Sarah Appeal

(Chop Suey--Edward Hopper)



I heard clips, sound bites from Sarah Palin's speech to the Tea Party audience. I almost said, "Convention," but since the attendees paid hefty ticket prices for admission, it struck me as more of a performance, or rock concert than a political convention. Although, what do I know? It may be delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions also pay hefty ticket prices, just in different ways.

I did not feel I was missing much by just getting sound bites from Sarah. Listening to her is not like listening to Barack Obama, where one thought, one sentences leads to another and you miss something if you just hear his punchy one liner at the end of his sixth paragraph, because he's been building toward that line, investing it with meaning for six paragraphs. There's nuance, thought, the on the one hand, but then again on the other, with President Obama.

None of that with Sarah.

Sarah is about zingers.

She knows her audience. Unlike Obama, she is not trying to persuade. She is not trying to say, well I know you may disagree with some or all of what I say, but let me show you I understand, I hope, the basis for your objections and I respect them, but I'm going to show you why I came to the opposite conclusion.

Sarah is not about any of that.

She is about reinforcing what is already out there, about turning resentment into outrage, about stoking the flames, arousing passions.

And who exactly, is she trying to arouse? I choose that word deliberately. She is not trying to seduce, which implies bringing someone along gradually, enticing, being aware of some basis for reluctance to respond, overcoming that and finally bending them to your will. No, she is dancing on the stage to those who are where they are because they've already decided what they want. She is not a strip tease artist; she's a pole dancer.

Sorry about that image. Sexist, I suppose, but so hard to resist.

So who is this crowd who is already in the club, drinking at the bar when Sarah gets up to perform?

They are the self perceived losers. They know full well they do not own the country or run it. They have had the experience of being dismissed, disrespected and shunted aside by professors, classmates, strangers. They look at their own homes, the failures of their children to finish school or obtain athletic scholarships to college or to achieve any measure of success. Their kids are not going off to Harvard or Swarthmore--for that matter they have never even heard of Swarthmore. Their kids have gotten pregnant or got someone pregnant at sixteen and are now in the process of temporary employment, getting laid off, losing their automobiles to repossessers, and all the other indignities of life among the struggling class of non graduates.

And Sarah is saying, it's all right.

That Sarah's daughter got pregnant, unmarried, was viewed gleefully by her detractors. Oh, right Sarah, just say no. Now she's sunk. Au contraire my friends, the pregnant daughter was the best thing, culturally speaking, that could have happened to Sarah Palin. I'm not at all sure Karl Rove did not set that up. That pregnant daughter was the perfect credential for the loser class. I'm with you. I'm one of you. I know what you're going through and I'm not going to let anyone tell me that experience disqualifies me from the Presidency or leadership of the Right or the right.

In representative forms of government, performers (i.e. politicians) have to decide who their audience is. For whom do you feel most comfortable performing? Most politicians do not have the range of a Meryl Streep. They have a tough time playing a grocery store clerk in Lower Yorta, PA one moment and a high flying editor of Cosmopolitan magazine the next.

Beyond that, politicians have a certain imperative to stay in character. If Sarah is just folks one moment and the sophisticate the next, then she is not sincere. It's just a role.

Beyond that, Sarah and most politicians are not well enough trained to play different parts convincingly, even they wanted to.

So she creates a persona which is a magnification, a clarification of what she thinks she already is.

The fact is, she is not a questioner, or a person who thinks about the complexities of issues. She is ignorant of many of the issues which perplex people at the Brookings Institution, the World Bank or the Center for Strategic and International Sudies. She does not bother trying to do her homework before her interviews, because, well, she never was much about homework.


And she's saying, that's okay. No, I didn't do my homework, which is why I kept flunking out of various schools, or leaving before I could flunk out. Just couldn't read and absorb all that stuff. But I know what I've learned in the school of hard knocks.

There is a wonderful scene in The Wire, where Howard Colvin, a former Baltimore police, is trying to persuade one of the toughest soldiers in the Barksdate crime organization, a man named Wee Bey, a man serving life without parole, to allow Colvin to adopt Wee Bay's son.

Colvin presents himself as cut from the same cloth as Wee Bey, no better, no better educated, no more successful in life, in no way morally or intellectually or personally superior to Wee Bey. Colvin turned right down the street and Wee Bey turned left, and they wound up on opposite sides but neither side was morally superior. There but for the grace of God, sort of thing. Colvin is saying, you and I came up on the mean streets and we are what we are, but your son has a chance to be something different, maybe something better. Let him go.

You don't find out until much later Wee Bey has actually responded to what Colvin has said. It happens when Wee Bey's wife, his son's mother, visits him, sits across the glass divide and objects to giving up the son she wants out on the corner earning her a good living selling drugs. She tells Wee Bey the son has to be a soldier to man up as Wee Bay had done when he was growing up.

And Wee Bay looks at her with some sympathy, the first time you ever see Wee Bay show even the faintest trace of sympathy, and he says, "Yeah, and who would want to be me? If he didn't have to."

There it is. The loser finally sees he's a loser and has faced it.

But Sarah is the mother saying this lot in life is just fine. We can be proud of ourselves. We are losers and proud of it. Not Sarah, nor her thousands of followers has the courage or the honesty or the sheer personal fortitude to look at their lives as Wee Bey has done.

But if you vote for me, and if I'm President then you are as good as anybody.

Sarah's not the first to play that card. Won't be the last. She's just prettier than most who've tried it.

Works for her, apparently.