Sarah Palin Explained Mystique

There is nothing harder than trying to explain the appeal of Sarah Palin to those who just don’t get it. The governor is launching a bus tour of historic parts of America that commentators say is a promo for a presidential campaign. First stop: the annual Rolling Thunder motorbike ride in Washington DC. To some, the thought of a presidential candidate burning rubber with “scooter trash” is incredibly cool. To others, it is tacky and inappropriate. The response is conditioned by different cultural values. That’s why the Palin mystique is so indefinable and controversial. Voting for her isn’t a rational act: it’s a motion of the gut.
Most Europeans and liberals find the governor repellent. Maureen Dowd’s joke that “Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy” encapsulates their myriad complaints: Sarah Palin is stupid, mad, childish, ridiculous and bad for feminism. Critics say that she was plucked from obscurity and given the Vice Presidential nomination to steal women voters from Obama, that there is nothing “maverick” about her. To them, she is a Republican electoral gimmick that has gained a terrifying life of its own.
But for every liberal who hates Sarah Palin, there is a conservative who adores her. Although she ticks all the right boxes on policy, the relationship is empathetic rather than ideological. To anyone who has experienced the lash of snobbery, Palin is a soul mate. Few politicians have ever been so quickly and violently thrust into the spotlight, strip-searched for scandal, humiliated and tortured by the media. The governor has been called a liar, a thief and a simpleton. Serious papers like The Guardian are still speculating about the parenthood of her youngest child, like Palin was a toothless guest on Jerry Springer. Yet what is refreshing about the governor is the very ordinary nature of her problems – a teenage pregnancy and a rogue son-in-law. All the copy about her bumpkin foibles only emphasises how real she is, and how distant and vague Obama seems in comparison.
The media’s dissection of Sarah Palin has discredited her in some quarters, but in others created a modern martyr. She seems convolutely (and sometimes inarticulately) careful about what she is saying, and to whom, is because she is terrified of misquotation. She has made some dumb remarks. But nobody who rises from librarian to governor of Alaska is an idiot; at least, they can be intelligent without being intellectual. To some, it seems that those trifling matters about which she has been accused of ignorance (where is Russia, what is Africa?) are the sort of things that only concern liberal arts professors anyway. They are certainly far less significant than the price of gas or the contents of Matthew 24.

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