So far as I can tell, Sarah Palin has four core beliefs:
1. Things go better with God.
2. Yay, Alaska!
3. Let's drill that sucker.
4. Curse you, political establishment.
Palinisms occur when Palin expresses one of these views in her idiosyncratically involuted syntax ("It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia"); when she expresses two or more of them in combination ("God's will has to be done, in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that"); or when she says anything at all in her imitable my sentence went on the Tilt-a-Whirl and got nauseous way ("And I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign, the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive and professional and helpful way for John McCain").
Tina Fey's caricature of Palin as an unprepared high-school student trying to bluff her way through an oral exam by mugging and flirting hit its mark not merely because of the genius of the mimicry, but because of its fundamentally accurate diagnosis of Palin as bullshit artist. Palin's exuberant incoherence testifies to an unusually wide gulf between confidence and ability. She is proud of what she doesn't know and contemptuous of those "experts" and "elitists" who are too knowledgeable to be trusted. This curious self-regard echoes through her book, Going Rogue, described by the critic Jonathan Raban as "a four-hundred-page paean to virtuous ignorance."
The issue is not that Palin, thrust upon the national stage with little warning, still doesn't know all the details. That's understandable. The issue is that she rarely appears to have the slightest grasp of what she's talking about even when she's supposed to know what she's talking about. For instance, in one of the 2008 campaign's most surreal examples of rhetorical excess, John McCain said Palin "knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America." A few days later, she offered a sample of her expertise in a town hall meeting: "Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. ... So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here."
In my opinion the really fascinating thing about Sarah Palin is NOT Sarah herself, it is the fact that there are so many people in America who seem to want to ignore her glaring deficiencies and project onto her some kind of superior sensibility that can not be measured by watching or listening to her speak, or examining her record as a mayor and governor. These people seem to believe that despite ALL indications so the contrary Sarah Palin is the last hope for this country.
That is why we must pay attention to Palin. It is not because of who she is, but because of what she represents about the willing ignorance of a certain population in this country. A population that are inclined to put their intellect on the back burner and only use their emotion driven belief system to select somebody who, for whatever reason, "feels" right to them.
And it is any wonder that for these almost exclusively Caucasian, middle aged people, with a limited educational background, would "feel" that Sarah Palin is more"right" than the intelligent, well spoken, biracial Barack Obama?
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