[lbo-talk] Savan on Sarah Palin's Fox Debut

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Jan 15 01:59:30 PST 2010


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.

© 2010 TheNation.com All rights reserved.



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