Sarah Palin's Princess Di moment?
What does it all mean? Palin’s surprise announcement, on Friday, that she is quitting as Governor of Alaska left a load of July 4 dinners in a Marie Celeste state of abandonment as commentators scrambled to explain her move.
The first scenario ventured goes something like this. It’s part of the bigger plan and somehow masks a greater, iron-clad will to bypass the local politics of governorship and head straight for the 2012 presidential elections.
This interpretation sees Palin conjuring a giant smokescreen to disguise her plan for world domination, possibly while stroking a pristine, white Siamese cat.
It gets some mileage from the message Palin posted to supporters on her facebook page:
"I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint. I hope you will join me. Now is the time to rebuild and help our nation achieve greatness!"
But it also totally misses the point. You need to look at how she’s talking, not what she’s saying if you want to get a proper sense of what’s going on. Because, lets face it, the words are totally, utterly crazy.
“Why “milk it,” as she put it, when you can quit it?” writes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.
“Only dead fish go with the flow,” she said, while cold fish can blow out of town. Leaving Alaska in the lurch is best for Alaska. She can better “effect change” in government from outside government.
She can fulfill her promise of “efficiencies and effectiveness” by deserting Juneau midway through her term — and taking her tanning bed with her.
“We need those who will respect our Constitution,” said Palin, who swore on the Bible to uphold the Constitution. She said she can’t fulfill that silly old oath of office in the usual way because she’s not “wired to operate under the same old politics as usual.”
Naturally, she dragged the troops in, saying that her trip to see wounded soldiers overseas “fortified” her decision to give up because “they don’t give up.
Watching the footage, listening to her difficulty controlling her breath, seeing her racing through her sentences, the high pitched edge to her voice, the forced good humour like a pressure cooker on the point of explosion, it’s obvious.
She wasn't prepared enough for this. And she thought competition was her strong point. She’s a hockey mom. A hunter. But really, it’s her Achilles heel. Because 'Sarah Baracuda' learnt competition on a high school basketball court.
It saw her through local politics, fine, but she's been given no time to adjust to the new rules, perameters and nuances that come with this different game.
She's got guts. She may really imagine that she’ll bounce back for 2012 but, without a miracle comeback, it now looks impossible that her emotional understanding will withstand it. Because it has already come undone.
And the greatest proof of this is that she’s not even telling herself the truth yet. She thinks she’s doing it for Alaska. That she’s still on top and making the calls.
Yet the only bit of her speech that really rings true comes at around the 4.38 mark, when she says “I will support others who seek to serve. In, or out of office. And I don’t care what party they’re in or no party at all.”
Her gestures lose their weird, wired puppetry and she breathes naturally, with the pure relieved exhaustion of someone who's thrown in the towel.
So, in an odd way, Tina Brown is right to be reminded of "the unraveling Princess Diana made in December 1993."
“Over the next few months,” the princess announced to a startled audience at a luncheon to benefit the Headway National Injuries Association in London, “I will be seeking a more suitable way of combining a meaningful public role, with hopefully, a more private life. I hope you can find it in your hearts to understand and give me the time and space that has been lacking in recent years.” Then she burst into tears.
Like Princess Diana, who was both an addict of fame and its tormented victim, Palin is at constant war with the exposure she seems to live for. In Diana’s case, it was the raucous tabloids and their pitiless photographers who stalked her every waking hour alone or with her children. In Palin’s case, it’s that malign aristocratic phantom, the “media elite.”
It’s hard to feel as sorry for Palin as one did for Diana. The comely governor is so cocky in her ignorance, so relentless in pursuit of her own rise to fame, her arrogance makes it much harder to see her vulnerability. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Like Diana, what she was really saying in that rambling resignation speech was one word: "HELP!”
