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Palin: Already Almost Forgotten

October 5th, 2011 at 10:51 pm David Frum | 306 Comments |

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Palin2 Palin: Already Almost Forgotten

“I will continue driving the discussion for freedom and free markets…”

- From Sarah Palin’s statement announcing her decision not to run for president.


Um, probably not. Sarah Palin’s political voice had dwindled well before she announced her decision not to run. Now it will sink altogether into inaudibility. She will be no kind of force in future national discussions. She will have no sway over party debates. She will retain some starpower for a little while longer. She may for another cycle or two be able to help certain candidates for certain political offices raise some money. Even that will fade within two more years or four. Her political career was brief, bizarre, and sordid. But now at least it is definitively finished.

Palin will never become a party elder stateswoman. Over the past three years, it became apparent to all but a handful of cultists that her only interests were money and celebrity. She had no concept of public service, and no capacity to serve even if she had wished to do so. Soon even those last cultists will quietly abandon the argument. We talk often these days about makers and takers. Sarah Palin was the ultimate taker. She abandoned her post as governor of Alaska to cash in on lectures and TV. She squeezed her supporters for political donations and spent the money on herself. To adapt an old phrase, she seen her opportunities and she took ‘em.

In the end, she exploited, abused, or embarrassed almost everyone who had believed in her. Most embarrassing of all: she was never even a very good con artist. Everything that was false and petty and unqualified in her was visible within the first minutes of encountering her. The people she fooled were people who passionately wished to be fooled. To that extent, what was important in her story was not the faults and failings of Sarah Palin. There have always been grifters in politics. What was important in her story was the revelation of conservatism’s lack of antibodies against somebody with the faults and failings of Sarah Palin. That’s the story that should trouble us still.

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306 Comments so far ↓

  • lyhunt56 // Oct 7, 2011 at 12:31 am

    Reading all of this rather late. It is interesting though, that no one is addressing Mr. Frum’s main point that the party needs to deal with being taken in by such a person (not sure what adjective(s) to use to describe her).
    In addition, I found it interesting that I did not hear/read much about her announcement today. Got very little attention (from my random perusing, anyway).
    Appropriately so, people were much more interested in eulogizing someone who actually did something with his life — Steve Jobs.

    Let me add — that there are actually a number of posts about the Republican Party — I missed them earlier, I think.

  • Headlines | The Daily Slog // Oct 7, 2011 at 2:37 am

    [...] Frum: Totally Forgotten Years Ago “Palin: Already Almost Forgotten”–headline, FrumForum.com, Oct. 5 [...]

  • Fairy Hardcastle // Oct 7, 2011 at 8:59 am

    With the exceptions of Watusie’s laughable attempt to defend the editor and the “Archivist” who offered one example of when he thinks the editor saw Sarah Palin at some speech in Canada, the editor himself has not responded. Even that example says nothing about actually meeting the former Governor. I am inclined to conclude he has never met Sarah Palin which would mean his statement was unfounded at best and deceptive at worst.

  • Primrose // Oct 7, 2011 at 9:37 am

    Fairy Hardcastle, I looked up encounter and found a very long entry (see below) at no point does it require one to be physically there. In the case of people, there may be the assumption but it is not at all required.

    http://www.thefreedictionary.com/encounter

    • Fairy Hardcastle // Oct 7, 2011 at 10:52 am

      I looked at the entry. I would probably defer to the OED here: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/61781?rskey=mEwQ3D&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid over the Free Dictionary, but the definitions are consistent and convey in the first and primary sense of the word an actual face to face meeting. When you put that together with the statement that someone is “visibly” something “within minutes” of the encounter the import is clear. It in fact suggests that the one encountering, here the editor, said or did something to the one encountered, the Governor, to solicit a response upon which such a specific and damaging judgment was made.

      • Primrose // Oct 7, 2011 at 2:38 pm

        Since I don’t have access to OED, obviously I didn’t use it, and can’t reference it. Since the OED is more of an encyclopedia of language than a dictionary, it is not necessary for speakers (or writers) to reference only it. And face to face personal meeting most definitely is not necessary, even so. I recently encountered bears on my lawn, I did not try to have face to face meeting.

        Nor is there anything in that line as written that conflicts anyway with your excessively limited definition. Plenty of decisions makers would have had to meet her face to face, and it is quite obvious when and how she talks what kind of person she is.

        • Fairy Hardcastle // Oct 7, 2011 at 2:51 pm

          Ok. So next time some says “I encountered Primrose and within 5 minutes I could tell he was a petty and false person” don’t get upset that the person never met you, or never even saw you in a room. Just go about your life unknowingly “encountering” people who develop bad opinions about your heart and soul every few minutes. Look even your own example requires being in the physical presence of the bears!! Now the editor has not bothered to even suggest he was in the same room as Mrs. Palin yet he has quite clearly stated that upon encountering her within a few minutes he knew she was a petty and false person. As I said before, it is boils down to not thinking of Mrs. Palin as another fellow human being but an idea or caricature one bandies about in lefty circles.

          • Primrose // Oct 7, 2011 at 5:25 pm

            But I am not a public person Fairy Hardcastle. I do not give interviews or campaign speeches. I do not run for so much as dog catcher. I do not join reality TV shows. People who do not know me, don’t know of my existence, generally speaking.

            You could say of course that you encountered Primrose on the FrumForum and then make assumptions (as many have, one tangential expat in particularly nasty way) but then you would have to back that assertion up.

            If your argument is that Mr. Frum is wrong and that Mrs. Palin is really a lovely person, OK, based on what? How do the bulk of her statements and actions contradict that other idea?

            I don’t think the word encounter suggests intimate knowledge in any event. It suggests some distance, and obscures , and thus is given less reliability than words like meet or know.

            As to to us all being human, I wish conservatives remembered that when they spoke of public figures who are liberal. There was no call to remember our shared humanity by the Swift Boat Committee, or those calling Mr. Obama the antichrist. There was no shared humanity when paralyzed veteran Max Cleland was compared to Osama bin Laden. And where is the shared sense of humanity for Mrs. Obama, a reluctant public figure, treated like dirt because she tells kids to exercise and eat their vegetables. Even though there is ample gossip that she is unhappy with her public role, compassion does not come into play.

            They only remember it with people like Sarah Palin who looks like they think nice people look. And maybe in private she is, maybe she’s a great gal, but her public self is unqualified mean girl. Since she’s never expressed regret for that public self, I am not convinced she’s secretly wonderful.

          • Fairy Hardcastle // Oct 7, 2011 at 6:16 pm

            From my standpoint, you should always treat your adversary as a fellow human being no matter what party you are in. That’s in part why the Hitler mustache or the Joker defacement is wrong no matter who the President is.

            The editor is not some unknown blogger or twitterer blasting away with incendiary remarks like you can find right now: “Hope she dies now” etc. The editor is apparently someone of standing within the political community having just been asked to be an election contributor for CNN. Mr. Frum therefore has a higher responsibility to get it right because, apparently, his statements are seen and repeated by a fair amount of people. My argument is about the evidence for his conclusion that Mrs. Palin is petty and false which he says is based on an encounter that lasted at least a few minutes. I asked for it, but only silence replies. Do you really think he will repeat such a statement while on CNN? Hey, anyone can say I think so and so is false and petty and that’s an opinion you can legitimately form by watching TV, but that’s not the image presented by this post which is of a real encounter.

          • Primrose // Oct 8, 2011 at 11:55 am

            But your assertion that the claims (of many who met her) are all wrong has no proof either. You say she’s human as if that alone answers questions of character. And by now we have plenty of tell-all memoirs, that indicate she was less than wonderful. You offer no reason not to believe them.

            Since Mr. Frum is, one presumes, is fairly well connected, it is not unreasonable to assume he’s not making a casual assumption, but is responding to a larger consensus of those who worked with her. The point of his phrase is that Mrs. Palin grifter quality was easy to spot, and yet still people let themselves be fooled, not that he spotted it after a brief encounter. The point seemed fairly obvious to me.

          • Fairy Hardcastle // Oct 9, 2011 at 5:45 pm

            Having nothing other than the editor as evidence of the author of this post, and no other statements about how he met with friends or others who actually encountered the Governor and concluded that she was petty and false, the natural reading of this post is that the author himself met the Governor. I never made any assertion about the claims of people who actually met the Governor long enough to form a judgment about her integrity. I don’t know any personally. Do you? Or are you willing to trust people you don’t personally know regarding their judgments about another person you don’t know at all? The bottom line for me is that when it comes to certain opinions like she’s unqualified or her policies are wrong-headed sure you don’t need to meet the Governor, but you should listen to exactly what she said or read what she wrote, not what others says she said or wrote.

            At some point it became clear to me that truth was not always the goal when reporting about the Governor, e.g., how Eisenstadt punked MSNBC with the “Africa is a country” fabrication. So I decided that the new outrageous statement or scandal attributed to her or her family needed to have a star put next to it until verified. Now, with the editor seemingly on his own authority making a direct statement about the character of the Governor in the context of an encounter that lasted some minutes, I have to put a star next to that one and say: back it up buddy. Even now several days after this post, no statement from the editor.

          • Primrose // Oct 10, 2011 at 11:03 am

            First I disagree with your reading of the sentence. I think it presumes that the author knows people as well as persona knowledge.

            As to not simply listening to what others say, I don’t have to. Every campaign speech, every choice of inflection, every wink made it abundantly clear that her attitude towards others is not kind and wonderful, that she is self-centered. Her actions reveal that she is a very certain type of women that other women know really, really well, and not with pleasure.

            Now of course that is public persona. Perhaps she is quite different but she chose that public persona and has never veered from it, never expressed regret or tried to counter it with actual facts. She claims we all just were out to get her, not that her public persona veers from her private one but that we are trying to catch her out. She’s bears no responsibility.

            This is very different from saying you misunderstand me, I winked because I was really, really nervous or I didn’t answer the reading question because my favorite magazine is People and I thought it would make me sound dumb. She’s had plenty of opportunity to re-write the record. Sarah Palin seems to feel that people should assume she’s a nice, wonderful person because she’s that kind of person, not because she has any obligation to behave nice—which means it is very unlikely she is actually kind or thoughtful.

            Maybe before she entered public life she was a different person but she did enter it and she made certain choices, she must bear responsibility for those choices, character is not handed to you at birth. While we all have tendencies and preferences, character is something we are constantly creating.

            If you feel she’s passed these current tests, provide proof. In all these posts, you haven’t said anything to contradict Ms. Palin’s public persona.

          • Fairy Hardcastle // Oct 10, 2011 at 1:40 pm

            Primrose, you keep trying to make my point much bigger than it is. To repeat: the editor described an encountered with Mrs. Palin which lasted at least a few minutes and during which he concluded she was “visibly” false, petty and unqualified. I asked the editor to describe the circumstances of that encounter. He has not responded. Despite Watusie’s and your attempt to defend the editor by talking about “virtual” encounters either on the TV or through speaking with people who actually did meet the Governor, that’s not what the post said and no clarification has been forthcoming from the editor. As I have learned in the context of evaluating assertions about the Governor you have to be specific and precise because that is where all the shit happens. Show me the “encounter” editor! Tell me who you relied upon to make that statement and what was the nature of their encounters with the Governor. His post was not some private letter to his inner circle of Palin bashers it was to the whole wide world web, and as such it comes with the presumption that the ordinary understanding of words applies.

            Have you heard of Journolist? Seems there was a concerted effort to tar and feather the Governor at some level.

            Having never met the Governor I cannot make a sound judgment about her integrity or what she really means when she winks. I can however agree with her views on the proper Constitutional limits of the Federal Government, with her views on sound fiscal policy and her views that traditional morality makes for a happy and free society.

        • paul_gs // Oct 7, 2011 at 5:06 pm

          ‘Plenty of decisions makers would have had to meet her face to face, and it is quite obvious when and how she talks what kind of person she is.’

          Palin was a competent and savvy governor. Her support in Alaskan was strong with both Democrats and Republicans.

          • Primrose // Oct 7, 2011 at 5:27 pm

            Based on what facts? By the time she quit, she was considerably less popular.

          • paul_gs // Oct 7, 2011 at 11:20 pm

            Democrats manufactured a vicious smear campaign against her, that’s the only reason her support dropped. She was a good, competent governor.

          • Primrose // Oct 8, 2011 at 11:57 am

            I see. Well, in any event, then you admit that your first statement was untrue. She didn’t have tons of support.

  • Assorted links — Marginal Revolution // Oct 7, 2011 at 11:56 am

    [...] David Frum is on a roll: “the lack of [...]

  • Is Sarah Palin’s political career over? (The Week) | News Bulletins // Oct 7, 2011 at 3:42 pm

    [...] career is over: Palin’s “political career was brief, bizarre, and sordid,” says David Frum at FrumForum. “But now at least it is definitively finished.” She “exploited, abused, or [...]

  • Fairy Hardcastle // Oct 7, 2011 at 5:18 pm

    Now perhaps to end this post, I post in full Redstate’s Erickson’s comments. He makes at least pertinent points: (1) how Mrs. Palin energized him and others to keep up the attack on Democrats and help earn an historic House GOP victory and (2) how to really describe an “encounter” this one with Nichole Wallace:

    “At one point I very much wanted Palin to run. In fact, for the longest time I would have preferred to lose with Sarah Palin fighting for liberty than win with one of the candidates pushing a Republican brand of creeping socialism. But it became clear to me she was not running. And as it became clearer and my platform at RedState and elsewhere rose and I said this, more and more of her fans piled on.

    There is a lot of news out there tonight and suddenly the twitterverse and media have moved on. Nonetheless, I want to toss out a few thoughts on her.

    In 2008, many of us were unenthused by John McCain. We voted for him because of Sarah Palin. Here at RedState, after the campaign and the piling on of Palin by Nichole Wallace and others started, we formed Operation Leper. I went on Glenn Beck’s radio show and pledged to root out the McCain campaign leakers.

    At one point, an extremely prominent radio show host called me and asked me to take Steve Schmidt off the list because he was innocent of the infraction and was getting all sorts of heat. I took him off, but later put him back on when it became clear he was, along with Wallace, a source. I remember one night last year visiting with Nichole Wallace (who I’ve since gotten to know and realize she’s actually very nice) and someone who asked her why she’d left politics to become a writer. She looked over at me and said it was because of me. Well, really because of the loyalty of so many who thought Sarah Palin had been mistreated by the McCain campaign.

    Sarah Palin deserved better than what she got. She took a lot of bullets for Team McCain, and while we may be right or wrong, it seemed that long after McCain surrendered, Sarah Palin kept fighting.

    Her verbal positioning of death panels, who Obama palled around with, etc. really gave a lot of us lines to use and rally too as we opposed the administration.

    Back in 2010, my friend Nikki Haley called and told me Governor Palin was going to endorse her. She asked me to cover over and be on the steps of the South Carolina State Capitol with them. In the picture above, I’d just gotten a text from my mom that all her friends were calling her because I was on TV with someone who looked like Sarah Palin. Governor Palin replied, “Tell ‘em you’re with Tina Fey.”

    But for Sarah Palin, we might not have Governor Haley. We might not have Governor Perry either. Sarah Palin rallied conservatives in Texas for Rick Perry against the entire Republican establishment who’d lined up to oppose him. Her early support really helped him.

    Governor Palin became a champion of many who otherwise might not have gotten a voice. We did not always agree. But I never stopped liking her.

    I’m not sure what the good Lord has in mind for Sarah Palin and her family now, but I do wish them all the best. And I suspect we have not seen the last of Sarah Palin on the campaign trail, fighting . . . .”

  • Is Sarah Palin’s political career over? (The Week) | Breaking News Today // Oct 7, 2011 at 9:17 pm

    [...] career is over: Palin’s “political career was brief, bizarre, and sordid,” says David Frum at FrumForum. “But now at least it is definitively finished.” She “exploited, abused, or [...]

  • paul_gs // Oct 7, 2011 at 11:22 pm

    Forgotten? 282 posts already. C’mon folks, help push it past 300.

  • Is Sarah Palin’s political career over? | All Latest News // Oct 8, 2011 at 4:07 am

    [...] career is over: Palin’s “political career was brief, bizarre, and sordid,” says David Frum at FrumForum. “But now at least it is definitively finished.” She “exploited, abused, or [...]

  • Churl // Oct 8, 2011 at 9:56 pm

    “Palin: Already Almost Forgotten”

    Not yet by Frum & Chums, I see.

  • Kevin B // Oct 8, 2011 at 10:46 pm

    I’m trying. This post has already drifted off the front page, but remains prominently featured on the banner for easy remembering. Take it off the banner and let the healing begin.

  • Is Sarah Palin’s political career over? | All News Update Dot Com // Oct 9, 2011 at 12:05 am

    [...] career is over: Palin’s “political career was brief, bizarre, and sordid,” says David Frum during FrumForum. “But now during slightest it is definitively finished.” She “exploited, abused, [...]

  • bcrago77 // Oct 9, 2011 at 1:16 am

    The irony is that FrumForum – the website of a has-been “conservative” who barely survives off the scraps of CNN and MSNBC by attacking actual conservatives – hit a record in hits and comments only by alleging Sarah Palin’s irrelevance.

    National Review was happy to see Frum go, The American Enterprise Institute forcibly booted Frum primarily for being boring, and FrumForum generally gets very, very few hits: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/frumforum.com (traffic rank 74,798.) The pathetic parasite Frum only gets hits (and a link from Memeorandum) when he feeds off the predominance of Sarah Palin.

  • Mark Whittington | Reports of Palin’s Political Demise Exaggerated | Palin4America // Oct 9, 2011 at 11:19 am

    [...] done as a political force is ongoing. David Frum, who clearly detests everything about her, believes she is finished. But a group of conservatives queried by the National Review were almost unanimous in their [...]

  • paul_gs // Oct 9, 2011 at 8:02 pm

    295 posts. Let’s work it people and get it over 300!

  • The end of Palin? » Filibuster Cartoons » Archive // Oct 9, 2011 at 8:41 pm

    [...] had the guts to point this sort of stuff out, but as it stands, only fringe outcasts like David Frum seem to have the courage. This is, I think, Mrs. Palin’s single most destructive legacy. She undeniably lowered the [...]

  • mannie // Oct 11, 2011 at 4:00 pm

    Oh, but the trouble she caused. Ms. Palin dragged that healthcare debate so far into the gutter that nobody will have the courage to address this most important of issues in a public forum for years to come.

  • sodakhic // Oct 16, 2011 at 12:22 pm

    Mrs. Palin runs rings around you, Frum. You are a pathetic individual, even if you do have a family. I’d like to move in next door and find the real David Frum. What an amazing 5 years for Sarah Palin. Blasting the political establishment in Alaska, taking on big oil, then having the strength to take on the VP slot, with the loser McCain. All this while raising a family, with one special needs child. I say just these five years will go down in history as spectacular. She spoke to roughly 25,000 last week around the world. I’d say her future is pretty damned bright. You people forget this woman was brought up in 30 below weather, a frontierswoman, who could take her family over the Rocky Mountains in the dead of winter if she had to. Almost forgotten, that would be Frum.

  • Is Sarah Palin’s political career over? | Sarah Palin // Oct 17, 2011 at 2:08 pm

    [...] career is over: Palin’s “political career was brief, bizarre, and sordid,” says David Frum at FrumForum. “But now at least it is definitively finished.” She “exploited, abused, or [...]

  • Governor Palin, America’s Amos | Congress Arizona // Nov 16, 2011 at 5:48 pm

    [...] politics after her announcement that she is not seeking the GOP nomination for President. David Frum states, “Sarah Palin’s political voice had dwindled well before she announced her decision not [...]

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