Sarah Palin bounces a reality check.
Nick GillespieSarah From Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar, by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, PublicAffairs, 306 pages, $26.95
The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star, by Matthew Continetti, Sentinel, 256 pages, $25.95
Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin, HarperCollins, 413 pages, $28.99
No recent political figure has ignited the fury of the commentariat like former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Shortly after inducing a pulse in the zombified John McCain campaign with a rousing speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, the little-known politician was dismissed by Salon’s Cintra Wilson as a “power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty” whose conservative ideology made the feminist writer “feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.”
The editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Martin Peretz, sniffed that the candidate “was pretty like a cosmetics saleswoman at Macy’s” and that it was “good to see that the Palin family didn’t torture poor Bristol [unmarried, pregnant, and 17 at the time], at least in the open.” The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, a self-identified conservative who calls his Daily Dish “the most popular one-man political blog in the world,” persistently suggested that Trig Palin, the governor’s then-four-month-old baby with Down Syndrome, was likely not Sarah’s biological child; and demanded the full release of her obstetrical records, stopping just short of insisting he be allowed to examine the placenta. If Barack Obama is hounded by a small group of reality-challenged “birthers” who doubt the president was born in Hawaii, Palin has more than matched him with what might be called her “after-birthers.”
This is ugly stuff, the sort of warmed-over misogyny you expect from early ’70s Hollywood, not semi-serious writers and pundits. But Palin’s admirers have issues with modulation and mental balance too. Watching last year’s vice presidential debate, National Review’s Rich Lowry squealed that Palin’s smile “sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.” As happens so often with what passes for political discourse on the right and left, those of us who stand athwart the red-blue dichotomy find ourselves yelling, “Please make it stop!”
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