I watched the clip of Sarah Palin in Iowa, and I sloped off to the internets to read everything I could to more fully enjoy wallowing in her embarrassment.
One of the first columns I read was Kathleen Parker's "I told you so" column which was oddly compassionate about Sarah Palin. It concluded thusly:
In the end, the story of Palin’s rise and fall is a tragedy. And the author wasn’t the media as accused but the Grand Old Party itself. Like worshipers of false gods throughout human history, Republicans handpicked the fair maiden Sarah and placed her on the altar of political expedience.That wasn't what I was looking for in the aftermath of the Iowa speech. I wanted some gore to season my schadenfreude. And it was all over; I ate and ate. There was plenty. Jon Stewart, Huffpo, even Hannity.
But a curious thing happened. I got indigestion, and I found myself going back to the Parker column.
And the oddest thing is, as much as I still think Sarah Palin is probably an unpleasant human being, I'm coming out of this episode with a lot more compassion for her than I would have expected. She is out of her depth. She's desperate. She's like one of those humans in the Greek myths that the gods pick up, toy with for a while, and then discard, to devolve into a cricket or be fed their own children in a pie, or be dismembered by wild horses.
Sarah Palin wasn't always a laughingstock. At one point she (or somebody) did some actual good in Alaska taking on the big oil companies:
When a group of Democratic legislators called on the companies in October 2007 to disclose their Alaska-based profits, for example, Palin wrote in an e-mail to her staff: “I know some hate to hear me say it, but . . . the dems are right on this one. And more power to ’em for asking for more info from the Big Three. Too bad the R’s couldn’t join in this request also.”It's pretty far from the "drill, baby, drill" that was the party line she hewed to after McCain tapped her for the nomination (a decision that should haunt him for the rest of his days).
Do I still think she's venal, intellectually unsuited for public office, a bully, an archetypal high school "mean girl"?
I do.
But why do I even know about her? Because she was governor of a state that had about the entire population of Fort Worth, Texas? No, because the GOP elevated her, used her, and has now discarded her. Again, the Kathleen Parker article:
It mattered little that they didn’t know much about her. Whatever she might lack in intellectual heft, they apparently reckoned, she made up for in “hot-ness”...One last quote from the Parker piece, which deserves to be read in its entirety:
Any man of Palin’s comparable deficits, no matter his winning ways, would have been eliminated from consideration within minutes of opening his mouth.
One wonders why Palin would accept the invitation to become McCain’s running mate, given how ill-prepared she was, not to mention that she’d just had a baby...What she didn’t count on was the stress of constant travel, performance and cramming for speeches — or the pain of separation from her family. Nor could she have anticipated that her own team ultimately would lose faith in her. Imagine being the governor of a frontier state, suddenly being placed before millions of armchair critics and asked to perform without proper preparation, training or support. This is crazy-making on its face; devastating and crushing to the individual who finds herself alone on the ledge.So, who would have thought it. Here I am, feeling sorry for, of all people, Sarah Palin. Remembering that she had, in fact, just had a Down Syndrome baby. Remembering what she'd said about being tempted to just go have an abortion.
[Palin] was on a trip out of state at the time, she said, and "just for a fleeting moment I thought, 'No one knows me here; no one would ever know.' ...My amniocentesis came back and then I understood why some people would think they could change their circumstances, just take care of it. Todd didn't even know" the results of the prenatal testing yet, so "no one would know."What a peculiar turn of events.