Sarah Palin: In the American grain

Various friends and relations object when I describe soon to be former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin as a great American character. 

I think they hear me say it as if I'm placing the emphasis on great or even as if there's a period after American.

The emphasis is on character, as in if you didn't know there really was such a person as Sarah Palin you'd think someone had made her up.  And in a way someone did.

Us.

Sarah Palin is one of those pure products of America gone crazy or in some cases only slightly cracked through greed, vanity, hubris, religion, idealism, obsession, anger, passion, love, success, failure, whatever, whose stories, happy, sad, comic, tragic, uplifting, inspiring, cautionary, or indicting, tell the story of the country in allegorical miniature.

It's a collection of eccentric personalities that includes heroes and heroines, villains, saints, con artists, geniuses, fools, lunatics, visionaries, clowns, and romantics, but in their odd ways rebels all.

Billy Sunday, John Brown, Alvin York, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Nixon, Johnny Appleseed, George Armstrong Custer, Elvis Presley, Charles Lindbergh, Charles Manson, Henry Ford, Bugsy Siegel, Dolly Parton, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Muhammad Ali.  The list goes on.

Some of these characters are great Americans in the sense of having achieved much and done wonderful things to affect the course of history.  The difference between them and other great Americans is that when you tell the stories of those other men and women the focus in on them and the rest of the country seems to be a supporting player and backdrop, there to be either the object or the stage of their greatness, while when you tell the great American characters' stories you are telling the story of their time and place at the same time---you are in fact using them to tell the story of their time and place.  Bugsy Seigel's story is the story of Vegas in the late 1940s.  John Brown's story is the story of the coming of the Civil War.  Marilyn Monroe's story is the Hollywood story.

The stories of great men and women tell us about them.  The stories about great American characters tell us as much or more about us.

Abraham Lincoln's and Richard Nixon's stories contain some striking similarities.  Lonely, introspective, self-starting poor kids, largely self-educated, the sons of angry, withdrawn fathers, devoted mama's boys, outsiders all their lives who despite tremendous successes never fit in among an elite they dominated intellectually and professionally.  But Nixon's paranoia and resentments, his endless capacity for self-destructive hatreds, his knack for turning even victories into occasions for bitterness and self-loathing seem more typically American than Lincoln's patience, self-sufficiency, tolerance, and humility.  Lincoln is what we'd like to be.  Nixon is what we've too often been.

A great American's story is exemplary.  A great American character's story is representative. 

Before John McCain plucked her out of Juneau and placed her front and center on the national stage, Palin was a great Alaskan character.   If you'd heard of her before last August, you might have thought she'd been sprung fully grown like a Venus from the pages of John McPhee's Coming into the Country , with her rifle in one hand, Trig on her hip, and her Miss Wasilla sash across her chest.  She'd have made a good recurring character on Northern Exposure or in the stories of Jack London.  Robert Service could have written a poem about her.

Or written her into life with a poem.

In his Vanity Fair article, Todd Purdum takes issue with Palin's assertion that Alaska is a microcosm of America.  He quotes McPhee to refute her:

“Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’”

I don't know.  I've never been there.  But there's always seemed to me a good reason McPhee called his book what he called it.  Every part of America was once foreign country, until it wasn't.  And it was always bordered by another foreign country called the frontier.   Those borders were never distinct.  You could leave America, leave civilization, by lighting out for the territories, but you could also go the other way, and find your way back in to the country by way of the territories.  In a way, every travel book about the Untied States is about discovering America by wandering along its edges.  Alaska is as good an entry point into the collective American psyche as other lawless outposts on the edge of the wilderness, like Texas or Florida or New York City.

Sarah Palin was a great American character before we knew her.

Palin's story was always interesting but it's become important because of her part in the collective nervous breakdown of the Republican party.

The Party establishment, except for Bill Kristol, wants her gone because:

1. The GOP's still a boy's club.  To the degree that it's not, it's still a club and Palin was not invited to join and never would have been---she is not their kind of people.

2. She's an embarrassment.  The GOP's supposed to be the party of serious grown-ups.

3.  She isn't the least bit interested in even pretending to care about the establishment's issues or their interests.

4.  She's threatening to take control of a significant part of the base, the angry working class and the religious fundamentalists, that the establishment has worked hard to control and exploit without having to listen to it or grant it real power.  This is the big problem Palin has presented them with.  Their preferred method of keeping the base in line has been to keep these people so angry and confused that they don't think, they just react, so that nobody ever stops to ask why not a public option or wonders if a carbon tax might work.  Palin is doing something else.  Taking them and their concerns seriously.  She's offering to lead them.  Where to and to what end I don't think even she knows, but it's scary to the establishment because it might be into a third party or into a weird and wild place where the Party might as well be a third party.  Either way it would be the end of the GOP forever.

Sarah Palin is leading the march off the cliff that began with the rise of the radical Right and the Party's welcoming of the secessionist-minded South.

She's been able to do this and do it in an amazingly short amount of time because she is such a great American character.

In some ways, Sarah Palin's story is like Harry Truman's.  Each of theirs is an all-American story of the little man or the little woman rising through luck and pluck.  Both Truman and Palin were small-time successes, locally important, nationally insignificant, until accidents of history placed them in positions where their talents and virtues allowed them to shine.  The difference between the two characters is, of course, character.  Truman worked hard at everything he did, all his life.  He had a healthy sense of his own self-worth, a confidence in his abilities that kept him going through hard and trying times.  But he knew what was important as opposed to being self-important.  Truman saw how he fit in the grand scheme of things.  Sarah Palin sees everything in terms of how it fits in her grand scheme of self.  She is vain to the point of delusion, and I think that is what is so typically American about her.

Sarah Palin is the embodiment of the desire to hit the lottery, to go on American Idol, to hit the game-winning home run, to meet our soulmate, and the confidence that not only can any of all these things happen but that they will happen or ought to happen.

She represents Americans' unshakeable belief that we were born to be rich, famous, loved, and successful , that God or Fortune meant to smile on us, and if none of this has happened---yet---it's not because we haven't work hard enough, or we don't have the talent, or we're not all that loveable, it's that we wuz robbed.

Whether or not Palin's decision to resign makes political sense, whether or not her reasons were rational or irrational, whether or not she did it because she really wanted to or because there's a scandal brewing she thinks she has a better chance of surviving out of office, the speech itself was wacky.

But it still had some coherent themes.

One is that Sarah Palin is convinced that whatever Sarah Palin chooses to do is the right thing.

Another is that Sarah Palin deserves whatever Sarah Palin believes she deserves.

A third is that anyone who disagrees with Sarah Palin or gets in Sarah Palin's way is stupid or evil, take your pick.

And a fourth is that all of us are endlessly fascinated by Sarah Palin.

Except that it wasn't interrupted by the flight attendant coming along to take a drink order or the band striking up the Bunny Hop, that speech was pretty much exactly like a monologue you've probably been forced to listen to on a long airplane flight or when trapped in a corner by another guest at the wedding.

Palin is the greatest saleswoman for the generally held principle that there ought to be no qualification for anything good happening to us except the wonderfulness of our being us.
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Like hilzoy I didn't find a whole lot new in Pudrum's Vanity Fair piece.  But it was interesting to see the weirdnesses from last fall collected in one narrative.  I think, though, the most important part of the story was this:

None of McCain’s still-loyal soldiers will say negative things about Palin on the record. Even thinking such thoughts privately is painful for them, because there is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired—and as reflecting, too, an unsettling willingness on their own part to aid and abet him. They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job.

It's amazing that someone so temperamentally and intellectually and emotionally unsuitable could have become President of the United States, and I'm not talking about Sarah Palin in the event that her 72 year old running mate had won the election and then keeled over in office.  I'm talking about her running mate.

It's scary that someone like Sarah Palin could come so close to the Presidency, but it's scarier that someone who thought Sarah Palin should come so close came even closer.  And how is that this man who proved himself unsuitable for the job, not just with his choice of running mates, but in many other ways, is still trotted out by the producers of the talk shows practically every Sunday to blither on and on with what's essentially the message:  You voters were wrong to pick Barack Obama over me!

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The McEwan thought Purdum's article was pretty good, but she has some strong criticism for the aspects of it that tend to portray Sarah Palin as not a great American character but a typical crazy female.

Bill Nothstine, rounding up various blogs' lists of speculations about what Palin's up to, thinks we need a blogger panel on Bizarre Resignations Methodology.

Comments

[KearaO]

Excellent analysis. I especially admire your ability to see what Harry Truman and Sarah Palin have in common. My antipathy for her dominates my ability to see her in historical context. But you have really put her there. Thank you.

[Apostate]

Brilliant.

[Bill Altreuter]

I think it is worth mentioning that Palin has worked pretty tirelessly to get where she is-- and that this quality is also a very American thing. She is smarter than she gets credit for, and has gone far because people have underestimated her. Right now she is drawing comparisons to Dan Quayle, but I don't think so. Quayle was a rich kid, with a rich kid's sense of entitlement. Palin really is what she says she is- jus' folks. The daughter of a high school teacher, with a third-or-fourth rate education. She is attractive, and knows it, and uses that power very effectively. If she'd been born a boy she might have been the kind of scrappy white gym rat that people like to rave about in the first round of the NCAA hoops tournament, and then gone on to obscurity, but since she never had that kind of opportunity to be adored she's moved on into politics.

In many ways she impresses me as the ideal Republican presidential candidate. Except for Nixon (and Ike, of course), the Republican party prefers to nominate amiable boobs who are convinced that they are right about everything. What made Bush fils unusual was that the people who were really running things were so visible. They won't make that mistake again-- if Palin gets the nomination (about a 50-50 shot right now, I'd say) she'll appeal to a pretty big slice of the bell curve's back end.

I've never been to Alaska, but from what I have read, and from what I seen about the Alaskans I have met it seems to me that you are correct-- it is an idiosyncratic place, populated to the extent that it can be said to be populated by eccentric individualists. If you haven't read it, you should pick up Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union".

[Rana]

Wonderful post, Lance!

I'm glad you evoked McPhee (one of my favorite writers) and the frontier/West aspects of this.

One of the interesting/irritating things about the coverage of Palin's candidacy was the obvious fact of most of the media establishment's lack of understanding of the West and, specifically, Western conservatism. Palin may be a religious whack-a-doo conservative, but she's a different flavor than similar folk in the South. A lot of her rhetoric, about independence and so on, reads differently through a Western lens than it does through a Southern. Southern plaints are always filtered through the knowledge that they'd fought for independence once, and not only failed, but became even more economically dependent in the process. The West, on the other hand, for all of its rhetoric about freedom and the frontier, has been under federal auspices since day one. The racism of the South, with its roots in slavery, looks different than the racism of the West, which is not only informed by border anxieties, but the history of native genocide and the presence of Mexico and other nations. The West is also the home of a lot of self-created mythologies and religions (Amie Semple McPherson is coming to mind).

Richard White's notion that Westerners like to complain about federal support as if it were a scratchy wool shirt (it's irritating but it's all that's keeping them warm) seems apropos too.

In other words, what fascinated me about Palin, and made me sometimes angrily sympathetic with her (when my thinking brain wasn't dominant - when I think about her, as opposed to feel about her, she disgusts and alarms me) is the way that she wasn't just dismissed as a nutty conservative woman, but as a nutty conservative Western woman. Her type's familiar to me - but it was clear that anything Western still has a strong odor of the exotic and weird to the establishment. Put another way, Bush's Texas persona only seemed believable to those who have no gut sense of the West themselves; most of us West of the Plains recognized that as the fakest thing about him. Bush wasn't a Texas rancher or even a cowboy; he was a dude.

Palin's Western identity, on the other hand, is genuine Western character of a type that Easterners clearly still have trouble understanding.

[Bitchphd]

Seems pretty definitive to me.

[DaveMB]

Ditto. A brilliant essay -- should be required reading for anyone trying to teach American history and/or American studies.

[Apostate]

I disagree with Bill that Palin is smart - she is like Bush. She has perhaps more cunning than even he did, and she is perhaps more hard working than he was, but she doesn't have true intelligence and she isn't capable of sophisticated understanding or thought.

[greginak]

The thing not mentioned about Alaska is that there is a strong sense of Alaskan Exceptionalism in this state. Many Alaskans, like sarah, are just sure that Alaska is the best place ever and what ever happens here is just wonderful. Most , non-indigenous Alaskan's, moved here or are children of people who moved here. There is an immigrant fervor to the sureness that we are the best. There is saying here "we don't care how they do it outside." Outside is the lower 48. Alaska is the center of the world for many up here.

@ Rana- Having grown up in NJ and now lived in Ak for many years, i think you are right to a large degree but miss a little bit. The type of Western character sarah represents, which is hard to understand,n is not the westernness per se but the hypocrisy and lack of insight. Alaska is American's Saudi Arabia. We get almost all our state income from oil and have benefited from huge amounts of federal money. But Alaskan's, at the least the conservative ones, want to pretend this state was built entirely by hardy individuals and that we don't need nobody else. Sarah's kind of westerner/alaskan is in love with the fantasy of being Daniel Boone and will ignore any thing they do that shows that fantasy not to be true.

[TPO]

Wow. That was fresh and brilliant.

I'd only like to amplify a bit on one point:

It's amazing that someone so temperamentally and intellectually and emotionally unsuitable could have become President of the United States, and I'm not talking about Sarah Palin in the event that her 72 year old running mate had won the election and then keeled over in office. I'm talking about her running mate.

This, of course, applies not just to McCain, but to the entire modern conservative movement, which manufactures and props up these characters. We've just lived through 8 years of a "temperamentally and intellectually and emotionally unsuitable" President, and we all know how well that worked out. Bush was the creation of a movement, and unfortunately, the chance that the movement has the wherewithal so succeed (on their terms, of course) again, is too high for my comfort level.

[Mike Schilling]

This is the kind of piece that Lance does better than anyone else. Often, it's about a fictional character (e.g. what's really going on with Sam and his feelings about Diane and Rebecca); in this case, I only wish it were.

[bekabot]

"Various friends and relations object when I describe soon to be former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin as a great American character."

I object too, Mr. Mannion. Sarah Palin is not a great American character but a great American caricature. There is a difference.

[actor212]

While your analysis is spot on, Lance, I have to question this bit:

Their preferred method of keeping the base in line has been to keep these people so angry and confused that they don't think, they just react, so that nobody ever stops to ask why not a public option or wonders if a carbon tax might work. Palin is doing something else. Taking them and their concerns seriously.

It seems to me, based on what I saw in the campaign, that she was grabbing the drum major's baton and speeding the march off the cliff up. "Electing a terrorist", "pals around with terrorists", "I can see Russia from my front porch" (ok, that was Fey, but still...)

Where is thought and concern there? Has she said something since that hasn't been simpering, pandering nonsense that I'm not aware of?

[calling all toasters]

Interesting and insightful Mr. Mannion, but... really. She bears about as much resemblance to HST as she does to Milton Berle. Humble beginnings are a dime a dozen in America-- hell, even George Bush knew if you weren't regular folks, you could become regular by spending enough money on it. If you want a true parallel to La Palin, it would be better to look at show business. The narcissism, the histrionics, the moodiness and overall lack of seriousness are all there. Well, lack of seriousness about everything except her press. And the lack of a real person inside of it all. Maybe she's the new Joan Crawford, or the new Britney. Either way, that only makes you a serious political figure in California.

All those crowds who adore her were just a bunch of Dittoheads. For them, she was the new Agnew.

[Bill Altreuter]

I didn't say she is smart, I said she is smarter than she gets credit for. Devising a metric is difficult, but my hunch is that she is smarter than Bush. I realize that's a low bar, but it seems to me that Palin is at least smart enough to do her own conniving. Bush was always a catspaw.

[actor212]

Bill, I like Apostate's term "cunning" more than smart, and not just for the obvious puns it raises.

Palin's not smart because I don't believe she thinks things thru. Instinctually, for example, she could have had the upper hand with the Letterman incident by remaining graciously offended.

That she turned around and accused him of pedophilia and in such graphic terms tells me she didn't think that thru. Use Rush to make that charge but remain above the fray, insist on an apology but graciously note that he probably meant her eldest daughter, not the fourteen year old kid.

After Rush raises the issue.

She sensed an opening, and rather than slip through it, decided to tunnel and make it bigger and it collapsed in on her, covering her in her own dirt.

[Todd B.]

Very insightful post, Lance. I've not been here in awhile and it appears that is my loss.

This rang a bell:

"But it still had some coherent themes.

One is that Sarah Palin is convinced that whatever Sarah Palin chooses to do is the right thing.

Another is that Sarah Palin deserves whatever Sarah Palin believes she deserves.

A third is that anyone who disagrees with Sarah Palin or gets in Sarah Palin's way is stupid or evil, take your pick.

And a fourth is that all of us are endlessly fascinated by Sarah Palin."

Funny, this sounds quite a bit like my three year old daughter and her parents. Only we are more annoying than stupid or evil.

And as for the humble background: her husband and her are worth several million dollars. Yeah, she's jus' folks like you and me.

When I read Palin quotes and think about her attraction to angry working class folks, reactionaries, and her belief good state-corporate relations, I hear Hitler and I smell fascism. Godwin's Law be damned, but deeper economic destruction coupled with her willingness to slander and her support of sedition and treason makes her one of the most dangerous people in this country. There are plenty in the boy's club willing to make the deal if it means regained power.

I hope I'm wrong.