Meanwhile, I'd like to call everyone's attention to some cogent analysis from Greg Peters who says of Stupid,
Look, there’s no doubt that Sarah Palin isn’t the sharpest knife in the corpse. But when she can’t give the name of a supreme court case, or name a newspaper she reads, it’s not the same kind of stupid vapidity that spews out the rambling gibberish she passes off as interview answers. She’s trying not to get caught. She doesn’t trust the question; she thinks she’s going to be made a fool of somehow, in a way she doesn’t quite understand yet. She’s like a child being questioned about some unspecified infraction.
She is, of course, a politician, and one who has used the standard late-20th-century GOP playbook to good effect. She may not be quick and she may not be deep, but please. The woman is not so dumb that she can’t name a newspaper.
I think this is essentially correct. What it means, though, is that since Stupid is so amazingly unprepared to appear un-Stupid in these situations we're still back to pointing out that she is indeed stupid... if in a slightly less obvious way.
But it's not really the stupidity that's the issue with Stupid. Rather it is the egregious insult to the voters that Stupid represents. People are being told to vote for a candidate based not on what she thinks or says but really just because the talent agency went out and found the properly branded type. And, of course, this sort of cynical identity politics isn't exactly new. Of course, Palin was chosen for her gender and for her conservative and religious cred just like any "ticket-balancing" veep in modern American political history. Of course, her "regular gal" persona is calculated to appeal to the same "regular folk" who found George Bush electably charming. Of course her gift of gaffe is every bit as amusing as Ray Nagin's. None of that is new.
What's new is the degree to which the peddlers of this bullshit just don't care enough to pretend the bullshit is anything other than what it is. There has been no serious attempt to convince anyone that Stupid is in any way qualified to be President or Vice-President. In years past, there would be some straight-faced lie about the candidate's resume. But with Stupid we get nothing in that vein that passes the laugh test. We get a half-assed "Uh... she can see Russia from her house" and "There's a lot of oil in Alaska" but mostly it's "Hey look at the pretty lady! My she sure is sassy!" This time we aren't even important enough to be lied to. This time they just said, "Fuck it. Here's something shiny to play with."
This week, Matt Taibbi filed a report on Stupid's speech to the GOP convention. Taibbi writes:
We're used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She's all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It's just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn't the most qualified candidate, that the party "went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives."
The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains.
And there it is. Stupid is just the latest slip of a bar already set impossibly low by George W Bush. She is a candidate perfectly suited for the politics of the reality TV generation. No substance, no (actual) personality, just a poorly sketched type presented in as little time as possible before it's time to start eating worms.
In a sense, I'm just as drawn in as anyone by the spectacle. I can't wait to find out just how dumb she can possibly be tonight. At the same time I, like many others, can't help but think that this will be the turning point for Stupid. Tonight we're likely to find out from the talking heads that she "exceeds the low expectations"... that maybe she really is that loveable stooge the hate voters need to feel better about themsleves after all.
In short, this could go really really badly.
On the other hand, it's bound to be at least mildly amusing.
Enjoy the Stupidbowl.
No comments:
Post a Comment