Can You Smell What Sarah Palin is Cookin'?

There are many times where I would like to bang my head against a wall when I read the numerous stories that center around the one-woman drama show that is Sarah Palin. I am sure that many of you have felt the same way. There are those out there who dismiss her as being a mere blip on the Conservative radar that has no future chance of winning office and there are those who take her very seriously as a new face of the Conservative movement.

I am somewhere in-between on this one. I have yet to be convinced that she is a new brand of Conservative that will redefine the Republican Party, but I also don't think that she should be just ignored with the hope that she goes away. Palin has this raw appeal that resonates with many angry Conservative Americans. Even when she is factually wrong, even when she says ridiculous things in interviews...she still connects emotionally with a large number of people. That is interesting and really can't be simply dismissed.

Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone has a new piece up on his blog which breaks this issue down in greater depth. It is worth the full read, but I have included just a couple of clips below:

Sarah Palin’s battlefield, on the other hand, is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that’s far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick.

Most normal people cannot connect on an emotional level with Rush’s meanderings on how Harry Reid is buying off Mary Landrieu with pork in the health care bill. They can, however, connect with stories about how top McCain strategist and Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt told poor Sarah to shut her pie-hole on election day, or how her supposed allies in the McCain campaign stabbed her in the back by leaking gossip about her to reporters, how Schmidt used the word “fuck” in front of her daughter, or even with the strange tales about Schmidt ordering Sarah to consult with a nutritionist to improve her campaign endurance when she herself knew she just needed to get out in the fresh air and run (If there’s one thing Sarah Palin knows, it’s herself!).

[...]

Sarah Palin is on an endless crusade against assholes. It’s all she thinks about. She doesn’t really have any political ideas, in the classic sense of the word — in fact the only thing resembling real political convictions in Going Rogue revolve around the Trans-Alaska pipeline and how awesome she thinks it is.

Most of the rest of the book just catalogs her Gump-esque rise to national stardom (not having enough self-awareness to detect the monstrous narcissistic ambition that in reality was impelling her forward all along, she labors in the book to describe her various career leaps as lucky accidents or mystical acts of Providence) and the seemingly endless parade of meanies bent on tripping her up along the way.

[...]

She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn’t know this, another reason she’s such a perfect political tool.