http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/516567/is_sarah_palin_a_natural_fox
Posted on January 14, 2010 The Notion (The Nation Magazine's blog)
Is Sarah Palin A Natural Fox? By Leslie Savan
Only after Fox News announced that it had hired Sarah Palin as an "news
analyst" did I realize that I've been subconsciously calling her Sarah
Fox, Fox Palin, or Sarah Palin-Fox for a while now. She seems to be
both the face that Fox wants to project and the audience it wants to
capture: Palin represents the natural next stage in Fox's evolution
from talking heads who pretend to know things that aren't true to those
who sincerely believe things that aren't true.
You could even reverse the order of that old illustration of evolution,
that row of amphibian, monkey, and human figures walking increasingly
upright out of the water, to show Fox's development, starting with
Shepard Smith, who really is some kind of journalist, to Bill O'Reilly,
then gently moving down through Sean Hannity to Steve Doocy to Glenn
Beck (an amphibian if ever there was one), and ending in Palin, who's
all fish.
That strikes me as a smooth progression, or at least it did until I
watched her debut last night on O'Reilly. Her halting and deferential
appearance -- she even called Bill "the big man on campus" -- may
actually undercut her usefulness as a propaganda tool. She seemed
nervous with Papa Bear, who was rather snappish. Opening with a video
mash-up of TV personalities calling her an "ignorant rightwinger" who
"doesn't know anything" -- meant to outrage her fans, but demeaning
nonetheless -- O'Reilly then weighed in with direct and often
rapid-fire questions about "the perception...that you're not that
smart."
Like, what's the graceful answer to that? O'Reilly had just shown John
Heilemann, coauthor of Game Change, on 60 Minutes saying, "She still
didn't really understand why there was a North Korea and a South Korea,
she was still regularly saying that Saddam Hussein had been behind
9/11, and literally the next day her son was about to ship off to Iraq
and when they asked her who her son was going to fight, she couldn't
explain that." While Sarah flashed a fixed smile and told Bill that she
didn't let that sort of thing get to her, it started to dawn on me
that, in one important respect, Fox and Palin are quite different:
Sarah Fox is not nearly as clever as cable Fox.
O'Reilly seemed to be passive-aggressively telling her as much
Wednesday night. Notably, he didn't defend her by saying, "I know you
and you're one smart cookie!" Rather, he defended her with his usual
invisible-hand-of-the-market argument, noting that both she and Fox are
so successful, scoring such high ratings and raking in so much money,
that so what if the pointy-heads deride them as wrong? Are those people
topping The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list?
Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson, on Monday night's Countdown, said it
best: "Sarah Palin is the latest in a line of populists, but she's very
different in one way. Populists historically have pretended not to know
anything. They've actually been part of a fairly intellectual group of
people. But she really doesn't know anything. And it's in God's plan
apparently that she [won't] learn anything."
And that's true: From Robert La Follette to Huey Long to George Wallace
to, as Jon Stewart showed, the Oxford-educated Fox & Friends co-host
Gretchen Carlson, most populists in American political history have
only acted dumb, so as not to provoke the resentment of their audience.
In fact, it's been their pretense of being just folks that usually
annoys their opponents the most, and occasionally leads to attacks
intended to "expose" their hidden taste for opera or some other such
tell-tale sign of being a smarty-pants.
That's not going to happen to Palin. And anyway, real or faked, for Fox
and the Republican Party dumbness in the name of demagoguery is no
vice. Sarah Palin's ability to sit there with a straight face and say
things so stupid (like health care reform will lead to "death panels")
that they break the sound barrier, leaving her opponents speechless, is
a gift, not a failing. And as O'Reilly's defense of Palin made clear,
she doesn't have to win a majority to succeed in her new job. As former
McCain consultant and part-time Palin coach Mark McKinnon said,
blabbing on Fox is "an easy job with very little accountability." It's
like being a spokesmodel for conservatism.
Nevertheless, given Palin's history of "going rogue" by quitting pretty
good gigs that turned onerous on her, she might still spontaneously
combust in the cable channel's face. She could back out of the contract
as she has so many speaking engagements. She could have more Katie
Couric moments on the air, in which her utter inability to recognize
her own limitations makes her feel ambushed and paranoid. Her close
mentors, like Fox's Greta Van Susteren, could one day grow as
frustrated with her as has Steve Schmidt, the top McCain consultant who
helped choose her as the running mate and now trades accusations with
her over who's the bigger liar.
Even if you accept the viability of Fox's intent -- to rebuild the
bridge between the big-money Wall Street elites of the GOP and its
reactionary Christianist base -- Palin's performance Wednesday night
ought to give you pause. Maybe she's more mermaid than fish after all,
a false siren for leaders who want to use her to control a base grown
profoundly suspicious of the GOP establishment. When Glenn Beck asked
her on Wednesday, in her second appearance as a Fox contributor,
whether she would remain a Republican, she answered yes, if they get
back to doing what they should do. To which Beck added, "A big if."
At that moment, you could almost see a long line of older Republican
men who helped her rise in politics, beginning with former Alaska
Governor Frank Murkowski and ending with John McCain, shaking their
heads in shell-shocked disbelief.
Leslie Savan is the author of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in
Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever.
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