Sarah Palin, if you haven’t noticed, has been in the news a lot lately.
On account of her book being released this week, Sarah Palin has been sitting down with numerous nightly and morning news anchors to take part in softball interviews consisting of questions on topics ranging from the acrimony of the 2008 presidential campaign to Levi Johnston in Playgirl. And with all this new found exposure, I’ve been reminded of why I love Sarah Palin to begin with. I remember why each time I see her on television with her Kawasaki 704 glasses (retail price $450) talking about how she’s just a “regular gal,” smiling from ear to ear, I can do nothing else except do the same – I smile. I remember why every time I see Sean Hannity’s eyes light up with boundless love and infatuation, or hear Rush Limbaugh’s heart start to go pitter-patter each time she utters such timeless catch phrases like, “you betcha!” or talks warmly about her “traditional American values,” I couldn’t be happier. Or when Fox News anchors go out of their way to somehow wedge her name and Ronald Reagan into the same sentence, and then go even further out of their way to make sure you know they’re not actually comparing her to Reagan when they compare her to Ronald Reagan, I jump up and down like a seven year-old on Christmas morning. The fact is, Sarah Palin might be my all-time favorite conservative politician, and she has been since the second I found out she was going to accompany John McCain on that magical presidential ticket two years ago – ever since then, I’ve been deeply and madly in love with Sarah Palin.
A recent Newsweek cover asks the question, “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sarah?” and immediately I think, what problem? Exactly what problem are they seeing that I don’t? Sarah says she’s speaking out to help save this country – to restore it to the principles that it was founded on when guys like Washington, Jefferson and Adams were running things – and I couldn’t agree with her more. Just think of the good that could be done for this country if the mainstream liberal media would just leave ol’ Sarah alone and let her spread her message of – ummmmm -
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am a Democrat. To be honest, I’d consider myself a fairly liberal guy – not crazy liberal – but solidly liberal. So why, in light of that, would I be so full of Palin Power? The answer is simple: there would be no faster way to destroy the nut-bag, conservative, anti-government, paranoid, tea-party movement, than to let her talk and talk and talk until she can talk no more. The more she says, the more people realize she has approximately the same amount of depth as her 3-inch platform heels.
People like Rush Limbaugh like to say that the reason Democrats and the media like to make fun of Sarah Palin is because we are scared of her. They believe that Sarah Palin is potentially the strongest candidate to take on Barack Obama in 2012, or at the very least, the movement’s most qualified leader to spread the message of small government and what are referred to again as “traditional American values” (AKA the overt fear of all non-white people and culture). When the truth is, we make fun of her because she, quite simply, just isn’t real. She’s a shamelessly crafted caricature that appeals to the lowest common denominator of American instincts. Beyond her smile, hair-sprayed ’do, and rote recitations of Reagan platitudes, there’s absolutely nothing there. No message – not a single original or unique idea. Absolutely no vision for America.
A year or so ago, the media assaulted her for not knowing what the Bush Doctrine was, twelve months later, they’ve all but stopped caring. The hard questions are gone. The conservative women crying sexism are almost silent. Sarah Palin has gone from a central figure of political discourse to a novelty talk show act whose entertainment value to most falls squarely in between “Jaywalking” and “Stupid Human Tricks.”
And to say any Democrat is afraid of her is to miss the point. We love her. We hope that the 60% or so of the American electorate change their mind and start to like her. We hope that she runs for president and we hope she gets the nomination. The summer that the Palin For President campaign bus rolls through town will be the summer of endless entertainment. Suburban soccer moms will cheer as she rallies them against the evils of gay marriage and for the untapped wisdom of racial profiling – they’ll shed cheers of joy when she lectures the administration on the perils of overspending while forgetting George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D.
And I’ll cheer along with them. Because there is no surer way to deliver 4 more years of Democratic control of the White House than to trot her and her family out on stage every night. To give you a picture, a Sarah Palin campaign would look a little like what Dan and Rosanne Arnold would look like had either of them decided to run for president. An updated version of an 80′s sitcom that everyone is a little embarrassed to admit they ever watched.
But today, don’t you think that is the very definition of Must See TV?
You betcha!
