She's everywhere, but don't ask where Palin is coming from
Posted by adn_jomalley
I can't escape her. No one can. She's everywhere. At the gym, talking on five televisions. At the doctor, on the first magazine in the waiting-room pile, "We read 'Going Rogue' so you don't have to!" I thought I should at least try to follow all the excitement, so I DVR'd her on Oprah last week. But when I watched it, a strange drowsiness took hold, and the information wouldn't soak in. I was saturated.
Remember when guv love was everywhere? Approval ratings were stratospheric. But at Costco this week, where shoppers rolled obliviously past a huge pile of "Going Rogues," it seemed fervor had subsided. Book sales at local Borders and Barnes & Noble were strong, managers said, but it was no Harry Potter situation. Were we saturated? Maybe not. But I wondered why we weren't a stop on the book tour.
I'm no hater. In fact, I might even have voted for her. But that was eons ago, before she became somebody else.
The last time I interviewed her, it was just after she announced she was pregnant with Trig. She had this warm, relaxed, familiar quality. I already thought she was savvy. She had never been extra sophisticated when it came to talking about policy, but in Alaska we never expect that of our politicians. She understood her audience. She got our populism, our libertarian streak. What I liked best: you could never be sure what she was going to do.
She wasn't tight with the Republicans, but she wasn't in line with Democrats, either. Mostly she seemed motivated by common sense. She did her thing with oil taxes and the gas line and ethics legislation. She didn't talk about abortion and the Bible too much. And, she was cool with redistributing wealth. I'm still telling people the story of the Hmong family of 10 in Mountain View who made the down payment on a four-plex thanks to the $1,200 "energy bonus" they each got from the state, on top of their usual PFD.
But then the big VP deal blew up and the media descended and there were all those interviews and speeches and photo shoots. She started talking about communism and "palling around with terrorists." Next time I saw her, it was Election Day. I rode in a van with the national press pool, speeding behind her black SUV from the Anchorage airport to Wasilla early in the morning. She was going to vote at City Hall.
When she and Todd crunched out across the snow afterward to talk to reporters, she was wearing a Carhartt jacket. The Carhartt jacket is never an accident in Alaska politics. It's a device. An everyman costume. Once in a while a city politician pulls one out to seem authentic to people off the road system. What confused me was that that day Wasilla was awash in love. No Carhartt necessary.
But then I realized she wasn't wearing it for us. It was for the people Outside.
Last week I was asked to talk about "Going Rogue" on television, so I slogged through it. In all 403 pages of heartwarming family moments, Bible-quoting, abortion talk, Reagan-references and bitterly-recalled political scenes, I kept looking for that woman I remembered, the breezy neighbor. But she wasn't there.
Instead, there was a character I didn't recognize, busy settling the score for innumerable slights, setting up political straw men and knocking them down. Her every memory was calibrated to echo a talk-radio talking point. She was too perfect, rarely reflecting on her own mistakes, mostly unchanged by her life's remarkable turn. And she lived in world that seemed like a Northern Exposure version of where I'm from, like small town anywhere with lots of scenery shots and the occasional bowl of moose chili.
There she was at the Country Kitchen, having breakfast with the waitresses named Ruby and Flo, the plumbing store owner and the construction worker. It was a diner scene that could have happened any place, but in the book it was emblematic of "the real America," where patriotism blooms and "kitchen table wisdom" is dispensed. It felt manufactured.
But then she knows her audience now, and they aren't from here. They are from diner towns on rural highways, from Fayetteville, Ark. and Springfield, Mo., and Sioux City, Iowa. Her audience is in agriculture and manufacturing. They are rural or suburban, usually white, heavily evangelical.
Of course that isn't where she comes from. Our economy is based primarily on oil, with a big hand from federal and state government spending. More than 30 percent of the population isn't white. We have no more evangelical Christians than the national average, and perhaps the country's largest number of people who say they have no church affiliation. And in Wasilla you are probably more likely to come across a skinny latte at one of the espresso stands than a diner-style cup of joe.
But none of that matters. She's a different kind of politician now, telling a story that hits all the right notes for her new audience, Americans stirred up by talk radio and the Fox News Channel, mad about taxes and mistrustful of government. Their disaffection is real and widespread and I don't think it should be ignored. She means something to them that she didn't mean here. And that's why they're standing in line for 20 hours for her Sharpie scrawl.
I'm headed Outside for the holidays and I'm already preparing for a whole new onslaught of questions from strangers. "You're from Alaska?" they'll ask. And then they'll want to know what I think about her.
But what they don't know is I'm a tired observer just like everyone else. I can't explain the phenomenon she's become because she doesn't resemble the politician I knew, and her Alaska isn't mine. So when they ask, I'll probably just shrug and tell the truth, "I have no idea where she's coming from."
