The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

  Particularly credulous was Janet Malcolm, writing in the New York Review of Books:

  Palin, who is both narrator and star of the series, performs arduous and sometimes even dangerous feats of outdoorsmanship to demonstrate the conservative virtue of self-reliance. In the episode in which she struggles for a foothold on a vertiginously steep glacier at the foot of Mt. McKinley in eerily beautiful and vast Denali National Park, she knows that no government handout is going to help her. She isn’t even sure God will help her, though she cries out to Him and His Son, “Oh God. Help me, Lord!” … She is tied by a rope to a guide above her and her husband below, but she can’t seem to make progress on the rock. The guide gives her instructions, but she can’t follow them. “I don’t know what I’m going to hold on to here.… What about my legs? Where do I put ’em?”

  Forty-five minutes later (as a subtitle tells us) she is still clinging to the rock, helpless to take the next step up. “That’s so much worse than I ever thought it would be,” she groans. Finally, through a great effort of will, she manages to heave herself up to the pinnacle. “I don’t think that I have been that scared or that challenged in a long time,” she says, and we believe her. The episode has a realism not often seen in reality TV [emphasis added].

  “We” believe her? Maybe not quite all of us. Longtime Alaskan and former rock climber Phil Munger wrote on his Progressive Alaska blog, “The rock climbing episode was simply awful.… Her whining and self pitying was horrid.”

  Author, photographer, and guide Stewart Green, who has written nineteen books about rock climbing, reviewed the “sorry episode” for About.com. He wrote, “If there are three things that climbers can agree about, they are these: We don’t like made-up climbs to make someone look good; we don’t like anyone faking it; and we don’t like having BS tossed around about our beloved sport.”

  Sarah, he wrote, “groaned and cackled and whined with a cat-claws-on-blackboard-voice all the way up the route. Her stiff boots were not rock climbing shoes.… Her pants were way too tight and restricted her leg movement.… Another huge problem with the episode was that Sarah Palin, husband Todd, as well as the climbing guide were not wearing climbing helmets. Tsk tsk tsk. Very bad form and a very bad idea … I seriously doubt that the ‘Bumpit’ that Sarah wears while climbing would protect her noggin from falling boulders.”

  Thus, contrary to what the gullible Malcolm wrote, most of us were not taken in by Sarah’s histrionics. Malcolm also fell for a more disturbing ploy that involved Trig and his future as a Down syndrome child.

  “There is another passage in Sarah Palin’s Alaska that stands out … for its emotional truth,” she wrote. “It takes place in a native village called Eluk, where Todd Palin’s Eskimo cousin Ina has set up a summer ‘fish camp.’ … In Ina’s kitchen, Sarah and Ina cut up fish and have an intimate women’s talk”—as if women ever have “intimate” talks when surrounded by cameras, boom mikes, slithering cables, and milling television technicians.

  Ina has a Down syndrome twelve-year-old. After talking to her, Sarah confides to producer Mark Burnett’s cameras and a television audience of millions, “Getting to meet our little cousin there … kind of gives me a look at ten years from now.” Malcolm writes that Sarah “is devastated by the look into the future.… We see her breaking down and beginning to cry, and we cry with her. At this moment … she is a woman one pities and sympathizes with and, yes, even admires.”

  I can only speak for myself and not for “one,” but I don’t think I’m alone in being revolted by the cynicism of choosing to parade severely disabled children in front of television cameras for monetary and political gain.

  The eight-episode series was stuffed to the gills with hokum and tripe. In the New Yorker, Nancy Franklin wrote, “Nearly every … moment comes across as calculated … and we find out nothing about Alaska that we didn’t learn in elementary school. I know that some Americans think Palin is stupid, but I never realized that she thinks we’re stupid.”

  A reviewer in the English Telegraph wrote, “Various people called things like Truck and Trog, Troop or Trib or Troll wander about, walk-on players in this risible woman’s delusional pitch for power. Alaska looked very fetching though. It was a bit like being on a spectacular holiday marred only by the worst travelling companion imaginable.”

  The Guardian observed that Sarah, “freed from her political brief of standing on the far-right talking rubbish, is just this incredible force for boredom. It’s like a magic trick; she can take an observation that is already inherently boring, then make it 10 times more boring with unenlightening statistics, a Newspeak vocabulary and this ghastly cheerleader delivery.… The truth is, there’s nothing to see but a tedious, narrow-minded, pedantic, uncurious person. And some snow.”

  Even before the show aired, Republican strategist Karl Rove expressed doubt about the wisdom of a prospective presidential candidate displaying herself on “reality” television. “There are high standards that the American people have for [the presidency],” he said, “and they require a certain level of gravitas. People want to look at the candidate and say, ‘That candidate is doing things that gives me confidence that they are up to the most demanding job in the world.’ ”

  I have no reservations about saying that in the history of American politics, no candidate for national office has ever displayed less gravitas (that is, high seriousness, substance, a dignified demeanor) than Sarah Palin.

  Over the course of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, she became such a caricature of herself—in one episode cavorting, giggling, and pouting with the queen of reality television’s housewives, Kate Gosselin—that by the time it was over she’d all but removed herself from the 2012 political equation. She earned millions of dollars, but she paid a fatally high price in credibility for every dollar.

  THEN CAME TUCSON. On the morning of Saturday, January 8, 2011, a gunman shot and killed six people and wounded thirteen others in a supermarket parking lot as Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords held an outdoor meeting with voters. The prime target was Giffords, who was shot point-blank in the head.

  Within hours, news reports revealed that Giffords’ congressional district was among twenty that Sarah’s political action committee had targeted with gunsight crosshairs early in 2010. “Let’s take back the 20, together! Join me today,” Sarah wrote below a map showing the districts of twenty House democrats she wanted targeted for special attention in the 2010 elections.

  As early as March 2010, Giffords had told people that the use of crosshairs made her uneasy. “We’re on Sarah Palin’s ‘targeted’ list, but the thing is that the way she has it depicted, we’re in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” she told an interviewer. “When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there are consequences to that action.”

  Her observation left Sarah unfazed. More than two months after Giffords won reelection, the map with the crosshairs remained up on the SarahPAC website.

  Thus, when a demented twenty-two-year-old Tucson resident named Jared Lee Loughner attempted to assassinate Representative Giffords with a shot to the head and opened fire on others in the crowd, people made the obvious connection to Sarah’s crosshairs map and to her militant rhetoric (“Don’t retreat, reload!”), which had been stirring the passions of millions of gun-toting right-wingers since 2008.

  Sarah was outraged that anyone would think she should bear any responsibility for Loughner’s actions. She called Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, on Sunday, January 9, the day after the shootings. In itself, this was unusual. Months would go by without Ailes speaking to Sarah directly. He had hired her and unleashed her and left her largely on her own ever since, knowing that whatever trajectory her broadcasting career followed—whether she soared back into contention for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 or crashed and burned—she’d produce ratings that translated into revenue. Contrary to public perception, Ailes was far more concerned about Fox News’s bottom line than about
the future of the Republican party.

  Sarah demanded that Ailes immediately clear airtime on Fox so she could go live with a national broadcast disclaiming any responsibility for the shootings.

  He refused. Ailes could see that already the story was turning, as it became evident that Loughner was a lone lunatic, not affiliated with the Tea Party or with any right-wing militia, and that his obsession was with Representative Giffords, not with Sarah Palin.

  Ailes advised Sarah to hold her peace. It would do her no good to insert herself into a tragic tale that had nothing to do with her. He said he would not clear airtime on Fox, nor would he permit her to use the equipment in the home studio Fox News had built for her so she could record a statement about the shootings.

  By Monday, Ailes’s prudence seemed justified, as mainstream media opinion coalesced around the view that it was unfair to blame Sarah for a deranged gunman who’d never shown the slightest sign of even knowing who she was.

  But Sarah couldn’t leave well enough alone. On Tuesday, January 11, the day before President Obama flew to Tucson to visit Giffords in the hospital and to speak at the memorial service for the victims, Ailes, in his office at Fox News headquarters in New York, received an unsettling report.

  A Fox executive told him that Sarah was renewing her demand for airtime. She wanted to broadcast a statement the next day. She was determined to speak out. She felt that she, too, was a victim of the shootings.

  Ailes was unequivocal. He would not let her appear on Fox—especially not on the day of the memorial service!—in an attempt to make the story about her. He was stunned by her tastelessness and lack of judgment.

  Sarah could not accept no for an answer. Denied access to Fox News, and even denied the right to use her Fox studio, Sarah read and recorded a ghost-written statement anyway, using her personal video equipment.

  On Wednesday, January 12, the day of the memorial service, with President Obama en route to Tucson, Sarah went public with her response to the Tucson tragedy, releasing a video on Vimeo and posting her statement on her Facebook page. Not even Roger Ailes was going to muzzle this pit bull.

  Sarah’s post-Tucson plunge into the pool of Narcissus proved to be, by several light years, the worst political blunder she’d ever made.

  After some boilerplate expressions of sorrow for those who’d been killed or wounded in the shootings, Sarah stressed that there was one victim as yet unnoticed: herself. She condemned “the irresponsible statements from people attempting to apportion blame for this terrible event” (i.e., anyone who said her crosshairs targets could be an incitement to violence).

  She said, “Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts.”

  Then she added, “Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible [emphasis added].”

  What observers found reprehensible was Sarah’s use of the term blood libel. Throughout history, the phrase has referred to the false accusation that Jews murdered Christian babies so as to use their blood in religious rituals.

  Sarah, whose grip on historical fact is less than secure, clearly hadn’t the slightest idea of the term’s origins. Quite likely, neither did whoever wrote the speech. Conservative law professor Glenn Reynolds had invoked it in a January 10 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, and there’s no reason to think that anyone in the Palin camp knew that “blood libel” was anything more than a handy new phrase that Reynolds himself had coined.

  Denunciation of Sarah’s attempt to equate her post-Tucson plight with the ugliest effects of anti-Semitism through the ages was quick and widespread. Jack Cafferty’s response on CNN was typical: “Sarah Palin may have done herself in. The tragedy in Tucson, Arizona, presented an opportunity for Palin to reach beyond her base and strike a note of unity. It was her chance to say something that showed she was capable of true leadership.…

  “Before Palin opened her mouth, there was a good deal of sympathy for her. Many believed it was wrong to drag her into the debate. But then she spoke. And it was just awful. Defiant and inflammatory, Palin invoked the historically painful term ‘blood libel’ in attacking the media.”

  In the days that followed, Sarah received the sort of history lesson she’d just as soon have skipped. Reaction was so strong and so unanimously adverse that she did something she’d never done before: she shut up.

  THREE MONTHS PASSED. Her uncustomary silence eventually caused mainstream media to adopt a new meme: Sarah was finished. She was done.

  In Newsweek, Howard Kurtz asked rhetorically, “Is Sarah Palin Over?” His answer was such an emphatic yes that a couple of days later he was doing a live Internet chat about “the end of the Sarah Palin phenomenon.” Even neoconservative Bill Kristol, who had first legitimized her with establishment right-wingers, began to distance himself. “I thought she had a real chance to take the lead on a few policy issues, do a little more in terms of framing the policy agenda. I don’t think she’s done that,” Kristol said.

  But as those who’d come to understand her character suspected, Sarah wasn’t retreating, she was reloading. She was never going to just fade away. Her silence in the wake of the “blood libel” fuss was strategic, as she waited for the impact of the Tucson shootings and her disastrous response to fade.

  In May, she bought a $1.7 million house in Arizona, in order to be more centrally located in anticipation of the 2012 Republican primaries. She also announced her “One Nation” bus tour, which she described as “part of our new campaign to educate and energize Americans about our nation’s founding principles, in order to promote the Fundamental Restoration of America.”

  Unlike on her Going Rogue book tour in 2009, Sarah didn’t bring Trig this time. He had turned three, and was no longer quite so easy to wave around in front of adoring throngs as if he were a loaf of heaven-sent manna bread.

  In addition, more and tougher questions about Trig’s birth were being asked on blogs, and, shielded by anonymity, more Wasilla residents were coming forward with statements that contradicted Sarah’s version of events. One persistent allegation was that Sarah had had a tubal ligation after Piper was born and could not ever have become pregnant again.

  Sarah may have felt it was time to distance herself from Trig. So she brought Piper on the first leg of her bus tour. Even that turned sour, however, as in appearance after appearance the ten-year-old displayed a petulance that made her misery clear to all who saw it.

  Sarah kicked off her “campaign to educate and energize Americans about our nation’s founding principles” on the back of a Harley at a Memorial Day motorcycle rally in Washington, D.C.

  In New York, she ate bad pizza in Times Square with Donald Trump, whose personal plan for the “Fundamental Restoration of America” involves high-rise hotels, condos, and gambling casinos named after himself in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

  Then it was on to Boston, where in response to a question about who Paul Revere was, Sarah said he was “he who warned, uh, the … the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and, um, by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that, uh, we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free … and we were gonna be armed.”

  As I wrote on my blog that night:

  Were Sarah’s version correct, the U.S. might still be a British colony today. We certainly wouldn’t have won the Revolutionary War.

  First of all, Sarah: Revere wasn’t warning “the British” of anything. He was warning the rebels about the British army’s nighttime advance.

  Second, the whole point of Revere’s ride from Boston to Lexington (his destination was Concord, but he didn’t make it) was that it wa
s secret. Because the Middlesex County countryside was rife with British supporters, Revere virtually whispered his warnings that the King’s forces were crossing the Charles River on the night of April 18–19, 1775, to launch an attack upon the American rebels.

  Ringing bells and sending warning shots while on a clandestine mission? To warn the British that they “weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms”? Was this the version of American history that Sarah learned in Wasilla public schools, and as the daughter of her schoolteacher/father Chuck Heath?

  From Boston, Sarah traveled to New Hampshire, where she upstaged Mitt Romney on the day he formally announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination. Then she flew home to Arizona, having once again displayed her ability to wrap the mainstream media around her finger.

  In the Los Angeles Times, James Rainey expressed the new conventional wisdom, writing that he found Sarah “fascinating” and quoting in support a Politico editor who called her “arguably the most electrifying presence in American politics.”

  Suddenly, it was the summer of 2008 all over again. Justifying the frenzied, mile-by-mile coverage of what was essentially a six-day non-event orchestrated by a noncandidate for public office, Rainey wrote, “At some point writers, editors and producers have to give their audiences a dose of what they are interested in.”

  The Politico editor Charles Mahtesian was more candid. “There’s a mutual codependency in the relationship,” he said. “Neither side can live without the other.”

  SO THAT’S WHAT it has come down to as America prepares for the 2012 presidential campaign: our mainstream media reduced to a level of helpless codependency, in which its willing suspension of disbelief in regard to Sarah requires that it not look at or listen to her too closely, for fear that it might discover something it can’t ignore.