http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee265
Palintology
November 18, 2009
By Scott McLemee
Important as it was, the campaign of Barack Obama was not the only
history-making element of the 2008 presidential election. With Sarah
Palin, we crossed another epochal divide. The boundary between reality
television and American politics (already somewhat weakened by the
continuous "American Idol" plebiscite) finally collapsed.
Her campaign's basic formula was familiar: members of an ordinary
middle-class family turn into instantly recognizable national
celebrities while competing for valuable prizes.
But like any contestant at this late stage of an already decadent
genre, Palin seemed much less conscious of the stakes of the game
(power) than in how it let her broadcast her own sense of herself.
At that level she could not lose - the ballot box notwithstanding. I'm
not sure what Sarah Palin's favorite work of postmodern theory might be
(all of them, probably) but she seems to take her lead from Jean
Baudrillard's Seduction. Other political figures use the media as part
of what JB calls "production." That is, they generate signs and images
meant to create an effect within politics. For the Baudrillardian
"seducer," by contrast, the power to create fascination is its own
reward.
Watching Palin respond to questions about her book Going Rogue (or not
respond to them, often enough) is, from this perspective, no laughing
matter. She grows ever more comfortable talking about herself. If no
more capable of simulating knowledge of public issues, she is getting
her story straight, more or less. And this matters. For now she does
not have to be accurate, just coherent. She is consolidating her
presence, her "brand." Teams of professional ideologists can feed Palin
her lines later.
Is this too cynical? I fear it may not be cynical enough. For it
assumes that Palin will eventually be integrated into her party's
apparatus and turned into a mouthpiece of old-school Republican
electoral politics -- a basic platform of tax cuts for the rich and
unregulated handgun ownership for everybody else.
That is not the only possible outcome, however. Someone with Palin's
developing command of the arts of media seduction -- and whose knack on
that score is largely a matter of her performative maverickiness -- has
the potential to change the rules of the game.
<snip>
An example is the item Palin posted on Facebook in early August: "The
America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with
Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's `death panel' so
his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their
`level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health
care. Such a system is downright evil."
This was fantasy. But it was effective fantasy. To borrow again from
Baudrillard, it seduced -- abolishing reality and replacing it with a
delirious facsimile.
The editors of _Going Rouge_ give Palin credit for the rhetorical power
generated by her words, and perhaps also by her canny use of the
social-networking venue: "With remarkable economy of prose, Palin cast
health care reform as an assault on the country, put a face on its
supposed victims (her baby Trig), coined the expression 'death panel'
(linking it directly to Obama), raised the specter of euthanasia in the
service of a state-run economy, and rallied the troops around a fight
against 'evil.' In short, she personalized, popularized, and polarized
the debate. Never mind that Democratic health care reform bills merely
funded optional end-of-life consultations that had heretofore been
almost universally acknowledged as a good. (Indeed, Palin herself once
championed them in Alaska.)"
Well, consistency is, after all, the hobgoblin of tiny minds. Sarah
Palin is playing the political game on a much grander scale -- with
rules she may be rewriting as she goes.
<end excerpt>