Uso del humor y la ironía

Sarah Palin reloads

From The Economist print edition

She's back, and this time she's selling books

ONE day in January last year, Sarah Palin was watching her son graduate from boot camp. As she gazed at the ranks of “tall and strong and serious” young men marching in perfect unison, all of them “ready to sacrifice all in a fight for freedom”, she recalled something Senator John Kerry once told students in California. If you study hard, he said, “you can do well. And if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” “What a loon,” thought Governor Palin. “What an elitist loon.”

This vignette captures rather well the secret of Mrs Palin’s appeal. John Kerry, of course, was a war hero, but these days he is the kind of senator who really annoys Mrs Palin’s fans. She, like most military mothers, thinks her son went to Iraq because he is brave and honourable. Mr Kerry implies that he went because he was too lazy or stupid to do anything else. Many Americans find this attitude condescending. These coastal liberals, some heartlanders grumble, think we all are brainless hicks—even the soldiers who defend them.

Mrs Palin’s supporters are disgruntled. Not furiously teetering on the brink of violence, as some cable shows suggest, but heartily ticked off about the state of the nation. Their jobs are insecure. Their savings have been battered. They think the country is run by Ivy League snobs who are mortgaging its future to give bail-outs to their chums on Wall Street. And they feel, in their gut, that Mrs Palin is the only politician who really gets it. As a retired policeman in rural Virginia recently told Lexington: “With the exception of Sarah Palin, I don’t have confidence in any of them.”

That is why Mrs Palin’s new memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life”, is such a hit. The media chatter about the book has focused largely on the tedious question of who exactly was to blame for which cock-up during the doomed McCain-Palin presidential campaign. Mrs Palin’s fans, however, will read it for something else: a chance to spend 400 pages getting intimate with their idol. And she will not disappoint them. The book is packed with anecdotes to buttress their view that she is a likeable Everywoman. She shops at Wal-Mart. She eloped with her high-school sweetheart. She loves eating meat, preferably after shooting it. “[T]here’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals,” she says: “right next to the mashed potatoes.” Yet she got on well with her vegan speechwriter, Matt Scully, whom she describes as “a gentle, green soul who I think would throw himself in the path of a semitruck to save a squirrel.”

Born-again Christians and ardent pro-lifers do not need reminding that she is one of them. But she also reaches out to less dogmatic social conservatives. She loved her gay college room-mate. She has civil debates with her pro-choice relatives. When she learned that her baby would have Down’s syndrome, she had a “fleeting thought…a sudden understanding of why people would grasp at a quick ‘solution’, a way to make the ‘problem’ just go away.” But she found strength in God and Todd, her husband. When she asked “Why us?”, Todd replied: “Why not us?”

Some women think her feminism is fake. But others are inspired by the way she has juggled five kids and a career. When she first joined the Wasilla city council, she found it full of patronising old men. But she took her baby daughter to meetings, breastfed her while recording radio spots and “didn’t care too much what the good ol’ boys said about it.” She made enemies the right way—by shaking up the corrupt culture of her own party. And when she was elected the first female governor of America’s most lopsidedly male state, she worked well with Democrats, largely avoiding divisive social issues in favour of practical ones, such as oil and gas. At one point she was America’s most popular governor, in that nearly 90% of Alaskans approved of her. But all that changed when Senator John McCain thrust her into the national spotlight.

The backlash

She had a few days to cram for a hazing most candidates spend years preparing for. She flunked, badly. Two-thirds of Americans now say she is unqualified to be president. A YouGov poll for The Economist this week found that 52% disapprove of her, of whom 40% do so strongly. And some of her critics express themselves rather forcefully. Naomi Wolf, a feminist, calls her “a stalking horse [for] the coming police state”. Al Gore’s TV channel calls her a “gun-ho”. Mrs Palin recalls her young daughter looking out of a car window and seeing people wearing T-shirts that said, simply: “Sarah Palin is a cunt”. Such rudeness outrages Mrs Palin’s supporters—and makes them love her more.

On policy, Mrs Palin’s book is negligible. Her call for “commonsense conservatism” is a string of clichés. She favours free markets and a robust defence, but other than that she offers few specifics about how she would grapple with the big problems America actually faces. She sometimes says things that make no sense: whatever its flaws, cap-and-trade is not a Ponzi scheme. One could argue that none of this matters. Mrs Palin will never be president—no one so widely disliked can plausibly win a general election. But should she decide to run in 2012, she would hit the Republican primaries like an avalanche.

Some pundits think she could capture the nomination. In many states, Republican primaries, unlike Democratic ones, are winner-takes-all. That is, when there are several people on the ballot, one of them can scoop all the delegates with only a modest plurality of the vote. This system sounds tailor-made for Mrs Palin. As Walter Shapiro of Politics Daily puts it: “A well-known candidate with a passionate following who organises early can win the nomination even if a large swathe of the party believes that he or she is ill-equipped to be entrusted with the nation’s nuclear codes.” Nothing would please the Democrats more.