Sarah, Plain And Popular

Now, about the Bristol Palin thing...

What is it about Sarah Palin? I mean, I get it: she's famous, she says stuff, there's a lot of drama around figuring out if she'll run for President or not... but I'm still mystified: is she really that fascinating? Really?

So far, Sarah Palin has been a small town Mayor, a failed Vice Presidential candidate, and served about half a term as Governor of Alaska. She wrote a book of memoirs that sold fairly well but apparently wasn't all that interesting. Now she appears on Fox News programs as a paid "analyst," and she's hosting a travel and reailty show on The Learning Channel... and, well, that's about it.

Are you fascinated? I know I'm not.

This week, a simmering scandal of sorts burst into the open: Palin's daughter Bristol, a contestant on this year's Dancing With the Stars (!), survived the semifinals by getting more audience votes than Brandy, the R&B singer/actress. She will now face Jennifer Grey in the finals.

Yes, that's about the extent of the scandal.

Palin the Younger's ability to outlast her DWTS competition has been the subject of considerable speculation, apparently; I didn't notice it... but then, I didn't realize the Finals were coming, either. The thing is, apparently, that Bristol gets, each week, a vast outpouring of support from conservative fans of Sarah Palin, despite the fact that, week after week, Bristol is hardly a great ballroom dancer, and others do better than she does. Or something.

Let's jump back for a minute and just take note of Dancing With the Stars overall, because the fact that people are getting excised about a celebrity ballroom dance competition, and what it might mean for our politics, is itself a good indication of the madness surrounding Sarah Palin.

Dancing With The Stars is a strange bird, even assuming one likes competitive ballroom dancing. Various has-been stars (the show itself is becoming a defining moment of "D List" for everyone who goes on it), of limited dancing ability generally, go on and pair up with a trained dancer, doing a variety of ballroom styles in front of the most neurotic, inane judges (which, in these reality show days, is saying something), except that the elimination decisions are then handled by telephone vote, like American Idol.

In this, apparently, people expect rationality and fairness.

Dancing With the Stars has shown, repeatedly, that actual ability to dance isn't the voting criteria by phone; it's a popularity contest, and each year, the eventual winner is a combination of sob story, a reasonably modest level of improvement from start to finish, and usually being kind of good looking in the revealing costumes. Each outcome has been disputed, and mostly the results are forgettable and embarrassing. If you're not reading US Magazine, you may have managed to avoid how Marie Osmond has remade herself thanks to her appearance a while back. And she's just one, sad, example.

I don't know why Bristol Palin is a "star"; I don't know why Sarah Palin still gets a lot of attention. These are the realities of our celebrity obssessed culture in this country, where fame is often disconnected from anything real. Bristol Palin has joined the circle of hellishness that produces self help book writers, diet advice spokesmodels, people who endorse dubious health remedies and dime store toilet water. None of this matters; and most of it can be easily avoided. I don't care who wins Dancing With The Stars, nor do I care who votes for Bristol, or why. In a sane world, yes, it would be fairly obvious that Jennifer Grey, a trained dancer from a family of trained dancers, would probably win. But then, in a sane world, there wouldn't be a ballroom dance competition on television featuring has been "celebrities." Start there, and then tell me, again, why this matters.

The point about Sarah Palin - and I do have one - is that all this irrational obssessing over the various moves that keep her and her family in the public eye is quite beside the point. There are reasons, perfectly reasonable ones, why Sarah Palin will not be President of the United States. They are the reasonable points about her incoherence, her lack of policy knowledge, her inability to organize a large scale campaign, and, most crucially, her interest in being famous over doing public service. Palin has skillfully used the levers of fame to provide a career as a "serious politician" as long as the whole thing winds up in quotes. She's not actually serious, nor, really, an actual politician.

Actual politicians are beginning, I think, to figure this out. That's why the real bad news for Palin was probably this week's other voting scandal - that Lisa Murkowski managed to win back her Senate seat over Palin's chosen irritant, proving that Alaska voters, who know her best, have no interest in ratifying her supposed political power, and will go to great lengths to prove it. Combine that with Karl Rove's apparent decision to undermine Palin and her power at every turn, and you have the makings of Palin's sidelining by the people who need to do it - Republicans who know all too well that a Presidential candidacy of hers would be disastrous, and embarrassing.

It's true, still, that too much of Palin hating is still wildly personal and unnecessarily harsh; and much of the resentment of her does betray a kind of ugly class sense of superiority most people, especially her harshest critics, would do well to examine and avoid. One doesn't have to disapprove of all that and wind up, somehow, making Palin more viable. There's nothing wrong with the kind of middlebrow fame seeking she and Bristol represent. It's just not the recipe for political success. And, well, Thank God - yours, mine, or theirs - for that.

Comments

[jinb]

I'm thinking a lot of the very shrill criticism she receives has to be part misogyny...it's just too fever-pitched. Haven't seen anything like it since, oh yeah, Hillary.

[weboy]

Okay... but now what? We have to throw out every criticism of Palin because some are very anti-woman? I agree, she's subject to some pretty awful stuff, about being a woman, about being from the "wrong class", all of it. Those aren't the reasons she shouldn't be President. But she shouldn't be President, it seems to me, is still the bottom line.

[jinb]

One can agree she should not be president and still comment on the over-the-top quality to the criticism she's receiving. It's as though it's been agreed upon that she's the scariest republican out there, and I think that's the real danger here, ignoring the ones with actual institutionalized power.

But your comment brings up a contradiction I've seen more than once (and commented on to no response) in your posts. You seem to be saying there's no way she will become prez at the same time you fear its happening. Which is it?

[weboy]

I've thought a good bit about this, and no, to be clear, I don't fear she will become President; I am firmly convinced that she won't be, and I'm nearly as convinced - though not 100% - that Republicans will not be foolish enough to nominate her. At best, she'll be an interesting, possibly time consuming distraction for them.

At the same time, I suppose, I fear the energy spent paying attention to her - that, it seems to me, is the real timewaster, and I think you're right, at least somewhat, that it distracts from the other, worse Republicans with real power. But to me, it's more than that: it's that even spending spending time deciding which awful comments are worse than the others is itself a fool's errand. Some comments about her are, indeed, far worse than the others... but at some point... why are we paying attention to any of it? If it's just to highlight how awful it is to be antiwoman or classist... well, okay, but to what end? I don't mean to say any of it's okay... but you know, you work as hard as she does to be noticed, and some people will just be nuts about it. I don't know if you can control the reactions to her; I do think one can solve a lot of the issue around both her fame and the reaction to it by trying harder not to encourage her notoriety. You see what I mean?