Enter Ms. Palin. She was asked if she thought that a news media “class bias” had created a double standard in how she and Ms. Kennedy were being treated.
“I’ve been interested to see how Caroline Kennedy will be handled and if she will be handled with kid gloves or if she will be under such a microscope also,” the governor replied. “It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out. And I think that as we watch that, we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here also that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus, say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be.”
Let’s leave aside an obvious difference between the women. One is looking to become a backbencher in a 100-member club. The other wanted to be the proverbial heartbeat away from controlling America’s nuclear launch codes.
Sticking to the class issue, it’s hard to imagine that the born-to-privilege Ms. Kennedy feels that she has received kid-glove treatment from reporters. Her qualifications for the Senate have been sharply questioned. And she has been pounded, you betcha, for the scores of “you knows” that rendered her inarticulate in recent interviews. To rework a line used by The Daily News in a different context years ago, it seems that with Ms. Kennedy, the syntax of the father has not been visited upon the child.
THAT Ms. Palin was unaware of the Kennedy coverage makes one wonder how she gets her information. Articles about Ms. Kennedy’s stumbles had circulated for a week before the Ziegler interview. What newspapers and magazines does she read?
Hold on. Isn’t that what Katie Couric asked in her CBS interview with Ms. Palin during the campaign? It was a softball question, hardly a gotcha moment. But the governor turned this, too, into a class issue. “To me,” she said, “the question was more along the lines of, ‘Do you read? What do you guys do up there?’ ”
She gave Ms. Couric the back of her hand. “Katie,” she said, “you’re not the center of everybody’s universe.” You almost could hear those words coming from one of Clare Boothe Luce’s characters.
Ms. Palin was similarly peevish about Tina Fey’s impersonations of her on “Saturday Night Live.
” There was “some, perhaps, exploiting, that was done via me, my family, my administration,” she said. Yet she was more than happy to have done some, perhaps, exploiting of her own. She did, after all, do a star turn on what she referred to familiarly as “S.N.L.”
All this brings to mind another women-focused film, “A League of Their Own,” about female baseball players during World War II. In it, the team manager played by Tom Hanks chews out a fumbling player so harshly that she is reduced to tears. “Are you crying?” he asks in outrage. “There’s no crying in baseball.”
He might well have added as a corollary: “Are you whining? There’s no whining in politics.”There is no whining in politics. That is going to become my new mantra. I love it!
Sarah Palin wants to be taken seriously as a politician without having her multiple missteps reported by the media. She wants her family to be left alone while constantly talking about them to the press. And the entire time she is doing these two things she wants to whine like a teenage girl who was just cut from the cheerleading squad.
The truly sad fact about Sarah Palin is that she is essentially her own worst enemy. Every time she opens her mouth she says something which makes her look foolish, or pathetic, or ignorant.
And then, since she lacks any sense of introspection, she looks outward to blame others for her self destructive tendencies. The media, the McCain campaign, and of course the "anonymous bloggers".
And she does all of this with the spotlight shining directly on her and her family. And if that spotlight shifts off of her for even an instant then you can rest assured that she will immediately do something, anything, to bring so she can bask in it's comforting illumination.
