2nd Week The qualities of Sarah Palin

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Lexington

The qualities of Sarah Palin

A head for business, a natural communicator—and a disaster in waiting for the Republicans

Dec 2nd 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

SO WOULD President Sarah Palin have been able to prevent the embarrassment of WikiLeaks? You betcha. “Inexplicable,” was her first tweeted reaction to the affair: “I recently won in court to stop my book ‘America by Heart’ from being leaked, but US Govt can’t stop WikiLeaks’ treasonous act?”

Needless to say, the commentators she derides as the “liberal elite” and the “lamestream media” pounced upon this confusion of apples (Mrs Palin won a copyright case) and oranges (the federal government lacks the legal power to silence WikiLeaks) as further evidence, if such were needed, that the former governor of Alaska should never be trusted to lead the free world. They did the same last week, when she said in a radio interview: “Obviously, we gotta stand with our North Korean allies.” Mrs Palin’s occasional flubs make it easy to underestimate her. But opponents who dismiss her as an airhead do so at their peril.

Consider first her head for business. Mrs Palin has converted her two months of fame as John McCain’s running-mate in 2008 into a global brand and a fast-growing fortune. Her earnings are private, but her first book, “Going Rogue”, was a runaway bestseller and may have netted her $7m or more. Now “America by Heart” is flying off the shelves. She is said to earn about $100,000 per speech, and her multi-year broadcasting deal with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News reputedly earns her $1m a year. Millions of viewers are now glued to “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”, an air-brushed not-quite-reality television series in which she and her brood cavort with bears and exude familial wholesomeness amid Alaska’s magnificent snowbound panoramas. That is said to be bringing her another $2m for eight episodes.

Next, there is the politics. However telegenic and sassy she is, not even Mrs Palin could keep this glistening bubble of celebrity permanently aloft if it were not for the speculation that she hopes one day to be president. Here, too, she has shown a deftness of touch that only the most purblind critic would refuse to acknowledge. Her quixotic (at the time many said “flaky”) decision in the summer of 2009 to resign half-way through her term as governor has been brilliantly vindicated. Though now a private individual, holding no office and not yet formally seeking one, she has made herself one of the most powerful forces in the Republican Party just when its fortunes have rebounded.

This did not happen by accident. Mrs Palin has rare political qualities. She is bold: she embraced the tea parties well before their impact became obvious. She is innovative: she has perfected the art of using the new social media to reach over the heads of a hostile press. And for all that she lacks the fluency of a Barack Obama, she is a natural communicator. Her Facebook post on “death panels” altered the national debate on health reform. When she asked “How’s that hopey changey thing working out for ya?”, she encapsulated many people’s doubts about their president. Just one tweet (“Doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate”) galvanised opposition to the so-called Ground Zero mosque. She helped put ratification of the new START treaty on hold. She even turned the president’s articulateness into a weapon against him. “We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law,” she told a tea-party convention in Nashville.

But can she become president?

That said, you do not have to underestimate Mrs Palin to recognise that it will be hard for anyone so divisive to win a presidential election. Mr McCain points out that Ronald Reagan, too, was accused of being divisive. But the Gipper was popular among blue-collar Democrats as well as his own party. In contrast, a recent poll found that the obverse of Mrs Palin’s stellar ratings among Republicans was that only 8% of Democrats had a favourable view of her. Another reported that 34% of Americans saw her “very unfavourably”. She says she can beat Mr Obama, but for as long as those numbers hold nothing would suit him better than for the Republicans to choose her as their nominee for 2012.

For the present it is her fellow Republicans—those who are seeking the nomination, that is—who have the greater cause for concern, if only because the attention the media lavish on the Sage of Wasilla drowns out their own messages. Nate Silver, a polling guru, notes that her search traffic on Google is 16 times that of Mitt Romney, 14 times Newt Gingrich’s and 87 times Tim Pawlenty’s. Rivals are loth to criticise her lest she accuses them of belonging to the party “establishment”, a high misdemeanour in these tea-driven times. When Barbara Bush, a former first lady, said she hoped the former governor would remain in the Alaska she appears to like so well, Mrs Palin responded immediately by lashing out at the party’s “blue-bloods”.

Whether Mrs Palin sincerely believes she can and should be president may not become clear for some time. Because her celebrity and income depend on the idea that she might run, she has every reason not to rule herself out of the race too soon. Since she is already famous, she does not have to declare early in order to build up the name-recognition that other contenders still lack.

This suggests that she could keep her party in a state of fevered expectation for months to come. And even if in the end she does not run, she will have an impact on the race’s outcome. In the primaries before the mid-term elections, Republican candidates learnt the value of an approving tweet from the patron saint of the tea-partiers—even though over a third of her picks then failed to win seats in Congress. Joe Scarborough, a television host and former Republican congressman, called this week on the party’s leaders to say in public what they all complain about in private: that she could devastate the Republicans’ cause in 2012. For some reason, none of them wants to speak up first.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington

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