Fear of The Mother
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In his eye-opening, astute new book,
The Persecution of Sarah
Palin, Matthew Continetti argues
that the “story of Sarah Palin is the story of American political
journalism’s intellectual bankruptcy,” and while Continetti’s
narrative does include plenty of lesser-known biographical detail
it also contextualizes Palin into a fascinating case study of the
politics of personal destruction as employed by the left-leaning
cultural and media elites who constantly tsk-tsk…the politics of
personal destruction. “It’s not new for a prominent political
figure to be hated,” Continetti tells TAS.
“But it is novel when a political figure
becomes so hated so quickly, and for that hatred to be based on
so little information.” Appalled by this persistent knowledge
gap, the Weekly Standard editor undertook
the challenge of setting the record straight and answering, to
his mind, “the most outrageous insults, myths, and exaggerations
directed at her and her family.”
Continetti was kind enough to chat recently with
TAS about The Persecution of Sarah
Palin – sure to soon be seen as the essential
companion to Palin’s own upcoming memoir
Going Rouge.
One of the most common attacks against those who failed
to see Barack Obama as a shining demigod upon a hill was to
psychologize an unflattering “fear of the other” onto them, but
as you catalogue in detail there was quite a bit of hysteria
about this “stranger from the strangest part of America” coming
from those same ranks, no? How much projection was going
on?
MC: Plenty. But the larger
phenomenon is that there are two political Others — the liberal
and the conservative. Each demonizes the other. Each sifts
through the evidence, picking out that which confirms their worst
fears and ignoring the rest. And yet it was odd, to say the
least, that liberals would react in such a hysterical manner to a
politician whose reputation rested on bipartisan ethics reform,
taking on the oil companies, and overthrowing a state GOP
establishment. But, because no one knew anything about Palin, the
media shoehorned her into their pre-packaged, one-size-fits-all
narrative about socially conservative ignoramuses bent on taking
America back to the Stone Age.
Sarah Palin seems to currently be in a horserace with
Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh for Go-To Bogeyman of the Left. On
election night 2009, for example, Chris Matthews
unequivocally labeled her
a “theocrat,” and a denier of “basic American notions
of pluralism.” Do you think the left’s ability to take a
bipartisan, popular reformer and turn her into a crank in much of
the citizenry’s minds will embolden them to take a similar
guns-blazing-with-half-truths-and-conspiracy-theories approach in
all future campaigns?
MC: I’ll have to include that
Matthews quote in the paperback edition! But, to answer your
question, I think the ferocity of the Palin episode was unique,
because her nomination to the vice presidency came as an absolute
shock to the media. Most of them had never heard of her, and yet
there she was, standing next to John McCain as the balloons fell
from the rafters of the XCEL Energy Center. What nerve! And so
the environment was ripe for all sorts of rumors and conspiracy
theories to fester about this mystery woman from the
North.
No one in the press, as you point out, “asked Joe Biden
whether he literally believed in the transubstantiation or the
Virgin Birth” or complained about
explicitly religious ads
run on behalf of Barack Obama’s campaign, but they were
nevertheless more than happy to “twist and contort” Palin until
she “fit the stereotype of the boorish, Luddite religious
conservative.” One gets the impression she could join
the Secular Coalition of
America and
still be denounced as a fundamentalist. Why is it that
what was good for the “progressive” goose wound up getting the
conservative gander shellacked as a
“Christianist”?
MC: Palin’s tradition of
Christianity was absolutely central to the liberal critique.
Simply put, the American left blanches at public expressions of
religiosity and believes that political figures should mention
their faith only in service
of liberal policy aims. Thus it did not
matter that millions of people share Palin’s Christian faith. Nor
did it matter that, in both her gubernatorial administration and
on the campaign trail, Palin mentioned her religion rarely and
neither governed nor campaigned as a strident social
conservative. The stereotype was so powerful that liberals saw
zealotry where none existed.
It is nigh impossible to deny that a female
vice-presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket would have
driven self-proclaimed feminists to insist a powerful independent
woman — who, sure, disagreed with them on policy, but, still… –
should be back at the homestead rearing children and cooking
meals rather than in politics. What is it about what you dub as
“frontier feminism” that took a potential symbol of female
empowerment and achievement and turned her into an enemy
of
“right-thinking”
women?
MC: Palin does not subscribe
to the full menu of what the political consultant and author
Jeffrey Bell has called “adversarial feminism.” But Palin is a
feminist. She supports Title IX, frequently mentions the “glass
ceiling” separating women from men, attacked Barack Obama for
paying his female Senate staff members less than male staff, and
outlined a pro-woman foreign policy that Hillary Clinton would be
comfortable supporting. But she is also pro-life and does not
believe that women necessarily must trade off a happy home life
for professional success. And so the feminist establishment began
a crusade to expel her from the city of ladies. They succeeded in
making her politically polarizing. But, I think, they also
irrevocably tarnished their ability to speak on behalf of women
as a whole.
“The resemblances between McCain’s and Palin’s
political styles,” you write, “are uncanny” — “Like McCain,
Palin becomes self-righteous when she confronts individuals who
offend her idealistic sensibilities”; “Like McCain, Palin seemed
to revel in holding members of her own party to account”; “Like
John McCain, she was the triumphant underdog.” Yet not all of
these traits have endeared McCain to the conservatives whom Sarah
Palin is wildly popular with.
MC: The difference is in the
context. What conservatives know about McCain is the many times
that he has fought them. When Palin appeared, conservatives, like
liberals, knew only that she was pro-life. Then conservatives
witnessed the way in which liberals treated her. They rallied to
her side. It’s interesting to note that, in Alaska, conservatives
and Republicans have a much more nuanced — and sometimes more
skeptical — view of Palin. They did not like when she cut deals
with Democrats. They did not like when she criticized the state
GOP establishment. So, when you examine her more closely, you see
that the parallels between Palin and McCain remain quite
striking.
Despite the energy Palin brought to the McCain ticket
late in the game, you nevertheless say she was a “loyal soldier
in an army that did not appreciate her true value,” and that the
McCain campaign “made her famous but it also shoehorned her into
a bad media strategy and a partisan straitjacket.” How was Palin
devalued? How could her “true value” unbound have potentially
made a difference in the election?
MC: It remains the case that
the only time McCain polled ahead of Barack Obama was during the
two weeks between the GOP convention and the collapse of Lehman
Brothers on September 15, 2008. I believe that Palin was central
to this upsurge in support for the Republican ticket. Could
things have turned out differently on Election Day? Probably not.
In many ways the 2008 GOP ticket faced an impossible task. It
sought to replace an unpopular incumbent of the same party during
a time of war and recession. That’s a bad bet. Nonetheless, it
remains true that the McCain team did not know what they had in
Palin. Since they worried about her abilities, they limited her
exposure to high-pressure interviews with network television
anchors not known for sympathy to conservatives. Had Palin been
allowed to speak out more, and to various news outlets, she no
doubt would have made some rookie mistakes — but those mistakes
would have disappeared against a larger backdrop of
accessibility, common sense, and charm.
“The landscape of Alaska was littered with the
carcasses of Republican bulls she had emasculated,” one of your
sources tells you. The always-incisive Michael Goldfarb, your
current colleague and former McCain campaign staffer, says, “She
has enemies everywhere in Alaska. And they’re all Republicans.
The upside had been that she’d worked with Democrats. As soon as
she’s picked, though, there’s no Democrat who’ll say anything
nice about her.” You add, “The Alaskan Palin-haters met willing
accomplices in the global media” — and further note that this is
the same media that couldn’t find anyone in Alaska with a nice
thing to say about a governor with upwards of 80 percent job
approval.
To reluctantly drag out a Winston Churchill quote
already employed ad nauseam: “You have enemies? Good. That means
you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” And the
right enemies can say positive things about one’s character, of
course. But considering the demonization and the resignation in
the face of frivolous ethics complaints by partisans unable to
let the election go, did Palin’s enemies actually achieve some
measure of victory? Is this an example of how the political
independence and post-ideologue-ness we supposedly hold as a
national ideal can be deadly in the arena of political
reality?
MC: Victory for Palin’s
enemies would come if they succeeded in their attempts to drive
her out of public life. sThat hasn’t happened.
If anything, she has become more powerful, more influential, over
time. She did more to change the shape of the health care debate
in one Facebook post than any other major Republican politician.
She led the way in national Republican support for Conservative
Party candidate Doug Hoffman. Alaska was holding her down. So she
broke free. And now she can speak out as often as she
wants.
Palin has a habit of making bold decisions that may seem
odd at the time. When she entered the Alaska Republican
gubernatorial primary in October 2005, she was making an
extremely risky decision. When she made her surprise announcement
that she would resign from office on July 26, 2009, nobody knew
what to think. In retrospect, both decisions make eminent sense.
She won the 2006 primary in a landslide and won the general
election to become governor. Her resignation has allowed her to
return to the national stage as a leader of the conservative
populist revival. We’ll see what the future holds. But whatever
happens, it will be quite a ride.
