The Pit Bull in the China Shop
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 21, 2009

AT last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally
agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an
opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised “Going Rogue” as “well-
written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled
only “parts” of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air
America, belittled the book in The Washington Post while confessing that
she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it.

“Going Rogue” will hardly be the first best seller embraced by millions
for talismanic rather than literary ends. And I am not recommending that
others follow my example and slog through its 400-plus pages, especially
since its supposed revelations have been picked through 24/7 for a week.
But sometimes I wonder if anyone has read all of what Palin would call
the “dang” thing. Some of the book’s most illuminating tics have been
mentioned barely — if at all — by either its fans or foes. Palin is far
and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack
Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15
minutes are up are deluding themselves.

The book’s biggest surprise is Palin’s wide-eyed infatuation with show-
business celebrities. You get nearly as much face time with Tina Fey and
the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in “Going Rogue” as you do with John
McCain. We learn how happy Palin was to receive calls from Bono and
Warren Beatty “to share ideas and insights.” We wade through star-struck
lists of campaign cameos by Robert Duvall, Jon Voight (who “blew us
away”), Naomi Judd, Gary Sinise and Kelsey Grammer, among many others.
Then there are the acknowledgments at the book’s end, where Palin reveals
that her intimacy with media stars is such that she can air-kiss them on
a first-name basis, from Greta to Laura to Rush.

Equally revealing is the one boldfaced name conspicuously left
unmentioned in the book: Levi Johnston, the father of Palin’s grandchild.
Though Palin and McCain milked him for photo ops at the Republican
convention, he is persona non grata now that he’s taking off his campaign
wardrobe. Is Johnston’s fledgling porn career the problem, or is it his
public threats to strip bare Palin family secrets as well? “She knows
what I got on her” is how he put it. In Palin’s interview with Oprah last
week, it was questioning about Johnston, not Katie Couric, that made her
nervous.

The book’s most frequently dropped names, predictably enough, are the
Lord and Ronald Reagan (though not necessarily in that order). Easily the
most startling passage in “Going Rogue,” running more than two pages,
collates extended excerpts from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark
the birth of Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s
understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith and trust in God. But
Palin did not write her letter to God; she wrote the letter from God,
assuming His role and voice herself and signing it “Trig’s Creator, Your
Heavenly Father.” If I may say so — Oy!

Even by the standard of politicians, this is a woman with an outsized
ego. Combine that with her performance skills and an insatiable hunger
for the limelight, and you can see why she will not stay in Wasilla now
that she’s seen 30 Rock. The question journalists repeatedly asked last
week — What are Palin’s plans for 2012? — is a red herring. Palin has no
obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the china shop of
American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline,
all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn’t as a sitting governor.
No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.

The fact-checking siege of “Going Rogue” — by the media, Democrats and
aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike — is another fruitless
sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with
facts — or coherent policy positions. The more she is attacked for not
being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she
becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry, the editor
of National Review, has correctly observed, “She represents less a
philosophical strain on the right than an affect and a demographic.”

That demographic is white and non-urban: Just look at the stops and the
faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional —
the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in
2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced
in the Hitler-fixated “tea party” movement (which she endorses in her
book). It’s a politics of victimization and sloganeering with no policy
solutions required beyond the conservative mantra of No Taxes. Its
standard-bearer can make stuff up with impunity: “Thanks, but no thanks
on that bridge to nowhere”; Obama’s “palling around with terrorists”;
health care “death panels.”

After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her
to start studying the issues. If “Going Rogue” and its promotional
interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during
her months at liberty. Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for
not asking Palin “one policy question,” but when Barbara Walters did ask
some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is “dithering”)
or ran aground. Her argument for why “Jewish settlements” should be
expanded on the West Bank was that “more and more Jewish people will be
flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” It was
unclear what she was talking about — unless it was the “rapture” theology
that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a
precondition for the return of Christ.

The discredited neocon hacks who have latched on to Palin as a potential
ticket back into power have their work cut out for them. But it’s better
for Palin’s purposes to remain as blank a slate as possible anyway. Some
of her most ardent supporters realize that she’ll drive still more
independent voters away if she fills in too many details. And so Matthew
Continetti, the author of the just-published “Persecution of Sarah Palin”
and her most persistent cheerleader after William Kristol, wrote in The
Wall Street Journal that her role model for 2012 should be Bob McDonnell,
the new Republican governor-elect of Virginia, who won on “a bipartisan,
center-right approach.”

What Continetti means is that Palin could still somehow fudge her history
as McDonnell did; his campaign kept his career-long history as a
political acolyte and financial beneficiary of Pat Robertson on the down-
low. Even the far right has figured out that homophobia is a turnoff to
swing voters, which is why Palin goes out of her way in “Going Rogue” to
remind us she has her very own lesbian friend. (What’s left unsaid is
that the book’s credited ghost writer, Lynn Vincent, labeled
homosexuality as “deviance” in her own writings for World, the
evangelical magazine.)

But no matter how much Palin tries to pass for “center-right,” she’s
unlikely to fool that vast pool of voters left, right and center who have
already written her off as unqualified for the White House. The G.O.P.
establishment knows this, and is frightened. The demographic that Palin
attracts is in decline; there’s no way the math of her fan base adds up
to an Electoral College victory.

Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/
Gallup survey, with 65 percent giving her serious presidential
consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike
Huckabee. The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely
to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries.
They don’t speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael
Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They
are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh
than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last
week called Palin “a cultural figure much more than a political one” on
the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary.

Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American
resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black
president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those
Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. As Palin thrives on the
ire of the left, so she does from the disdain of Republican leaders who,
with a condescension rivaling the sexism they decry in liberals, belittle
her as a lightweight or instruct her to eat think-tank spinach.

The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not
self-destruct, she will doom G.O.P. hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the
rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than
Palin and defies partisan labeling. Her ever-present booster Continetti,
writing in The Weekly Standard, suggested that she recast the century-old
populist outrage of William Jennings Bryan by adopting the message “You
shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.” If Obama
can’t tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the
very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her
torch.

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Slavery: The belief that people can be property
Corporatism: The belief that property can be people.