The Palin game

by Nathan Rodriguez

More than a week after the announcement of Gov. Sarah Palin as the GOP nominee for Vice-President, the strategy has become pretty clear.

Keep her away from the media as long as possible. Sequester her like she’s a juror on the O.J. trial, and don’t let her say anything off-the-cuff.

Right now the media are doing McCain’s job of actually vetting the Alaskan governor, so it makes sense to keep her quiet until the dust settles.

This accomplishes a few things: first, it facilitates the Republican strategy of playing “victim” of the media. They get to retread transparent accusations of sexism, and stick to the talking point of “executive experience,” while the media — merely doing its job — asks some pretty reasonable questions about her experience, and the McCain campaign accuses them of “ganging up” on her. It can look one-sided.

How dare the media belittle the myriad accomplishments of Gov. Palin! She’s a mother of five who can balance the budget while blasting a 12-gauge and selling a jet on eBay!

Second, it makes sense to keep her quiet while the national media unearths potentially shady stories. The cornucopia of scandals and suspect statements she’s accumulated in her 18 months as governor are pretty wide-ranging, and it makes little sense for the McCain campaign to expose her to damaging questions before coaching her on the appropriate response.

Had Palin been available from the beginning, it would have been interesting to watch her answer questions about her ever-changing stance on the bridge to nowhere, her husband’s involvement in a party promoting Alaskan secession, her slashing state funding for special needs children by more than 60 percent while claiming to “fight” for them in her acceptance speech, her apparent ease with banning books from libraries, opposition to abortion in cases of rape and incest, and that little brouhaha called Troopergate.

Now, with less than two months before the election, the media has quite a bit of ground to cover, and things will get muddy.

Do they try and delve into her foreign policy opinions? Do they try to pin her down on a few of the beyond-the-pale social positions?

My guess is that they’ll continue to talk about Troopergate and Republicans will try to continue banter about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, to polish up the “victim” image.

In the meantime, if Palin plays her cards right, voters will become weary of these supposed scandals, and she’ll be able to pull off the ultimate goal of the McCain campaign: To keep her responses on controversial issues vague enough to sound reasonable.

Because if she looks reasonable and sounds reasonable —which she should, as long as the McCain campaign continues to control the message —the media will be as obsessed with her field dressing a moose as they are burnishing McCain’s maverick image. And that’s when they will have succeeded in changing Palin’s image from one approximating a manipulative, deeply partisan Kathleen Harris, to a benevolent, independent-minded version of Frances McDormand from Fargo.

Sadly, the mainstream media is just shallow (or busy) enough, and the GOP just crafty enough to make her nomination about image, not issues. And that’s what the Democrats need to combat — to show that behind the swash-buckling image and easy smile resides a wolf in sheep’s skin. If they don’t, Palin will be able to superficially relate to enough Reagan Democrats to make the race much closer than it should be.



Note: This was written before I saw “Sarah Palin: An American Woman” on Fox. For some reason, it seems a little soft...she seems almost...human. I’d better turn the channel before her appeal that, “We don’t have to agree on everything,” begins to cling like the worst kind of dingleberry.
Coming up next – is Sarah Palin totally awesome or completely awesome? We report the hard facts and let you decide!