Sarah Palin in her announcement that she’s leaving her job as Alaska’s governor has certainly let some people down. One of these is Ruth Marcus, who found her emotional, and therefore unfit to seek higher office.
“I think my hostility has to do with our shared gender: I’m anxious to see women succeed in the political arena as elsewhere, and I think McCain’s cynical choice of Palin and her faltering performance since has served to set back that cause.” Marcus said.
I share her pain. I don’t want “women” as such to succeed any more than I want men to, but I feel Marcus’s perfomance as a columnist for The Washington Post has set back the cause of women being treated as serious people when they talk about public affairs.
Marcus is the woman who last winter backed the bid for a Senate seat of the wholly unqualified Caroline Kennedy on the grounds that she once was a sweet little girl on a pony, “our tragic national princess,” who for that reason alone should be given a job like her father’s.
“What a fitting coda to this modern fairy tale to have the little princess grow up to be a senator,” she burbled on to her readers. “On the question of Caroline Kennedy for Senate, my head says no, on balance. My heart says yes! Yes!”
Marcus was repelled when Palin said “no” to the continued abuse in the press of her daughters and special-needs baby. Marcus would never have been so emotional. She would have taken it all like a man.
Elsewhere, David Brooks was depressed by the downfall of “dignity,” a wonderful trait embodied by Tom Hanks and Lauren Bacall but not by Mark Sanford, the late Michael Jackson, and of course Sarah Palin, who “aspires to a high public trust but is unfamiliar with the traits of equipoise and constancy, which are the sources of authority and trust.”
Sheesh.
Sanford left his heart in Buenos Aries along with his soul mate; Jackson was guilty of dying while freakish; and Palin left office to staunch frivolous law suits that hung up the government, and a torrent of sludge on the part of the media that labeled her children as slatterns and freaks. (Which of these things is not like the others? Don’t ask.)
On the other hand, all was not lost as we still had Obama, that shining example of grace under something, who personified “reticence, dispassion and…other traits associated with dignity,” and whose “cultural effects… may surpass his policy impact” in teaching self control and proper restraint to the young.
Given the “policy impact” of his administration so far, any number of things may come to surpass it, but that he has displayed self-restraint in trying conditions is beyond any doubt.
How serene he appears under all provocations: jokes on NBC that he sleeps with his daughters, jokes on CBS that his children get ‘knocked up’ at ball games, jokes that his wife is a slut and/or moron, jokes that his son is a “retard” and freak. (Oh, wait. That wasn’t Obama. That was the Palins. Who would have guessed? )
Actually, it’s fairly easy to be restrained and composed while being routinely compared to God and Lincoln. The hard part comes with setbacks and ridicule, which may shortly be coming. Obama so far hasn’t shown grace under pressure. He’s shown grace under nothing at all.
Actually, there are people who, as Brooks says, don’t “know how to act,” but they are the people who hounded the Palins, who Brooks somehow wants to ignore. Palin didn’t traduce “social norms,” in her address, or her actions.
There are no “social norms” on how to react when bloggers attack a Downs Syndrome infant, or “comics” joke about 14 year olds being “knocked up” at ball games on network TV.
There are no “norms” because these things weren’t done until 10 months ago, when Palin emerged as a national figure, and this “code of dignity” went by the boards. If Brooks wants to find out who killed it, he can look at the people who work in the news and the Internet. There may be even be some at The Times.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
