Sarah Palin is smart, pretty, and adventurous -- a strong red-white-and-blue conservative. Truth be told, conservative women do like and indeed love Sarah Palin; ask several genres of conservative women, from the stay-at-home mom to the working mom to the conservative youth leader at your local college campus, about Sarah Palin, and you'll find that the common sentiment goes something like this: "I love Sarah Palin and I think the world of her. I wish her success in bolstering the conservative cause, but Tina Fey and The View and Oprah have told me that I'm not supposed to think she should run." There are many other roles RINOs would cast her into if possible -- U.S. senator, RNC committee chair, NOW president -- but President of the United States is apparently her manifest destiny.
A self-proclaimed "Rush baby raising five more Rush babies" called into Rush Limbaugh's show recently, offering a deeply offensive but devastatingly accurate reason about why women -- including conservative women -- would be so jealous of Sarah Palin that it would affect their judgement about voting. The caller boxed this phenomenon neatly into the "mean girls" category, where we regular girls don't like the popular all-American knockout with the QB boyfriend so we vote for the girl with the glasses as homecoming queen instead. Sarah Palin has it all; she's a brainy chick with glasses whose glasses only serve to accentuate her feminine hotness, dammit. AND she has the ultimate Hunk Stud in Todd. AND they have five children, so they've been getting lucky with each other too. AND their marriage has lasted, so any erstwhile hope of problems in her life which would serve as a salve to a jealous girl's spite is missing: and to top it off, she has a career. In a field that is dominated by men. IT'S...JUST...NOT...FAIR!!! With all this in mind, you would think that it follows that conservative women, like liberal women, hate her.
(The above, of course, is a sanitized version of what the caller said. The truth is, the caller opined -- and Rush agreed -- that any women who is at least an "8" on the hotness scale will not be threatened by Palin at all. So it would seem only natural that Sarah is hated by conservative and liberal women alike.)
But not so fast.
Remember the natural division among the spokeswomen in the Conservative and the Liberal movements. Not just in terms of politics -- that is axiomatic -- but especially on looks, with the implication being that most Democrats -- who are lucky to hit a "3", see the Internet poster "Theirs vs. Ours" -- are torn between suicide and genocide at the mere sight of Palin. They resolve their feelings of jealousy and inadequacy by spewing an entire vomitorium of rage and bile at Palin, every time they get the chance. The same thing happens even more forcefully with Gay Men, who are torn between their rage that Sarah Palin attracts more male attention than they EVER will, and their latent futile desire to land Todd Palin for themselves. So the upshot of all this is that Sarah is beloved of conservatives and hated of liberals, just what would have been predicted on the basis of her politics alone.
With petty personal jealousy out of the way, conservative women adore all of these things about Sarah Palin in the same way we adore a diamond. Much as we love these jewels in our lives, we also admit that their brilliance doesn't constitute the core of our being, we are independent people beyond a brightly polished jewel on our fingers. Sarah Palin is such a jewel. We conservative women are grateful for her, but not obsessed.
As much as conservative women admire and respect Sarah Palin, Palin's intellect and intellectual stamina has never been given a fitting platform, since the main information gatekeepers in our society are liberal women, whom we have already shown above are bitterly jealous of Palin and so wish to ruin her. Therefore her brilliance has not yet been translated beyond her (and our own) political comfort zone. Without help, she lacks the ability to cross over and present herself in the wider social and political strata. Just as love isn't enough to sustain a marriage, Tea Party-speak isn't enough to win the presidency. Without this, the depth in her, required of a president and commander in chief, is hidden. Further, Palin has other problems to overcome before she can build on her base of conservative women and move to other voters. The seeming bad news is that many of Palin's problems, as unfair as this may be, appear to be somewhat out of her control.
The Couric Betrayal
Palin's reputation among the left has never recovered from that introductory primetime interview with Katie Couric. While Couric has since been given a mulligan on the many ways she failed to live up to her journalistic promise at CBS, she will forever be hailed by the liberals as the woman who took the big, bad Sarah Palin down with an apple-pie smile and a simple question: "What do you read?"
Palin's befuddled and diffuse reply -- as expected of someone who rose from being a girl who worked her way through college, single-handedly defeated an incumbent governor, then wrecked a corrupt party machine, and faced down the best lawyers Exxon-Mobil could buy -- showed her self control in not gutting the supercilious twit Couric on the spot like a Grizzly bear gorging on a salmon.
My desire to snark at Palin right there by making some remark about quantum physics -- as though I can tell a Kronecker delta from a Clebsch-Gordan coefficient myself, or can tell Katie Couric's colonoscopy from my own nether regions, as I have been part of a human centipede with the Eastern liberals for ages myself -- lingered with me privately and in the hearts of countless other jealous women ever since.
Palin's frequent appearances as an expert in the controversial waters of Fox News Channel have done much to overturn the initial picture of her as a lightweight intellectual, for anyone with an IQ over the low 30s themselves. Witness the contrasting ongoing response to Palin from the Hollywood Left as compared to the blogosphere, say, Free Republic. Sure, Palin has made a media comeback, written a New York Times bestseller, monopolized the national debate about Obamacare with a single Tweet, but even this fails to stir the self-coddled and artificial left, so insistent they are in living in their echo chamber.
Not to mention that with each appearance on Fox News Channel, Palin's hair rises in height, her eyelashes thicken, and her cheeks redden...but her voice patterns are becoming more measured, her tones less strident. Not only has she ripened in poise and communication, but she has left behind the fresh-faced natural beauty we fell in love with when she was on the stage with John McCain in 2008.
Not that I am *at all* gloating, you understand. Why, I'm so far from being obsessed over her perfect life that I sweep under the rug what the stress of a Vice Presidential campaign, the constant travel, being a worldwide target of the left, being accused of complicity in the attempted murder of a Congresswoman by a Sheriff who admitted on the air he had no evidence, having her daughters the subject of jokes about statutory rape by professional athletes, death threats, facing over half a million dollars in undeserved legal bills as the result of a deliberate campaign to destroy her, writing a bestseller and having a book tour, and planning a Presidential run against the combined opposition of the entire left of the country AND the RINOs in her own party, and pretend that NONE of this would affect the appearance of a woman approaching fifty years of age. (There! I sunk the knife in to that preening b!tch) Oops, delete, backspace. *Whew!* Good thing I caught that line before it printed!
Moving on...
Our bespectacled wonder has been traded in for an overly coiffed, stiffed-faced...well, stiff. One wonders if she is capable of having a voice true to herself in the midst of fitting in. At least, *I* do. The rest of you who aren't blinded by jealousy have realized that her stiffness was in the McCain campaign from being FORCED to fit in, and that she is showing her true self, and easing up and enjoying the chase, even now.
Grizzly Bites
The TLC show Sarah Palin's Alaska came off as an inspired attempt to salvage her public reputation...particularly for the middle-of-the-road, non-politically involved TV watchers who were most likely to have been swayed by Katie Couric and the venom spewed about Sarah. What a better way to present her as anything BUT a cold, demanding prima donna, a "salt-of-the-earth" girl who any God-fearing American woman would be proud to spend an afternoon with. Sure, she's good-looking, but she's not snotty about it. Her comments that she would "rather be doing this than in some old stuffy political office" were meant to reassure her fans about her looks, and they were backed up by actions. Any "beauty queen" who can let her stuffiness down enough to club fish to death on camera can't be all bad.
She continued her metamorphosis into more of a pop-culture celebrity than a resplendent political diva on the ascent; knowing from her days of retail politics, running for office in Alaska, that people will not listen to your political views, nor vote for you, unless they first like you. She sprinkled in "unsophisticated" political metaphors about mama grizzlies protecting their cubs through self-reliance and independence as a way to connect with conservative voters. These attempts fell flat with the Eastern sophisticates and the hangers-on like myself...but Sarah didn't care about that either, having learned from her political role model, Ronald Reagan, that in politics, as in the theatre, it is infinitely more important to satisfy the box office than the critics. The show depicted a woman just as interested in being in the great outdoors with her family than a woman who (like Hillary Clinton) wanted to overcome her rage at being born "only a woman" by beings seen as an indispensable voice on the subjects that really matter.
The Arctic Fox
Palin became a Fox News staple immediately following the end of the presidential election. Fox, seeing how Palin had by herself rescued the moribund McCain campaign, and would have (if not sabotaged by moles and Romney ex-staffer, if not held back by the RINO arms of McCain himself) propelled the ticket to victory, stretched out arms to this wonderkind, to which Sarah Palin came running, grateful to find someone with the intelligence to want to make use of her talents and journalistic training. When Palin's own show on historical stories didn't pan out, she was given infomercial-like slots on all the heavy-hitting news programs: after all, she hadn't written her best-seller yet, for which her fans were hungry, and her personal charisma still enabled her to draw crowds (read: eyeballs beloved by advertisers). She promoted her first and second book, her reality TV show, and her speaking appearances, and she bolstered the arguments of the Fox News Channel's hosts. She came off like the queen of the Republican scene and the Tea Party movement. As indeed, she was.
(Dammit.)
Still, regularly appearing as a self-appointed expert on conservative values is not enough to give her credibility on issues of finance, national defense, or our nation's history in the hearts and minds of conservative women and most other voters. So, using the same determination which enabled her to take on Alaska's entrenched party machine, she began bolstering her credentials with overseas meetings and paid speeches at various venues: a chamber of commerce in the Northeast, a trip to India, a speech in Hong Kong, meeting with the prime minister of Israel (who had a degree from MIT and could tell a very sharp intellect hidden from hostile eyes beneath an "aw, shucks" demeanor, just like Bill Clinton; yet unlike Clinton, not given to perversion and guile).
Another problem, indeed, is that Palin still sucker-punches the press without apology. Palin was clearly caught on tape saying that Paul Revere "warned the British" by "ringing those bells." Even Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday viciously called her out to correct her words, and that was after a professor of history at Boston College had backed her up. Palin persisted that she did not get the history and the story wrong on Paul Revere: realizing that anyone too stupid to realize she had just TOURED the Paul Revere house on her bus tour, and was probably up-to-snuff on it, deserved whatever set-up she could get away with. Whether she said it accidentally backwards or not, she conveyed the focal context incorrectly -- at least according to the geniuses in the press whose knowledge of Paul Revere was limited to a vague quotation from Longfellow. [Editor's Note: the Boston Herald put out an article wherein at least two historians grudgingly admitted that Palin had the right of it vis-à-vis Paul Revere, thus proving that I myself am a jealous bimbo. Dammit!]
While she passes the test of social and conservative convictions with flying colors, Palin simply does not excel among the self-annointed set. And while there is no great sin in that (certainly many of us also crumble at an attempt to fake having attended one of the "right" schools), one cannot hope to be taken seriously as the first female president of the United States on the Georgetown Cocktail party circuit while being unable to stand up to friend and foe alike on one's alma mater. (Our only hope is that the economy heals quickly enough, like the planet was supposed to do once Barack Obama was elected, that hoi polloi continued to be dazzled by his effortless reading of the teleprompter and his proclaimed superiority, rather than turning to someone like them "who gets it" like Sarah Palin.)
That is, it isn't enough that the media prejudices the public against Sarah Palin, if Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Parties, and the economy mean people stop listening to the media altogether. If she's smarter than Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow, and more of a man than Chris Matthews, and she's able to prove it on the spot, it's still downright rude of her to show it so easily, as when she asked Maddow to get her a Diet Coke at the White House correspondent's dinner, and everyone else crowded in for a glamour shot with our Alaskan Queen. Shooting the breeze with Sean Hannity as he cocks his head adoringly to the left and asks rhetorical questions on liberty and fiscal responsibility simply makes it worse: the rest of us don't get to flirt with rich New Yorkers like him. If Palin really wants to prove that fat meat is greasy, she will (fair or not) have to stretch herself beyond her running workout and invite us common girls for a jog. We'll see who is sweating THEN, dammit.
Barack Obama
Believe it or not, the liberals actually believe that Barack Obama is a problem for Palin. Their "reasoning" runs like this: "Because Americans have already taken a chance on the outsider who promised that charm and wit could make up for lack of experience in the line of fire and depth and expertise in foreign affairs, the conservative voter is especially turned off to this strategy of going with a candidate who lacks a serious résumé."
My God, they're stupid. Dumb as a box of rocks. Stupid like the crew running Mondale's campaign against Reagan in 1984. Stupid in a way you have to have an Ivy League degree to accomplish. For one thing, Barack Obama didn't run on his lack of experience: he ran on the promise of his own awesomeness. "This was the moment when the planet began to heal." And the New York Times' own David Brooks touted Obama based on the crease in his pants. I don't remember ANYONE saying that Sarah was qualified to be President just because she was a hottie.
In the game that is the presidential election, you must not only be the able to show us the how, what, and why, but you must also be able to explain all of them convincingly and without defect. Obama did not, but then got caught in EPIC FAIL.
And as far as policies? Pretty much all Sarah has to do in order to win in a landslide, is to promise to do the OPPOSITE of everything Barack Obama has done. Think about it:
1) Denying oil leases while offering to buy oil from Brazil? No, "Drill, baby, drill."
2) Obamacare? No, that's "Death Panels." Let's privatize.
3) Cap and Trade? No, natural gas.
4) Raise taxes? Not on your life.
5) Partial birth abortion vs. five kids.
6) Meaningless wars all over the world after getting a meaningless Nobel Peace Prize like the prize in a Cracker Jack Box? No, we fight to win, win convincingly, then leave.
I could go on and on. But after everything else, is it not clear that the last election in 2008 was a referendum on Bush, and 2012 will be an up-or-down (but mostly DOWN) vote on Obama?
Democrats believe that in order to be able to face Obama the 2012 GOP candidate will need to articulate from every narrative -- present, social, historical -- with cunning ability, because they really believe that people are still hypnotized by the teleprompter. After all, isn't that how Obama first got elected? He ran on flowery prose, vague tales of great achievements, and enticing promises.
According to the liberal cant, then, the conservative candidate will have to be so masterful at language, expression, and self-assured knowledge that she can out-fox the teleprompter.
But that's just not Sarah. She has never been the master of the mellifluous, faux-sophisticate neurolinguistic programming. But she hasn't had to. Her strength has been in speaking from the heart -- "a servant's heart" -- in a way that all those of good will, those who like her, put the country above their own prestige or possibilities for graft, can sense her love of country and respond instinctively. Because of this, Sarah can speak candidly and from the bowels of her being without a hiccup or a worry of who thinks what. She will have to know herself, trust her thoughts, and ignore the calls from the polished shysters and establishment thieves to put ever more gravitas into her candidacy.
Though Barack Obama was able to pull off the allure of the unknown in 2008, the conservative nominee will not be romanticized as the promising underdog whom we must fight for in order to set the stage for a new day. She will have to package, introduce, sell, and defend this new day in a way that no one can deny. And this will be easy. Easy, for one, because it is impossible to deny that even Jimmy Dhimmi Carter is a towering paragon of strength and decisiveness, of sheer brilliant leadership, next to Barack. Easy, for another, because despite the frenzied mewling of jealous women and Eastern homosexuals, Sarah Palin really does have a successful, established track record to run upon. Even if we have acted as gatekeepers to suppress this news from the American people.
But no more; the celebrated filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon is set to release a new film about Sarah Palin which fits this bill exactly. It is entitled The Undefeated, and walks through Sarah's life and character from childhood through high school, from Mayor of Wasilla up to Governor of Alaska, to Vice Presidential candidate, through "the thumping" and beyond. We see a woman of iron will, every bit as much as Margaret Thatcher. And conservative women (like others) will fall in love with her all over again.
What Conservative Women Want
Conservative women want what all conservatives want and need in our 2012 candidate: answers and accountability. Unfortunately for the press, and the MSM (the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party), Sarah Palin has raised a lot more questions than given sufficient answers. And many of the questions seem deliberate: What's up with the bus tour? What's up with showing up in New Hampshire while Mitt Romney was announcing his bid? What was up with the reality show? All these questions keep stockpiling like old newspapers, mouldering in the basement while people turn to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for current events and analysis. (What do you expect? The press, beginning with Katie Couric, led the character assassination against Palin beginning in 2008, and haven't let up yet: up to and including crowdsourcing the reading of 24,000 emails from her term as governor. At the same time, they covered up everything imaginable about Obama, even helping to trash anyone who dared even seek his background information. Do they really expect Sarah even to give them the time of day after all that?)
As Palin continues to play these mind games -- both in an attempt to create buzz and mystique or to cheese off the press -- she further distinguishes herself as a sincere and genuine contender for the conservative nomination. People throughout the United States are sick to death of political games, and those who go through the motions of the same old thing: and Sarah's mind games address both the players and the playees of the games. She shows that not only that she can avoid dancing to the liberal tune, but that even if she does, they can't avoid covering her. Due to her genuineness and openness, she is not just photogenic, but charismatic. And in the hunt for ratings, the fight not to get scooped, they need Sarah Palin more than she needs them. These questions lean toward the juvenile context which that Rush's caller suggested; they cast Palin as a candidate for high school prom queen, soon to be President of the United States.
And there's nothing we bitter jealous chicks can do about it.
Dammit.
