Hating Palin

Why do so many people hate Sarah Palin with such passion? When John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate she was a total unknown to most people. Democratic activists rushed to fill in the blanks with their own narrative. Within 48 hours multiple stories were circulating about her past, none of them true. No accusation, no matter how outlandish, was out of bounds. There was serious speculation that she had faked a pregnancy in order to cover for her daughter.

It didn't help that the McCain campaign tried to reshape her. I saw an interview taped before the campaign and she was direct, smart and articulate (it helped that this was a travel log about the governor's house and office). After a month's coaching she was stumbling and rambling.

You would think that things would have quieted down after the election but they didn't. Near Thanksgiving Palin was talking about the Alaska economy at a turkey farm. By using an unusual angle a cameraman managed to include both Palin and a turkey being processed some ways behind her. This made the national news. The fact that she didn't know what was happening behind her back was given as a sign of her cluelessness.

She continued to be the butt of Letterman jokes, usually involving derogatory sexual terms and sometimes including her children.

Vanity Fair has a hit piece on her in its August, 2009 issue.

There have been fifteen ethics complaints about her. All have been dismissed.

Keep in mind that she was number two on the ticket for an election that was held eight months ago. McCain has long been forgotten but attacks on Palin continue.

We can dismiss Vanity Fair and Letterman as playing to their audience. If Vanity Fair's anti-Palin issue didn't sell then we would never see another hit piece. But it did sell. There is a market for this vitriol. Why?

I can think of a couple of reasons. The first and most obvious is that she continues to be popular with a significant portion of the country. She is (or was before her resignation) a serious candidate for president. This scares the left and they have gone into permanent campaign mode to stop her. This includes constantly belittling her and emphasizing any miss-statements (Huffington thought it important enough to post when she refereed to the Department of Justice and the Department of Law. They would never have revealed it is Obama made a similar mistake.)

That explains some of the attacks but not the intensity. This is personal. A lot of people outright hate her. There are a lot of factors here.

A lot of the anti-Palin hatred isn't against Sarah Palin the person. It is against Sarah Palin the media creation. People believe that she tried to ban books, etc. and hate that person.

There is also the insistence that she is a vindictive half-wit. Vanity Fair said this about her:

Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life's injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

Keep in mind that Obama's qualifications - part of a term in the senate -made Palin look overqualified.

This is part of a continuing depiction. Conservatives are dumb. Liberals are smart. Bush, Gore, and Kerry all graduated from Harvard or Yale. They all had similar grades in college (Cs). According to army aptitude tests they all have very similar IQs but Bush is depicted as dumb while Gore and Kerry are intellectuals. This carries over to almost all Conservatives. A hoax has been circulated several times in the last few years that purports to rank the last 12 presidents by IQ. All of the Democrats come in above all of the Republicans (except Nixon) with Reagan barely above average and both presidents Bush being below average. Depicting Palin as oversexed but dumb is following in this tradition.

There is also a less savory aspect to the Palin-hatred. Obama's election supposedly showed that anyone can grow up to be president. Actually it shows that anyone who managed to get into Yale or Harvard can be president. Obama and Clinton may have started out poor but they managed to get into Ivy League colleges.

In fact, Ronald Reagan was the last president who did not graduate from Harvard or Yale. Clinton and both Bushes went to Yale (W then got an MBA from Harvard). Unsuccessful candidates Kerry, Gore, and Dukakis all went to Harvard. Palin is the odd person out in this company. This shows in some of the comments made about her - the idea that she thought that Africa was a country instead of a continent, the Department of Law comment I already referred to, and the tenor of Letterman's jokes.

America may be ready to accept a black president but we are not ready to accept a blue collar candidate.

In contrast, Palin really is like most of Americans. She bounced around different colleges before getting her degree. She did not