Chuck Hobbs
+ FollowPalin’s Emails Reveal Political Strengths, Not Personal Weaknesses
Few modern political figures are as polarizing as former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the presidential running mate, Fox News pundit and reality television star whose recent bus tour along the Eastern Seaboard has fueled speculation that she will enter the 2012 campaign for the Republican nomination.
The very mention of Palin is enough to draw serious derision from progressives, while many Republicans believe that she is capable of uniting fiscal and social conservatives in opposition to President Barack Obama.
While Palin’s recent faux pas about Paul Revere’s ride to “warn the British” has drawn more than a few laughs on the left, the right immediately went into spin mode, arguing that most colonists were, in fact, British subjects, or by dismissing the entire episode as trivial.
Palin is no stranger to gaffes; her well documented interview with CBS News’ Katie Couric in 2008, in which she could not list a single newspaper or magazine that she routinely read, cemented within the minds of many that the former beauty queen was long on Republican form and short on doctrinal substance.
It is perhaps this latter point that led journalists last week to Alaska to review the nearly 24,000 emails released from Palin’s tenure as governor. While some observers clearly were digging for something to discredit her, it appears at first glance they found the opposite.
In an article published nationally this past weekend, Associated Press reporter Becky Bohrer writes that the emails depict Palin as a fiscal conservative who earned bipartisan support in her efforts to confront major oil companies — she even praised then-candidate Barack Obama’s energy platform.
Palin, whose popularity rating in Alaska was in the mid 80’s at the time she joined the McCain ticket, exchanged emails with her staff describing her excitement about joining John McCain’s campaign while remaining apprehensive about national press scrutiny.
Such emails are in stark contrast to the arguably narcissistic figure we see today, one who fires off comments — some poorly conceived — via Twitter and Facebook. Still, while the public face of Palin is of one who shares her most intimate thoughts, there remains a concern that a number of emails were not released to protect her from scrutiny on myriad issues, including her role in the firing of a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with her sister-in-law.
The question, then, is who is the real Sarah Palin? Is she the thoughtful “people’s governor,” the one who personally wrote a glowing email recommendation for a staffer seeking to obtain an apartment in Juneau? Or is she the Palin who, instead of owning up to factual or policy mistakes, attacks the “liberal media” for its “blood libel” against her?
To understand this issue, consider that Palin went from an obscure local political figure to an overnight national phenomenon. Palin is correct in lamenting that her initial treatment in the mainstream media was harsher than that of other candidates, including President Obama.
When Obama gave the keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the then U.S. Senate candidate was hailed as a rising star. Almost from the moment he entered the national stage, Obama was viewed as a transformative political figure that could become the nation’s first black president.
Conversely, within weeks of Palin’s assent to Republican running mate, she withstood scrutiny that no male candidate would face, including questions about whether she could balance the role of being both a mother and vice-president; whether she was, in fact, the mother or grandmother of her youngest child, Trig, who suffers from Down’s syndrome; whether she could righteously advocate conservative social issues since her daughter Bristol was soon to be an unwed teen mother; and whether Bristol was the actual birth mother of Trig Palin.
Those pernicious assaults placed the affable Palin on the defensive and darkened her perceptions about reporters who delved into such salacious gossip.
This is not to say that Obama did not withstand his share of personal attacks. The difference is that whenever Obama was questioned for being a Muslim or terrorist sympathizer, the mainstream media, with the exception of some Fox News pundits, mostly dismissed such notions as foolishness from the political fringe.
What makes Palin an intriguing 2012 presidential candidate are her documented initial successes as governor and the simple fact that millions of conservatives love her. With few Americans having attended Ivy League schools or holding professional degrees, Palin represents them in a way that Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden or even arch-conservative Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota representative who is a lawyer by trade, never will.
To these voters, Palin’s mistakes about history or civics are less important than reinvigorating the economy or projecting American exceptionalism abroad. Palin’s errors can even be endearing — reminders that she’s not an expert, she’s one of us.
Accordingly, progressives who take her candidacy lightly do so at their own political peril.
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