Sarah Palin was once a contender: a no-nonsense mom and a serious politician. Now she’s just a greedy celebrity with a grasping family, says Alexander Chancellor
Sarah Palin’s ignorance and inarticulacy are so constantly on display that she can’t just be simulating them to strengthen her popular appeal. They are also attributes in which she takes pride. As Jacob Weisberg writes in the introduction to his new anthology, Palinisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin: ‘Palin’s exuberant incoherence testifies to an unusually wide gulf between confidence and ability. She is proud of what she doesn’t know and contemptuous of those “experts” and “elitists” who are too knowledgeable to be trusted.’
It is this unquenchable self-confidence that is so striking about Palin. When she was widely ridiculed for calling on Muslims to ‘refudiate’ the building of a mosque at Ground Zero in New York, she said that she was only being like William Shakespeare who also had a habit of making up new words. (Surprising, perhaps, that she should risk identifying herself with such an egghead as the bard of Stratford-on-Avon.)
Weisberg, who used to collect and publish ‘Bushisms’ during the last presidency, says that these often hinged on a single grammatical or factual error, whereas ‘Palinisms’ consisted of ‘a unitary stream of patriotic, populist blather’. Palin is completely unfazed by the fact that her pronouncements are not merely devoid of substance but are so syntactically convoluted that they frequently defy comprehension.
One of Weisberg’s examples is a statement she made during the 2008 presidential campaign shortly after John McCain had made the ridiculous claim that she ‘knows more about energy than probably anybody else in America’. ‘Oil and coal?’ said Palin. ‘Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not… So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here.’ Decipher that, if you will.
It’s strange that anyone capable of such sentences should be admired for ‘straight-talking’, but thus it is with Palin. Even if they can’t understand what she is saying, her listeners assume that she is glorifying God, the nation, and the oil industry, and reviling the political establishment. And that, in fact, is what she usually is doing. She believes that God-fearing ‘real Americans’, who may know little of the world, are still wiser and more principled than any Washington ‘expert’; and millions of Americans are of the same view.
That’s why McCain’s impulsive choice of Palin as his running mate suddenly energised his campaign and looked for a moment as if it might propel him into the White House. But then things started to go wrong. There were Palin’s disastrous television interviews, in which her manifest ignorance of everything foreign was enough to make even some of her supporters wonder if she was yet ready for the Oval Office. But before that there was the drama involving her daughter Bristol. It was announced on the opening day of the 2008 Republican National Convention that Bristol, a 17-year-old Alaska high school student, was pregnant by fellow student Levi Johnston, 18. At the same time, it was announced that they were going to get married and planned to bring up their child together.
Because Sarah Palin is a family values, pro-life, no-sex-before-marriage kind of person, there were suspicions that Bristol had been dragooned into matrimony by her mother for political expediency. She denied it, of course, and appeared with Levi on the Convention platform to demonstrate their togetherness to the ecstatic delegates. The crisis seemed to have been overcome. Without having sacrificed any of her principles, Sarah was looking broadminded and compassionate, and Bristol eager to face up to her responsibilities as a mother. But soon after the election was lost and the baby born, the engagement was called off and Bristol sued Levi for child support and custody of their little son Tripp.
It’s hard to keep up with the twists and turns of the Bristol-Levi relationship, but it has become increasingly apparent that neither makes any move without considering how it might affect their celebrity status and its potential for making them money. Levi, the hockey-playing high school dropout, has been the more shameless of the two. He has been ready to do anything to keep himself in the public eye and help to realise his now fading dream of starring in a television reality show. Being a handsome young hulk, he even agreed to pose naked for Playgirl magazine until he was persuaded by someone or other to show a modicum of modesty. And he has milked his closeness to the Palin family for all it is worth, most notably in an interview last year with Vanity Fair, in which he ruthlessly trashed his sometime prospective mother-in-law. He said Sarah Palin was always fighting with her husband Todd, never did any cooking for her family, and didn’t even know how to fire a gun. He has since apologised for saying things that were ‘not completely true’ and asked the Palins to forgive him for his ‘youthful indiscretion’. They are unlikely to oblige.
Recently Bristol and Levi revealed to one celebrity magazine that they had become re-engaged, only to tell another such magazine soon afterwards that their second engagement was also off, apparently because Levi had confessed to possibly fathering another girl’s child. One would like to think this would finally draw a line under the Bristol-Levi saga and that we need never hear anything of either of them again. But that is unlikely, if only because Bristol is still pursuing her solo career as a celebrity. As America’s most famous teenage mother, she is employed by Candie’s, a fashion house that designs sexy clothes for young girls (modelled by Britney Spears), to front a campaign against teenage pregnancy. ‘I just want to go out there and promote abstinence and say this is the safest choice,’ she says. She has also acted in a television drama about teenage mothers, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and she is available to speak about her experiences for fees of $15,000 or more. That’s not a bad payoff for getting pregnant at school.
One might expect Sarah Palin, still contemplating a 2012 presidential bid, to strive to protect her reputation from contamination by her eldest daughter. But their aspirations don’t seem so very different. Sarah resigned from the governorship of Alaska last year to write — or, rather, have ghosted — a memoir, Going Rogue, which got her a reported $7 million dollar advance from HarperCollins and sold spectacularly well. Not content with that, she has another book coming out in November, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, and, starting on 14 November, an eight-part television reality series on the Discovery channel, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, in one episode of which she is to co-star with another woman famous only for giving birth. The woman is Kate Gosselin, a glamorous mother of sextuplets and twins, who had her own successful reality show about raising these eight children. They are all to go camping with Sarah in Alaska.
So the no-nonsense ‘hockey mom’ and crusader for ordinary hard-working Americans has become a greedy celebrity who charges up to £100,000 for a single speech. How can anyone still take her seriously?
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