The not-so-irrelevant Sarah Palin
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Friday, November 20, 2009


ARTICLE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch  
Publication Date: November 19, 2009

Sarah Palin doesn't matter. She's a has-been. Everyone knows it.

She lost the election. She quit her job as Alaska's governor. And now she has written an autobiography that, the book critics say, no one will really read.

It's true that "Going Rogue: An American Life" was ranked number one on Amazon.com for weeks before its release. When it finally debuted on Tuesday, the book dominated headlines from coast to coast, and its first print run of 1.5 million copies sold out.

But pay no attention to that. Palin probably did not write her book anyway. Just ask liberal blogger Ana Marie Cox, who reviewed Palin's book for the Washington Post. Sure, Cox admits that she only skimmed the last 150 pages of the 432-page tome before panning it. "But if I didn't read it all," Cox says, "neither can Sarah Palin claim to have completely written it."

Even if she did write it, America's journalistic establishment assures us, the memoirs of a figure as inconsequential as Palin have no weight anyway. Perhaps that's why the Associated Press dispatched 11 reporters to fact-check its claims prior to its release. The AP's crack team of investigative journalists nailed Palin for such whoppers as her claim to have altruistic reasons for running for office when, the AP reports, "Palin fits the conventional mold" of politicians "wanting high office for the power and prestige of it."

If you're wondering how the AP reporters can claim to know the inner workings of Palin's mind well enough to dismiss her own description of her motives as a factual inaccuracy, well, you must be one of those backwoods rubes who shares Palin's suspicion of a liberal bias in the mainstream media. Any fair-minded observer can see that no such bias exists.

Sure, Palin endured far more media criticism and scrutiny during her two months as a vice-presidential candidate than Barack Obama did in the entire course of his two-year presidential campaign. Her every word and association, private relationship and public appearance, was dissected, deconstructed and parodied by the same reporters and commentators who dismissed similar discussion of Obama's past words and associations as distractions.

But everyone knew that Palin was little more than an attractive, charismatic politician with a thin resume and a knack for delivering rousing speeches to advance a right-wing agenda. Obama was something utterly different: an attractive, charismatic politician with a thin resume and a knack for delivering rousing speeches to advance a left-wing agenda.

And Palin's good looks, unlike Obama's, were obvious evidence of her shallowness and lack of intelligence. So said leading "progressive" feminists as they engaged in retrograde rants about her hair and makeup, what she wore and how she waved and the sex life of her teenage daughter. Palin deserved such ridicule for committing the unpardonable sin: She embodied the modern feminist ideal of personal and professional success while rejecting modern feminist dogma on abortion. Most appalling of all, Palin publicly celebrated her own decision to choose life when faced with an unplanned pregnancy and a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome.

To a certain segment of America, everything Palin is and does is an affront. And everything her critics do to neutralize her influence only amplifies it. How many other retired governors could post a criticism of death panels in the health care bill on their Facebook pages and elicit a direct response from the president himself during a nationally televised speech? How many unsuccessful vice-presidential candidates can command a $1.25 million advance for a campaign memoir and spawn an entire cottage industry of critical books responding to theirs? How many politicians have enough popular support to spark a spontaneous boycott of a leading late-night comic for insulting their children?

America's media elites may consider Sarah Palin inconsequential and irrelevant, but they sure do spend a lot of time talking about her. It makes one wonder if somewhere, underneath all that confidence and condescension, her critics know that Palin and the values she represents matter after all.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.