Sarah Palin Rorschach

It’s been 5 days since McCain announced his VP pick, and it’s been about five days of non-stop discoveries of the apparently poorly-vetted choice.

I debated for years in college and then coached for some time after that. After doing thorough research on a subject, at some point a debater has to narrow down the field of arguments for or against something to present a cohesive narrative and beat the same, simple point.

So far it’s been utter confusion about how to attack the Palin pick. It’s great that there are so many options, but we have to narrow it down and get a cohesive message.

So, what’s that message going to be? Here are some options.

1. Sarah Palin, The Dumb Blond

   Palin infamously asking what exactly it is that the vice president does isn’t helping anyone think that she’s got the brains for the job. Her executive experience comes from being mayor of a town of under 10,000 and bring governor for less than two years. She said that she hasn’t “focused much” on Iraq and doesn’t seem to know much about what’s going on in the country. Some in her party worry that the only issue she can speak credibly on is energy policy.

   And Cindy McCain and other McCain surrogates are helping this out each time they point out that Alaska is near Russia, and neither is the fact that she’s a former beauty pageant contestant.

   Pro: McCain would be closer to death than any other president if elected. Can we really trust her to have her hand on the button? Plus a lot Americans are sexist, so that might help the other, all-male ticket to pound away a meme that appeals to misogyny (hey, just callin’ ‘em like I see ‘em).

   Con: Americans don’t seem to mind the idea of a dumb president, but they care if he’s elitist. While it’s impossible to measure the effect of “elitist” attacks on Gore and Kerry and Obama, the GOP seems to think it’s good enough to try in every election. Calling her dumb or inexperienced regularly doesn’t help Mr. Ivy League not seem condescending.

   Also, it comes across as sexist, and sexism doesn’t help Obama’s appeal among working class white women, who went for Bush in 2004. And it doesn’t help excite the feminists among us.

2. Sarah Palin, The Second Coming of Jerry Falwell

   Her social conservatism puts her with the fringe-of-the-fringe of the right wing. She’s been hailed by all the leaders of the religious right and she has all the right views: she’s against reproductive freedom, comprehensive sex education, any LGBT rights, and aid to pregnant teens, while she supports teaching creationism in schools.

   Pro: People are pretty tired of the whole Moral Majority shtick. Among independents and conservative-leaning independents that I know, that’s the #1 complaint I hear about the Republican Party: it’s filled with religious fundamentalists.

   McCain’s hoping to appeal to independents and centrists with his maverick-appeal, but Jerry Falwell is the mold for the standard-issue Republican. It makes the genuflection obvious and turns off independents who believe in the separation of church and state (and there are lots of them).

   Con: There’s a chance that this would help solidify the evangelical base around McCain – i.e. he feels their pain at being excluded from the political process (the religious right fundamentally sees itself as oppressed, no matter how little that makes sense to outsiders). I think the risk here is minimal – it wasn’t like they weren’t going to support the Republican nominee for president, it’s not like they have anywhere else to go, and it’s not like they couldn’t figure out that Palin’s a fundie on their own.

   There is also the fact that Obama himself has put his religion front-and-center, more so than McCain has. The most this means is that the blowhards on teevee will give him a hard time for taking the secular side of the so-called Culture War, but I doubt many people will care.

3. Sarah Palin, The Political Opportunist

   She’s already shown that she’s willing to lie to her family and about her family to get her job. Palin went from a veritable nobody to governor of Alaska to VP candidate in about five years, and she did it by making grand promises (like putting Alaska first in the national agenda) and cutting cynical deals (like increasing oil prices on the whole nation to hand a bigger check to Alaskans and the bridge to nowhere flip-flop).

   Her family wasn’t in a great position to be thrust into the national spotlight, but she did it anyway. And just three days after her fifth child was born she was back at work, making sure she could advance her career.

   Moreover, anything that makes her look like a hypocrite (like slashing funding for teen pregnancy shelters while being the mother to a pregnant teen) helps out here.

   Pro: Being a political opportunist is just about the opposite of being a maverick, with its implied dishonesty. It cuts the McCain message down to size and fits great into chain emails. People don’t want a leader who’ll say whatever to get the job.

   Plus, this is pretty much what the right-wing has been using against Hillary Clinton for decades. It’s had a moderate amount of success, and Hillary had big achievements and solid positions to weigh against it. Palin doesn’t.

   Con: It comes across as vaguely sexist, although less obviously so than presenting her as a dumb blond. It doesn’t reflect much on McCain, so it’s easy to ignore the fact that she’s an opportunist and vote for the #1 person on the ticket.

4. Sarah Palin, The Crazy Alaskan Militia Member

   This one was pretty much handed to Democrats on a silver platter when we found out that she was a member at one point of the Alaskan Independence Party. It’s a crazy separatist group with a sordid past that’s worth high-lighting. This is something that most Americans probably didn’t even know existed.

   It takes what they’ve been selling about Palin – the caribou-huntin’ real murikin – and twists it into something many Americans are actually afraid of.

   Pro: This theme questions her patriotism and her sanity all in one fell swoop. Not only did she join up with some crazy Alaskans with guns, but she wanted to secede from the US!

   Plus, every reference to moose-burgers will only serve to remind people of this narrative.

   Con: The Confederate Flag flying set wouldn’t care so much about the treason angle here. In fact, the American media seems to be much more willing to question the patriotism of people who want America to improve itself than those who want it to fall apart into 50 different pieces.

   It might be a hard sell to get it to move on to McCain, too, considering how every pundit’s head explodes at the very thought of questioning his patriotism.

5. Sarah Palin, The Slack-Jawed Yokel

   We know she hunts caribou, and here’s the city hall she ran with an iron-fist. She’s a small-town girl with big-city dreams, and she might just feel a little over-whelmed in the White House.

   In other words, this is the geographic/class version of “Sarah Palin, the Dumb Blond.”

   Pro: I can’t really think of any. Anybody But Bush? Did that convince people?

   Con: GWB won on presenting himself as a country boy (please ignore his Harvard and Yale degrees, his careful breeding, and his family wealth). I doubt making fun of her being from a small town or an unpopulated state will help out any.

6. Sarah Palin, The Corrupt Career Politician

   Besides Toopergate, Palin’s been pretty good about sending earmarks back to Alaska.

   Pro: People don’t like corrupt politicians, and this reflects poorly on McCain’s reformer and fiscal responsibility messages. It helps Obama’s message of change out as well.

   In other words, it works right in with the narrative Obama’s building and against the one McCain’s building.

   Con: It might be hard to get to stick, considering her lack of experience and the fact that almost no one knew anything about her exactly a week ago. Troopergate will prove harder to get people to care about than other scandals have (consider her high approval rate in Alaska even though that story’s old news up there).

***

Sure, there are more narratives on her to push, I’m sure, but this is a rudimentary list. I put in some of them even though I don’t agree with them – this diary is about brain-storming.

The point is that we need to, at some point, turn from research to painting a picture and defining this person who almost no one had heard of before last week. We can’t just present all the facts and hope that Americans hate her (and McCain, by extension); people want their news summed up in a digestible form.

Last, we, the people who don’t work for the Obama campaign, need to be having this discussion. He may say that her family’s off-limits, but McCain also has talked about how attacks on Obama’s character disgust him, even while they keep on coming. He needs plausible deniability, and we need to keep on chugging.

Personally, I don’t support creating sexist narratives, but this diary is as much about discussing what we should be doing as it is about discussing what we shouldn’t be doing.