Failing Upward: The Palin Reality Show

Posted by Robert Zimmer on 11.19.2009

Palin Charms, Repulses During Her ‘Going Rogue’ Media Blitzkrieg

'Going Rogue' could just as easily be the title of a TV reality show about a white-trash family who somehow found themselves running for president, because like shows such as 'Keeping Up with The Kardashians,' Palin's book merely offers a simulated version of reality – "truthiness," as Stephen Colbert would say. There is no need for E! (or Fox) to put Palin's show on the air, however, as it already runs on virtually every network. It is not that the Palins are inherently trashy; their private lives are refreshingly normal. The sleaze factor comes from Palin's shamelessness. She has leveraged her naked ambition, and ability to lie with enthusiasm, to whore herself and her family to the media in order to grasp the fleeting mantle of fame and money. The Palins have certainly endured beyond 15 minutes, and will likely endure beyond 15 months. But to what end?

Having discredited herself almost entirely during the 2008 presidential campaign with bizarre, incoherent television interviews displaying her utter lack of preparedness for the vice presidency, Palin cheerfully went on to quit her job as Alaska's governor, claiming she could better do her job by not doing it; she has engaged in a public Jon-and-Kate style spat with her daughter's 19-year-old ex-fiancé, who has now distinguished himself by posing nude in Playgirl magazine; and she endorsed a conservative tea-bagger candidate in the New York special congressional election who went on to lose to a Democrat, handing Republicans a loss in that district for the first time in over 100 years. The Associated Press fact-checked Palin's book and found that it is riddled with falsehoods, like most of Palin's public statements. Failure, clearly, has been no obstacle to Palin's success.

Just as Americans have a peculiar fetish for watching themselves be made fools of on television, America also has a penchant for allowing people to fail upward – just look at George W. Bush. This is true in part because if Americans personally like someone or his/her style, we sometimes overlook their professional incompetence. In some other cases, merely being an insubordinate rogue earns respect or a promotion, as known to anyone who's seen or lived the movie 'Office Space.' And sometimes we simply like people with chutzpah that speaks truth to power, or cuts through bullshit with aplomb. America's love-hate relationship with the Palins evidences all of these factors.

What is fascinating about Palin is how much she is like George W. Bush. They both profess to be born-again Christians, though she is more the archetypal Saturday sinner/Sunday saint than he. Like him, she is immensely self-confident and has a knack for plain, albeit garbled, speech that appeals to the anti-intellectual spirit that lingers in America. There is something charmingly imperfect about them both, that appeals to average Americans who themselves struggle gamely through imperfect lives. Her professional history, like his, is littered with failures gussied up by historical revisionism – lipstick retroactively applied to a pig, if you'll forgive the resurrection of the aphorism from the presidential campaign. They were both mediocre governors with a surface bipartisan appeal that instantly vanished upon entry onto the national stage. Their public friendliness is directly at odds with a hard-right ideological stance combined with the use of scorched-earth, divisive campaign tactics and rhetoric. Neither have much use for facts and figures, as evidenced by Bush's sneering dismissal of Al Gore's criticism of Bush's Medicare plan during a 2000 presidential debate ("He's got great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator.") For both, mastery of the issues is less desirable than what is achievable through personal charm and forcefulness of personality. For Palin, Bush should serve as a cautionary tale for what can befall under-qualified folks who live in an accountability-free bubble. Bush was simply unequal to the multi-pronged challenge of the presidency, which he won twice by dividing the country against itself. The results were catastrophic. Perhaps not coincidentally, former McCain (and Bush) campaign advisor Steve Schmidt opined that a 2012 Palin presidential candidacy would be "catastrophic."

This is of no import to Palin, who views the professional political consultant-class as a crowd of back-stabbing PR hacks who are more interested in protecting their career reputations than accomplishing anything of substance or import. She is quite right about this, and kudos to her for pointing it out. Her memoir deliciously skewers the Bush/Rove hacks who populated the McCain campaign apparatus, making fun of them for trying to control her diet and values message when they were a bunch of cynical, hard-drinking chain-smokers who couldn't come up with a positive message, much less stay on it. I have always wondered why these people continue to be recycled in losing campaign after losing campaign, and to be honest I liked Palin a little bit more for calling out Schmidt and other McCain operatives like Nicole Wallace as the political sea urchins they really are.

However, as evidenced by the rest of her book and her appearances thus far this week with Oprah, Barbara Walters, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh, nothing that has gone wrong so far in Palin's personal or professional life is her fault. She blames McCain's inept campaign staff for mishandling her and McCain both; she blames the campaign's ultimate loss to Obama on the collapse of the economy. The fact that she is at least partially correct on both of these issues does not change the fact that political consultants and mortgage-backed securities notwithstanding, she was an awful vice presidential candidate and let her state down after the campaign ended. She blames everyone but herself for the downward spiral that resulted in her mortifying resignation from the Alaska governorship, and has immersed herself in a very public mud-wrestling contest with a Playboy centerfold model who impregnated her daughter out of wedlock and has otherwise made himself famous for calling Palin a fraud of a mother and a politician. (Levi Johnston, at least, has the courage of his convictions and seems to have perfect clarity about whoring himself, unlike his former mother-in-law-to-be.) She is particularly fond of criticizing the liberal media elite, but has no problem accepting interviews with them to promote her book. She has outspokenly criticized political correctness, for example blaming it for the recent Fort Hood shootings, but insists on a double standard when it comes to her, for example deeming the Newsweek cover photo of her in a short skirt as "sexist." After slamming President Obama for "dithering" on foreign policy matters, in her book she invites Obama's secretary of state for a coffee date not to complain of the dithering, but to express a sister's sympathy for unfair media coverage. (A bewildered Clinton seemed to accept Palin's offer during a TV interview she gave from Singapore.)

A recent poll shows that anywhere between 60-70% of Americans believe Palin is not qualified to be president (compare the mirror figure for Hillary Clinton). Will this stop Palin's presidential ambitions? Of course not. 1,500 people lined up for her book-signing at a Michigan mall on November 18. (Presumably these people are among the unemployed.) This book tour will give Sarah Palin the political bug again, assuming she ever lost it. This is because the Palin movement is all about her, and reinforcing the bubble in which she lives. There is nothing better than an adoring crowd to make you forget about reality and create your own, especially with the help of cameras. This might be a useful skill in a time of peace and prosperity. But when our country grapples with the multiple threats of two wars, 10% unemployment, trillion-dollar deficits, 47 million without health insurance, and global warming, the times call for someone who can accept responsibility for what goes wrong instead of deflecting blame on others, while settling petty scores and painting oneself in the most flattering light possible. Palin's coyness about her political ambitions are irrelevant. It is a serious, dark time for America; Palin's unserious, frivolous nature makes her a perfect reality TV star. She is already that. What she is not is a viable presidential candidate, nor a credible political figure. Like 'The Real Housewives of Orange County,' the Palin reality show will jump the shark – if it hasn't already – and, one hopes, it will be canceled long before 2012.