The Misunderestimation of Sarah Palin

Melissa Harris-Perry
November 23, 2010
December 13, 2010 edition of The Nation.
http://www.thenation.com/article/156650/misunderestimation-sarah-palin

I assigned Sarah Palin's Going Rogue in my course on
women in contemporary US media and politics. I spent the
week walking around town, riding the train and dashing
through airports with the book tucked under my arm.
"Isn't she awesome?" gushed a waitress in a New Jersey
restaurant. My seatmate on a flight to Louisiana smiled
knowingly and whipped out her copy of Decision Points.
On my way to California a guy in a University of Alaska
sweatshirt nearly threw himself across the aisle to chat
with me. It was a camaraderie with perfect strangers
that I once evoked by wearing my Obama sweatshirt.

I expected my Princeton students--mostly young women,
self-identified as liberal and feminist and actively
engaged in local and national politics--to be critical
of Palin. But although they found her authorial voice
irritatingly self-assured and disagreed with her policy
conclusions, they also found her surprisingly
compelling. They thoughtfully drew parallels between her
nontraditional (dare I say mavericky?) career choices
and those of Hillary Clinton, whose Living History we
read the same week.

I pushed my personal Palin test one step further by
watching Sarah Palin's Alaska with my 8-year-old
daughter. My kid's dislike of Palin is pure, instinctive
and content-free. It's not as though she has well-formed
policy positions; she just knows that Palin was an
opponent to be vanquished. Born in Hyde Park, my
daughter learned to read "Obama" as her first word,
because it was plastered on signs all over our
neighborhood in 2004. My kid accompanied me to campaign
events throughout 2008 and has heard many kitchen table
commentaries railing against Palin and the Tea Party.
But twenty minutes into the first episode, she was
transfixed. She loved watching the baby bears. She was
jealous that Palin had a studio in her house: "Mom,
can't you get one from MSNBC?" She cracked up with hand-
clapping hysteria as the mountain-scaling Palin shouted,
"I was never a gymnast or a cheerleader!" At the end my
kid declared, "I know we don't agree with her, but her
life sure is interesting."

Eight-year-olds don't vote. My students are not planning
to switch parties. My book toting elicited as much
clucking disapproval as it did enthusiastic bonding. My
experiences are not scientific or systematic, but after
reading and watching Palin and the reactions to her
these past few weeks I am convinced that underestimating
Sarah Palin is a mistake of epic proportions.

Much of the urban East Coast discourse about Palin and
other Tea Party women is dismissive and mocking. Most
Democratic and many Republican commentators rely on a
basic assertion that Palin is stupid and therefore not
credible. But this perspective ignores that visceral
emotions are at least as important as sober rationality
in making political choices. Whatever her failings,
Palin has successfully harnessed new media forms to
engage and direct emotional reactions in ways that are
surprisingly effective.

Using Twitter, Facebook, corporate-news punditry,
readable memoirs and reality television, Palin has
managed to subvert traditional media. Rather than pay
for advertising, she is getting paid to advertise her
politics. Rather than wait for kingmakers to declare her
a contender, she smirks while predicting her victories.
Her reality show is a pinnacle of this new media-
saturation strategy. The show's producer, Mark Burnett
of Survivor and The Apprentice, pioneered the
infiltration of reality shows into network lineups. His
ingenious use of product integration exploded the
profitability and desirability of reality television.
While highbrow critics mocked the lame, melodramatic
obviousness of reality TV, the genre revolutionized
American entertainment. Sarah Palin's Alaska is the
ultimate test of this form. Will product placement of a
candidate prove to be the flattest, fastest, newest
route to the American presidency?

In her brilliant new book Reality Bites Back, Jennifer
Pozner argues that Americans prefer the scripted
"reality" of reality TV to the messy complexity of our
lives because these shows "both play to and reinforce
deeply ingrained societal biases about women and men,
love and beauty, race and class, consumption and
happiness in America." And Palin is the perfect reality-
show star: more ruthless, more eloquent, more
audaciously dishonest, more single-mindedly ambitious,
more likable and eminently more electable than Hillary
Clinton in 2008. She is a pencil skirt–wearing
marathoner who operates without a shred of shame or
self-doubt. There is something remarkable and
frightening about the depth of her belief in her
narrative. Every criticism, every defeat, every attack
is just evidence of the virtue of her chosen path. Her
show replaces the tough tradeoffs of a politically
complicated and economically insecure world with a fiery
self-assurance born of the hard, bright blindness of
righteousness. In uncertain times, this unassailable
certainty, set in the compelling aesthetic of the
American frontier and packaged with pitch-perfect
editing, proves magnetic even for those who disagree
with her.

Pozner reminds us that media are "as much a
dissemination mechanism for ideological persuasion
as...a means of entertainment;" they are "our most
common agent of socialization, shaping and informing our
collective ideas about people, politics and public
policy." Media, especially reality TV, encourage us to
think less and buy more. They capture our emotions and
silence our inner critic. They send us in search of
products to fulfill our deepest desires. Palin may just
be the political embodiment of our contemporary cultural
moment; a presidential candidate born from TV's easy
emotional draw and limited analytic capacity, a
candidate who needs only 140 characters to explain
policy, a candidate who attracts us even when she
repulses us. As with reality TV, to underestimate Palin
is to invite her to reach ever deeper into the American
consciousness.

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