Saint Sarah

The sole legitimizing force behind Sarah Palin is the persecution that her supporters perceive that she is subjected to. It’s a movement – if we could call it that – animated by its sense of victimhood. The quantity and ferocity of criticism directed at Palin, right or wrong, is the ultimate arbiter of her worth as a political figure; what she has done, what she promised to do, what she could do, don’t seem to matter.

And so it is with Matthew Continetti’s “The Palin Persuasion”, an essay of more than 4,700 words trying to make the case for Sarah Palin in American politics. It’s extraordinary that in this long essay we don’t have any arguments for Sarah Palin emanating from things that Sarah Palin has done. After more than a year in the national political stage, the dynamism of the Palin phenomenon is entirely dependent on the convulsions it generates in the two extremes of the political spectrum.

It is very telling that her record as governor of Alaska gets only scant mention in Continetti’s essay and it’s the usual limited list of accomplishments, the ones we heard about when she was introduced to the nation. Since the defeat of the McCain ticket in 2008, Palin as governor failed to make any serious progress despite the fact that she had gained tremendous prominence and influence on the right and that she was at the helm of a conservative state. At the end she decided to resign, 18 months before the end of her term, admitting that she was no longer able to effectively govern the state. It should have been a “mugged by reality” moment for the Palinistas.  But for them her resignation was proof of the everlasting prosecution. Palin would leave governing, as the Washington Post reported, because it was “in the best interest of the state and will allow her to more effectively advocate for issues of importance to her, including energy independence and national security.” Those who can’t govern perpetually campaign.

Continetti argues that Palin is similar to three other political figures: Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan and Ronald Reagan. Making the association with the first two figures is politically questionable, and in the case of Ronald Reagan, Continetti can only establish one similarity only. It is true that Reagan was despised by the nation’s intellectual and political elites but the similarities between Reagan and Palin start and end there. From then on we have to deal with an increasing array of differences. Unlike Palin, the more the American public knew about Reagan the more they liked him. And if someone wanted to know how much Reagan was engaged with national issues and how well he mastered them, he could take a look at the Reagan and Robert F. Kennedy debate back in 1967, fourteen years before Reagan became president.

It would be interesting for Continetti to explain why Palin is more like Reagan and not more like Nixon. Again in the case of Nixon the similarities between him and Palin are limited. Nixon a very intelligent man (not wise though) with a deep knowledge and command of the national issues, was nevertheless loathed by Washington and he could appeal to his base only in proportion to the perceived animus of his detractors.

Sarah Palin reminds us of a certain someone who we are forever called to judge not for his accomplishments but for his promising potential. In conservative circles it does feel like we are all in a classroom similar to that created by Muriel Spark in The Prime of Mrs. Jean Brodie. We are asked to risk the future of the Republican party so that Mrs. Palin, now in her political prime, has the chance to realize her ill-defined political and perhaps personal goals. “For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like” but for the rest of us who take the future of the conservative movement in America seriously, this is a very scary scenario.