Day By Day

Friday, November 13, 2009

Silly Sarah?

Drudge has an excerpt from Sarah's book on his site. Read it here. From her account the McCain staffers assigned to handle her were inept, patronizing, and dishonest. This may well be true, but her insubordinate attitude toward them reveals more than Sarah might want people to know. Ann Althouse explains:

[I quote at length because it's just too good to excerpt]

She had trouble getting phone numbers? She "snuck" around, relying on friends? Like it's a Nancy Drew caper. And did she not see the downside of allowing right-winger to draw her out? That wasn't fair to McCain. McCain's people locked her down? Did she think carefully about their reasons? Does she think carefully about anything? Why did she agree to be McCain's running mate? She won't take responsibility for her own difficulties.

Apparently, they were afraid you were not ready, and they were right, so why didn't you trust them or at least accept that you owed them control over the presidential campaign? You agreed to take the subordinate position, and you had to know that their reasons for picking you had to do with image and style. If you weren't prepared to do it their way, you should not have accepted the part. At the very least, you should not have been mystified about the way they were treating you. You should have been looking at the campaign strategy from every angle and building your sophistication, not just aching to burst free and expose yourself to the world — which, as you soon learned, did not go well.

It seems that Sarah Palin wasn't able or didn't want to bother to analyze whether she was ready to debut on the big media stage, and she wasn't large-minded enough to think beyond herself to what it would mean for the whole campaign. That is, she was dumb. She was too dumb to handle campaign responsibilities properly, so she was clearly too dumb to step into the role of President of the United States.

Could she build up her political intelligence? Might she have it now or by 2012? If these 2 pages of "Going Rogue" are any evidence, she is displaying her weaknesses all over again, and she is still too dumb to be President. And, most scarily, she doesn't know how dumb she still is.
Read the whole thing here.

Dumb is perhaps a bit too strong a word -- naive is far better. Washington politics ain't beanbag -- it is nasty and duplicitous and brutal and unfair and disgusting and every other negative word you care to throw at it. It represents human behavior at its worst. And to succeed at it you have to be willing to draw upon the expertise of those disgusting monstosities who populate the beltway environs. They know what they are doing. Yes they are trying to use you -- let them, and use them too. Political instincts and behavior honed in Wasilla are not going to work in national politics. Get used to it.

Ann may be wrong about Sarah's intelligence. I think she is. But she is right about one thing. This excerpt from Sarah's book reveals that Palin has not yet been able to shed the Capraesque image she had of herself when she started her remarkable odyssey into the wilds of Washington. This lack of self-awareness and intellectual growth is disturbing..., unless, of course, it is a calculated pose cynically intended to present to her numerous supporters an image of purity that supports their general revulsion toward the nation's political elites. Is she really Jimmy Stewart crusading against the monsters of the Washingtons swamp or could she perhaps be Andy Griffith in "The Crowd Roars?" cynically adopting the pose of plain-speaking, home-spun virtue. Or is she just plain Sarah from Wasilla? None of these, I fear, is an attractive alternative.