Sarah Palin’s brilliant publicist

The dominant theme to emerge from former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s recent blitz of television coverage seems to be that she doesn’t like being “handled.” Thematically, this coheres with the Going Rogue title of her new biography. It also plays to the disaffection inside the Republican Party, where many longtime Republicans are “going rogue” and ousting folks deemed to be insufficiently conservative. If this were the extent of Palin’s mythmaking, it would warrant a passing grade in the annals of political spin. Very clever stuff, all packaged neatly for lazy journalists to purvey.

Then something else dawned on me. Over at the Economist.com, a reporter reminds us that, when Oprah Winfrey asked her of her 2012 aspirations, Palin replied, “It’s nice not to be handled…to go where I want to go.” I didn’t watch the interview, so forgive my lateness to the topic, but was this a brilliant – and brilliantly cynical – answer or what? I mean, here we have Sarah Palin being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, the shepherdess of millions of you-go-girl feminists, basically reducing the 2008 election loss to “handlers” (implicitly men) taking away Palin’s prerogative to act and speak (as a woman). This one answer shows Palin – or perhaps her new handlers – to be a ninja master of political manipulation. Scary good.

But then I think about that dreadful early interview Sarah Palin had with Katie Couric, when she repeatedly swung and missed at softball questions from a softball journalist. She recovered somewhat in a later vice presidential debate with the feckless Joe Biden, but that’s mostly because today’s debate format – much negotiated over by the candidates – allow participants to evade questions with set-piece answers, and Palin has shown the ability to deliver a set piece; however, anything that demands extemporaneity and easy command of the issues, she’s as clueless as you-know-who.

I look at Sarah Palin, and I see a lot of George Bush…and that ain’t good. The last person the Republican Party needs right now in the White House is another evangelical lightweight who compensates for his lack of judgment and knowledge with an austere, misguided sense of providence and personal loyalty.