Beginning of the End for Sarah Palin?

Like a meteor, she barged into the political game. But the media buzz won’t help — she’s not going to make it to the White House. She is stupid, conservative and polarizing.

The fairytale journey of Sarah Palin to the center stage of American policy began on the day John McCain pulled her out of a snow-covered cabin in Alaska and posed her by his side as his deputy in the presidential campaign. From then on, her public profile only kept skyrocketing: huge rallies, a fat contract with the conservative TV network Fox News, two books topping the bestsellers list and, of course, her own reality show.

But in the last few weeks, something apparently started creaking in the machine built to take Palin all of the way to the White House. Rightly or not, she was accused of indirect responsibility for the shootings in Arizona, where six people were killed and Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was critically wounded (She is so far recovering). The claim is that Palin’s disparaging style toward the policy of the Democrats had crossed the line and turned into an actual incitement, which allegedly affected a mentally disturbed murderer.

Among other things, it was argued against her that as congressional elections approached, her website showed a map of the United States with bulls-eyes over the districts of Democratic congresspeople who voted for health care reform (naturally, including Gabrielle Giffords). The fact that the Democrats also circulated a similar map in the past against Republican candidates didn’t matter. Palin was forced to defend herself and got messed up even further, when she used the sensitive expression “blood libel” in describing the attacks directed at her. Ever since, her standing in polls has been in free fall, and there are those raising the possibility that she’s not going to run for the presidency at all.

Catch-22

In spite of this, it’s too early to eulogize Palin — at least as a strong candidate in the Republican primaries. She’s still the most sweeping politician in America, and from this standpoint, the scope of the media coverage she’s getting provides a correct picture when depicting her as a spearhead of the opposition to President Obama. However, from the beginning there has been a deceptive dimension of this picture as well, which is that in practice, the truth is that at no stage did she have a real chance to win in the general elections, even if she did win the primaries. Obama knows that by the way, and he’s praying for her victory in the primary elections. From this vantage point, we can definitely complain that the American press has been scaring us for no reason, and to a lesser extent, so has the Israeli one, dragging after the former and focusing on Palin much more than on Republican candidates who have veritable chances of defeating Obama.

How can this phenomenon be explained? A total dissonance between the tremendous media and public buzz the presidential candidate manages to evoke and her genuine chances to be elected, which amount to zero? Well, in one sentence you can say that Palin is caught in a sort of a Catch-22. She succeeds in generating this buzz, vital for any candidate striving to win, thanks to her eccentric features, even though these very features indeed prevent her from becoming a candidate with a practical chance to win big. If you like, you can pick three out of them as being especially problematic: Palin is just too stupid, too conservative and too polarizing.

Trying to Memorize the Details

Intelligence: An American president does not have to possess an extraordinarily high IQ. Still, there exists a minimum standard from the public point of view, so that someone not meeting it is perceived as a person not eligible to hold the most senior position in the world. Here are a few examples of things that are a must-know if you want to be elected president: For instance, that the U.S. is supporting South Korea while being in a conflict with the North — and not the other way around; that Africa is a continent and not a country and that the candidate contending against you for the position of vice president, who has already served for decades in the Senate, is named Joe Biden. John McCain’s advisers can still remember the heartbreaking look of Palin surrounded by hundreds of note cards while sitting in her hotel room in a bathrobe and in a condition of a nervous breakdown, trying to memorize this kind of information to no avail.

Conservatism: Quite schematically, it could be said that about a third of Americans identify as Democrats, a third as Republicans and a third as independents. Therefore, a candidate willing to get elected to the presidency has to rake in almost all of his party’s support base, plus a significant portion of independent voters, who are positioned in the center of the political map and hold moderate views. All the surveys conducted to date show that Palin is unable to break through this barrier and carry away the independent voters. They are simply refusing to vote for somebody who’s identified as a leader of the conservative tea party movement, supportive of banning abortions even in the case of rape, in opposition to stem cell research and in support of teaching creationism, which contradicts the theory of evolution.

Polarization: This is not just Palin’s conservatism arousing such an acute antagonism in the midst of Democrats, independents and, increasingly, also among moderate Republicans. It’s also, and perhaps primarily, her style. Everything that makes her a goddess to the tea party adherents causes potential voters in the center of the political map to avoid her like the plague: the impassioned rhetoric and a tight hookup with controversial TV host Glenn Beck; her endorsement of extreme candidates — a number of them who are truly odd — in Congressional elections; and even her lifestyle, which includes hobbies like going on hunting trips to chase reindeers up north.

Let Her Stay in Alaska

A survey performed in the past few days in New Hampshire — one of the most important states in the primaries — put Palin in fourth place, with only seven percent of support. Even before that, when her star seemed to be rising, Barbara Bush — the mother of the 43rd president and wife of the 41st one — was once asked in a rare interview what she though about Palin. She shared: “I … thought she was beautiful, and I think she’s very happy in Alaska, and I hope she’ll stay there.” As it looks for the moment, Mrs. Bush can relax, and so can we.