The Emperor's New Clothes

Shortly after the US elections drew to a close and the euphoria of seeing the first ever Black man elected to the presidency died down, I was met with a sense of sadness.  I was beginning to realize that an ongoing spectacle (actually more of a side show) that had kept me thoroughly entertained for the previous 9 weeks had come to an end.  That sideshow was none other than Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.  The only thing more enthralling than her endless litany of gaffes and foul-ups, was the mental gymnastics Palin’s sympathizers and apologists engaged in to try to rationalize, minimize and obscure her obvious incompetence.

I could just as easily have written about Palin’s hypocrisy, her arrogance, her corruption, or her utter disregard for the truth, a trait she shares with the owner of the coattails upon which she freeloaded into the national spotlight.  No, not Neiman Marcus… Hillary Clinton.  Instead I’ve chosen to focus on her most glaring defect - her sheer idiocy and the triangulations of those who tried so hard to deny it.

Most rational observers began to suspect something was up when they saw her September 11^th, 2008 interview with ABC news anchor Charlie Gibson, where she famously was unable to state her opinion on the Bush doctrine because she had no clue what it was.  The problem for me wasn’t that she didn’t know what the doctrine was - a lot of smart people didn’t at the time – but that she felt she had to disguise the fact she didn’t know.  To me these were the actions of an impostor.  Palin, who is sometimes affectionately referred to as Caribou Barbie, sat down for her second major interview with CBS’s Katie Couric nearly three weeks later and it was here that the carefully crafted façade started to unravel.  First, Ms. Barbie reiterated her preposterous belief that her state's proximity to Russia somehow gave her foreign policy credentials, stressing that one could actually see Russia from parts of Alaska.  She then proceeded to give rambling, incoherent responses to routine economic and national security questions.  Like a college student who hadn’t bothered to show up to class until the final exam, Sarah Mascara attempted unsuccessfully to bullshit her way out of revealing the true extend of her ignorance.  As one conservative pundit put it, “if bullshit were currency, Palin could have bankrolled the bailout herself.”

Almost instantaneously half the members of blogosphere joined a growing chorus of voices calling for the mainstream media to acknowledge what even many on the right had tacitly conceded.  Sarah Palin was a know-nothing.  The interviews had vindicated beliefs that they had held all along, that she was essentially a Maybelline-drenched version of George Bush on steroids; that she hadn’t been properly vetted; and that her talents were limited to reading speeches verbatim from a teleprompter - speeches even her own handlers admitted she had no hand in writing.  But the mainstream news reporters, ever weary of the dreaded liberal media label, capitulated to the right-wing ideologues for whom Palin had become a messiah.  They made every excuse for Palin’s shortcomings.  Some accused their own colleagues of asking gotcha questions, while others opined that the campaign had destroyed her confidence by keeping her from the media for so long (poor Sarah!).  Most, however, simply pretended not to notice.  In spite of this, a clear picture was forming in the minds of independents and moderate conservatives.

The response of the McCain camp was to shield her from anyone who could potentially ask her a question.  No interviews.  No press conferences.  No town halls.  CNN’s Campbell Brown proclaimed that the McCain camp was being sexist by locking her away from the public.  “Just let Sarah be Sarah” became the rallying cry of the apologists.  While it’s clear that John McCain is quite sexist as demonstrated by his voting record and his notorious off-the-record remarks, I’m pretty sure that’s not the reason they hid Palin from the public.  In fact, I’m almost positive it’s because whenever she got within ten feet of a microphone, she said stuff like this.  Unfortunately for the apologists, the firewall broke down just before the election, when two French-Canadian Radio hosts known as The Masked Avengers landed a phone conversation with the governor by posing as French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. 

The interview took on a professional tone at first, but then the pranksters progressively ramped up the level of absurdity, at one point going so far as to discuss explicitly how good a performer the French first lady was in bed.  When the duo eventually ran out of jokes some seven minutes into the call, they were forced to admit over the phone that the whole thing was a prank.  In response, the apologists dutifully echoed the campaign's talking point that Palin had now joined the ranks of heads of state such as the real Sarkozy and former French president Jacques Chirac, both of whom had also fallen victim to the Masked Avengers.  But what they failed to point out was that, of the dozens of politicians and entertainers targeted by the pair over the years, only two never caught on and had to be told about the prank.  Sarah Palin and Britney Spears.  In subsequent interviews, the Avengers seemed to suggest that this was not a coincidence.

Of all the defenses put forward on Bible Spice’s behalf, my personal favourite comes from the liberal journalist Joe Queenan, who said on Bill Maher just after the election that he thinks the detractors are scared of Palin and what she represents.  As laughable as it is, this point is not without merit.  I think we should all be terrified of Palin and what she represents - terrified for the same reason that we would be terrified if we saw an unsupervised toddler roaming a busy street armed with an automatic weapon.  This is the image that gets conjured up when I think of Palin being entrusted with the nuclear codes.

And what Palin represents is the no-longer-negligible possibility that someone as breathtakingly dumb as her could one day be the leader of the free world.

Luckily that never materialized and as an added bonus it turned out that my despair at what I thought would be the end of the Palin circus was premature.  Some of her best jewels came to us after the election was over.  It was reported by Fox News that some in the McCain camp were claiming that Palin’s inanity was even worse than previously suspected.  Allegedly, she lacked even an elementary understanding of basic civics and at one point asked one of her handlers to clarify whether Africa was a country or a continent.  Whether or not these allegations are true is beside the point.  That they were granted even a modicum of credibility meant that Ditsy Chick’s reputation had been severely tarnished by her campaign performance, and rightfully so.

So why, when presented with such compelling evidence, were so many otherwise reasonable people so reluctant to admit that Palin was just not very smart?  Obviously for many on the right, they were blinded by ideology the same way they had been for Bush.  A lot of people on the left seemed to want to protect Palin, and a lot of liberal women in particular, out of a kind of solidarity, found it difficult to watch another woman being torn apart by the male-dominated media.  One theory put forward by several commentators is that Palin’s male admirers, although generally averse to government stimulus packages, secretly fantasized about her providing a stimulus to their own packages.  And really, what better way to inject liquidity into the flaccid market that was McCain’s formerly geriatric base than by tacking a milf onto the ticket?  Some have even speculated that this is what prompted John McCain to pick her as his running mate after having met her only once for a couple of hours.  Could it be that the 72-year-old adulterer was once again smitten by a much younger woman?

For their part the mainstream media seemed to be bogged down in a culture where telling-it-like-it-is had become taboo.  Nobody wanted to go out on a limb and risk sounding uncouth.  It was like that children’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes.  Only in this version, the clothes have been replaced with a perceived intellect and preparedness.  So now that it’s all over, the remaining apologists within the media need to stop playing along and proclaim once and for all that for the entire 2008 campaign, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been butt naked!

AlexsJenkins