly quite a few Americans, shake their heads at. It’s as old as the Salem Witch Trials, and now it’s packaged in a red suit jacket and librarian glasses. She’s everything a pill-popping, gluttonous, slothful Rush Limbaugh could never be. She channels their resentments while simultaneously walking the walk and winking the wink, looking smart and sassy to boot. Like Taylor Swift, she’s going to be around for a while, holy sex symbol of the Bible Belt, until her looks fade and she can enter the realm of pure spirituality; so we elites better get used to her. Now where did I leave my TARP bailout check?
Comments (4)
I've got to believe that
I've got to believe that she's a shrewd businesswoman who intends on replacing the void formed by Oprah's leaving the airwaves. If she can't be vice president, she figures, she can damn sure fight her way to a seat at olympus with the other mononyms (Martha, Oprah, etc) who have carved an empire out of the overly well-nourished bones of bored American housewives.
I'd like to nominate John McCain as the worst person in American politics. Not because the dinosaur ever had any chance at winning, but because his fumbled 11th hour Hail Mary play resulted in a national platform for the most insufferable woman this side of Carrie Prejean. A woman who, without the instant celebrity a VP pick bestows, would have faded into irrelevance with other gimmick legislators (Ventura, Schwarzenegger, etc.) as the beauty pageant winner turned Governor I'd Like to F**k.
The glimpses we've gotten inside her behavior on the trail and the reality TV level of turmoil (teenage daughter gets knocked up by K-fed in a hockey mask, uses the governor's office to keep him from his own kid, then he turns to porn) in her own family show that Sarah has to be hiding something at least on the level of a sex tape.
Prejean being exposed (literally!) for the hypocritical twit she is was glorious, but one day, we're going to hear something so fantastically just on a poetic level come out about Mrs. Youbetcha that it just might inspire the right to start, you know, vetting their pet icons before elevating them. Barack Obama is an epic letdown, but you could do worse than making your standard bearer a well-traveled, articulate*, good-looking minority with a world-class education who spent his childhood being exposed to cultures other than our own.
In response to this threat, the last two attempts to raise a defacto leader for the GOP have produced former beauty queens. Maybe step one to a GOP revival is to stop expecting strong, compelling policy to come from people who spent more than half their lives focused on shoes, makeup, and how they look in a two piece.
*Right wing commentators refer to Palin as articulate. I really need to see the moon dictionary they sell to conservatives.
Palin
I, along with Andrew Sullivan in his Daily Dish blog, have been waiting for a huge shoe to drop on Palin and so far it hasn't happened. Yet I think we have to realize that even if it does happen and is something the more liberal minded or "ethical" person may find reprehensible, the fact is it doesn't really matter much. It only matters what her fans think. Therefore I think it would need to be something that shows her faith to be obvious hypocrisy in order for her to be rejected by them. The rest of us need no convincing. As long as that doesn't happen, she is here to stay.
Alan...
Nate Silver (who you probably read already) has a superb series of articles regarding her likelihood of running in 2012:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/10-reasons-that-sarah-palin-could...
that said, i hope this is the last time i have to read a post about Palin at norip...we're pretty saturated with her as it is.
She's a pop star, no doubt
She's a pop star, no doubt about it. But I'll resist the temptation to extrapolate on her cultural impact and what it means. At least until she records her first album.