Early Years of Sarah Palin

Going Rogue, Ch. 1 § 1-7

Palin's writing is not as stilted as I expected it to be. There have been a few howlers along the way--ludicrous folksy dribble that has no place on the printed page--and the occasional informality that I would have asked her to take out if I had been her editor at Harper. But overall, it's not such a horrendous read. I certainly write more fluently than I speak, and the same could easily be true of Palin.





Palin's life is far less interesting than that of her father, Chuck Heath. She does a decent job of depicting the man as a hardworking, generous and upright person. By his daughter's account, Heath was a dedicated educator and coach as well as a highly talented athlete. I'm from a blue-collar family, and I appreciate her stories about her parents' hard work and frugality. What bothers me is when Palin suggests that her small-town upbringing makes her morally superior to others. My parents have toiled away to provide for me, and they raised me to live responsibly and to make good decisions. They did this without instilling me with some sense that we are extraordinary or especially praiseworthy.

They also managed to turn me into a functional adult without a pervasive Christian faith. Palin's sanctimonious discussion of her attempt to fill the "God-shaped vaccuum" in her soul is the most difficult material to get through.

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Palin has a sister name Heather Heath. I hate people who give their children stupid names. Plenty more of that to come.



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"[Patriotism] stirred in me as my class read the Pledge of Allegiance. I felt proud and tall as we pledged on our hearts every morning." p. 15

The Pledge of Allegiance never gave me a warm feeling in my heart. It never seemed like anything other than a hollow exercise to me, and that was reinforced in 2002 when the state legislature tried to make it mandatory that all public school students say the Pledge every day. None of the kids in any of my classes--even in highly Republican central Pennsylvania--ever showed any enthusiasm for the words in the Pledge. The more history I learned, the more obvious it became to me that the words in the Pledge were hypocritical. It painted America as a country that didn't keep its promises.

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"I developed a love of reading and writing early on." p. 15

I was utterly astounded when I read this. I can't force myself to believe that the young Sarah Heath was a bibliophile. The idea that that women enjoys poetry or literature is totally baffling.



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"The downside [of the economic development spurred by the completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline] was the concurrent spike in social problems. Without the law enforcement resources to keep things in check, prostitution, gambling and illegal drugs proliferated in the growing population, especially in the pipeline towns like Fairbanks." p. 21

Shouldn't someone who glorifies the frontier lifestyle be a little more accepting of prostitution, gambling and substance abuse? Those activities are hallmarks the American frontier. It is precisely because law enforcement has better things to do that these things are the last priority in frontier areas. Palin earlier complained about being pulled over on a snowmachine and wondering whether the officer involved didn't have better things to do. I think someone who rides a snowmachine where it doesn't belong is--depending on where exactly the incident happened, which Palin didn't specify--a much bigger threat to public safety than someone who gambles or buys a hooker.

I count Palin's complaint about being pulled over as her first indication that she thinks the rules don't apply to her. Everyone who gets pulled over sneers that the police have better things to do than enforce traffic regulations. But she doesn't seem to have any problem with state resources being used to police victimless activities like gambling and drug use.

Going Rogue

At long last I have purchased and begun reading Sarah Palin's memoir Going Rogue. I will be blogging my thoughts about the tome as I work through it.

My inaugural comment about Palin's book is that I find it impossible to respect anyone who uses a ghostwriter. If you're smart enough to hold high office, you're smart enough to write your own book. Good writers and mediocre writers alike rely on editors. Only abysmally bad writers can't cobble together a draft to send to their editor without a coauthor holding their hand every step of the way.

Chapter 1, § I

The stilted writing hits you from the very start. Palin recounts on page 2 that a constituent at the 2008 Alaska State Fair told her:

"Price of energy's pretty high, Governor. When are they gonna ramp up drilling?"

I don't know how people talk in Alaska, but I honestly doubt that anyone said something substantially like that quote to then-Gov. Palin's face. That's a pretty transparent attempt to insert one of Palin's pet issues into what is ostensibly a biographical section of her book. She's trying to push the idea that, to folks in Alaska, it's just common sense to support drilling for oil. No doubt the breakdown among Alaskans on the issue of domestic oil drilling is different than it is in the rest of the country, but the way Palin drops that in there without comment is pretty self-serving.

A few weeks ago I read a Rolling Stone article penned by Matt Taibbi explaining why Sarah Palin represents everything that is wrong with America. I agreed with most of what he said, and I always enjoy anyone taking shots at Palin, who is just about the worst thing that could possibly have happened to American politics. The most striking thing Taibbi said, though, was that he supports Barack Obama because of what he says about America.

It's more than just the fact that he would be the first black president. His various shortcomings notwithstanding, Obama is a thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate and open-minded person. He is no radical; we can't expect from him to bring about the socialist revolution the right keeps shouting about. There is no prospect of Obama overturning the political power structure in America; if Wall Street thought he was going to put the lid back on their honey pot, they would not have contributed so much to his early campaign during the early part of the primaries. But I think he is the best that we can expect that system to produce.

The divisive rhetoric of the right is only fully coherent if Obama is a dangerous outsider, so that is the narrative his opponents have constructed around him. It is a nebulous construct indeed; we have the word 'terrorists' thrown around without much attention to historical accuracy or grammatical number. The McCain campaign's official line is that Obama has a close friendship with '60s-era radical and domestic terrorist (singular) William Ayers. Never mind that their association was strictly professional, involved only charitable efforts with other leading Chicago citizens and a single fundraiser for Obama, and ended over three years ago. What matters is that voters hear the word 'terrorist'.

That word plays into two other (sometimes subliminal) memes pushed by the right. If Obama is a '60s-style leftist radical, is he also socialist or communist? Maybe he's a Muslim terrorist. Or maybe he's with the Nation of Islam- a violent black separatist and a different form of '60s radical.

Once these ideas get inside the soggy heads of so-called low-information voters, it all intermixes into a hazy, anti-American caricature. Both McCain and Sarah Palin are calling Obama a socialist; Palin and McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer have made comments about certain areas being "not real" America and some being more patriotic and pro-America. It's clear from the remarks made by McCain surrogates that, contrary to what Taibbi's argument, they think of conservatives as the best Americans, the ones who embody what America really stands for.

The game here is in-group identification. It has been no secret that the Republicans' best chance to overcome Obama in a very Democratic year is to paint him as alien. Most of the bad things about Obama stem from the degree to which he has sold himself out, ingratiating himself to the political establishment in order to become a player in the presidential race. Hitting Obama on that count doesn't play well with thinking voters, since their major alternative is a 26-year Senator who has assiduously followed the incumbent president during his second term in office. The other reality-based criticism of Obama is his lack of experience, which also doesn't carry a lot of water with anyone lucid enough to understand the danger in putting Sarah Palin within a heart attack or metastatic melanoma of the presidency.

With the legitimate criticisms blunted by their own candidates' shortcomings, the right has had to resort to turning Obama into a scary, angry, communist black man. The people who respond to those kinds of tactics are not the ones I would put forward as exemplars of what is great about America. One of the major reasons why I support Obama's candidacy is that statement that his election would make about America. He would not merely be the first black president; he would be a president who won despite prolonged appeals to ignorance and bigotry by his opponents.

More on Palin

Sarah Palin is a major gambit. The ubiquitous sports metaphor among pundits has it that she is a Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch effort to bolster a desperate Republican campaign. The Alaska governor was a dark horse when Sen. John McCain announced her as his running mate Aug. 29. Her nomination seems carefully tailored to appeal to the electoral blocs in which Sen. Barack Obama is perceived as weak. Palin should play very well with the voters supposedly alienated by Obama's infamous gaffe two weeks before the Pennsylvania primary in April. Obama was speaking at a private fundraiser in San Francisco when he said that, in reaction to the indifference of the Powers That Be, rural voters in Pennsylvania "cling" to the Second Amendment, religion, and xenophobia. Apparently dwelling on Obama's five-month-old comment, McCain and his people chose the evangelical governor of a state with an even stronger gun culture than we have in Pennsylvania.

During her acceptance speech, Palin brought up Obama's comment, saying that Obama addresses working class voters with respect when he speaks in Scranton, Penn., but mocks them behind their backs in San Francisco. The problem with Obama's comment in April was not that it betrayed a lack of understanding of the working class; indeed, there is a great deal of bitterness among the working class in this state. Gun ownership and church attendance are high in rural areas of Pennsylvania. These are cultural pillars which remain constant in the lives of blue-collar voters buffeted by the sort of things Obama and Biden talk about in stump speeches. Obama was obnoxious in his delivery, but his observation was sound. In the days since the Republican Convention, he and his running mate have pointed out that Republicans said much about God and guns but nothing about the issues which face the working class. This response is smart. Palin can field-dress a moose. Fine, but what are she and McCain going to do to lower gas prices, expand access to health care, create jobs for the middle class?

We have heard from the Republicans for months that Obama is naught but a carefully contrived spectacle, devoid of substance. He has been derided as a celebrity and accused of relying on identity politics. All of these memes have been irrevocably undermined by McCain's choice of running mate. The only requirement imposed on the vice president by the Constitution is that he or she must be fit to assume the Presidency; it is for this duty that Republicans have endorsed Palin. It's laughable for them to continue to disparage Obama's thin resume.

So many of the issues raised by McCain and his surrogates regarding Obama's fitness to take up the staggering responsibility of the presidency apply equally to Palin. How can it be said that he is too green to serve as commander-in-chief, but she is not? The pinnacle of Palin's executive experience is the governorship of a state no larger than the Harrisburg metropolitan area. Has her short time in that post prepared her to manage the vast executive departments of the federal government? If Democrats are wrong to treat their candidate like a celebrity, should Republicans refer to Palin as a "rock star"?

On the day that McCain introduced her to the nation, Palin parroted Sen. Hillary Clinton's remark about the 18 million cracks the senator's supporters had made in the glass ceiling that is the American presidency. Attaching a female to the bottom of the ticket in hopes that women will vote their gender is as sexist as any remark made by Democrats about Palin neglecting her children to run for office. It is obvious that the Republicans think women voters are stupid and that they condone identity voting when it is to their benefit.

The forfeiture of so many prominent talking points is the price McCain has paid to energize the Republican base. The Religious Right and social conservatives adore the governor and don't care much about the contradictions her presence forces on the campaign.

McCain neuters major talking point with VP pick

Awash in media coverage of the Democratic Convention, Sen. John McCain announced today that his running mate will be Republican Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. Palin was a dark horse, and the fact that her selection remained a secret for so long might have been an impressive media coup had the announcement not been overwhelmed by Sen. Barack Obama's historic acceptance speech a mere 12 hours earlier.

The McCain campaign has not been exceedingly deft in its interaction with the media, though reporters have taken dives for McCain on one or two important occasions. If the timeline surrounding the selection had been different, this might have signaled a reversal for the campaign.

Much like Obama's pick, Palin sketches out a number of contrasts to the top of her ticket. She is 28 years McCain's junior, and has not held any office in Washington. Palin came into office as a reformer in a state teeming with corruption less than two years ago, so her rhetoric about Washington will probably approach that favored by Obama. She gave birth to a son with Down Syndrome in April; she and her husband decided not to abort the pregnancy when they learned of their unborn son's disability. Her vociferous opposition to abortion makes her a pleasing choice for the religious right. If she becomes the first female vice president, she will break the old-Protestant-white-guy mold on as many counts as Barack Obama.

The obvious problem with choosing a neophyte as nominee is that it undermines the McCain campaign's primary attack meme against Barack Obama. A vice president must be qualified for the presidency, and not merely because of the dictates of the Constitution. The Republican National Convention next week will endorse a woman with 21 months of experience in state government to be commander-in-chief. If Obama's resume is thin, Palin's is transparent.

The strategy behind Palin relies partially on her reputation as a reformer in her own party, which McCain hopes will reinforce his erstwhile claim to maverick-dom, and partially on the hopes that she will attract disaffected Clinton voters. But her primary advantage may be her appeal to the hard right. Palin is extremely Protestant, speaking out loudly against abortion rights and advocating Creationism in her state's school curricula. One consolation that came with McCain's primary victory was the elimination of three of his rivals who indicated in a debate that they do not believe in evolution. The choice of Palin may give unfortunate credence to the anti-reality crowd.