OP-ED COLUMNIST
Sarah’s Amazing Race
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: September 1, 2010
Sarah Palin is going to Iowa to be the headliner at a Republican fund-raiser. In the state that will be the first to hold a contest in the 2012 presidential campaign, even if it has to do it in 2011.
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Her staff says this means nothing whatsoever, but let us acknowledge that Palin is on a roll. She’s got her own TV show, not counting Fox News. And she twitters! Or somebody does it for her. Hard to tell which. Her twit on the president’s Iraq speech was: “may make u want to dig out ur old Orwell books so rewritten history can be deciphered.”
On the one hand, the sentence construction does have that Sarah ring to it. On the other, how many of you think that Palin has old Orwell books hanging around the house? May I see a show of hands?
And she endorses candidates. In the Republican primary for the United States Senate race in Alaska, her pick, a hitherto unknown person named Joe Miller, beat the incumbent, Lisa Murkowski. Whether Palin’s backing made any difference to the 28 percent of eligible voters who flocked to the polls is unknowable. But Palin’s endorsement did inspire the Tea Party Express to give Miller nearly $600,000 for TV commercials, which he used to brand Murkowski as a liberal insider who changes her positions “more often than a moose sheds its antlers” and as a member of a family that regards itself as entitled royalty.
“We stayed on the high road,” Murkowski said when she finally conceded on Tuesday. She originally got her Senate seat from her father, Frank, who held it before her and then decided to appoint Lisa as his successor when he moved on to the state’s governorship. So the royalty ad may have had a point, although I’m sure the bit about the antlers was over the top.
Almost no one expected her to lose — certainly not the Alaska Democratic Party, which had dumped its nomination on Scott McAdams, the affable mayor of Sitka, a town with 9,000 people and no road access.
He seems to be an intelligent and well-spoken guy. But the choice was apparently based on the fact that the party’s state convention was held in Sitka and McAdams was, if not well known, at least extremely handy.
Anyhow, Miller’s victory was another big win for Palin in this year’s primaries, and it was followed by the news that she was going to appear at a fall fund-raiser in Iowa — the Iowa of Iowa presidential caucus fame. “Iowa Republicans are going to look favorably on anybody that has come to this state this year to help us win in 2010,” the state party chairman told The Des Moines Register.
So very hard to imagine Palin as a presidential candidate. So very easy to imagine her on a reality TV show. “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” is set to premiere in November on TLC, the cable network that was known in happier days as The Learning Channel. One of the episodes will reportedly involve an educational visit to Alaska by Kate Gosselin and her twins and sextuplets, who also have a reality show on TLC that used to be known as “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” until her husband ran off with a large number of different women.
Kate Gosselin appeared last year on “Dancing With the Stars,” and Bristol Palin will be competing on it this fall, holding what is apparently the Recent Break-Up slot in the competition. While Levi Johnston, the father of her baby, runs for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, on his own reality show. The Palins are now reality TV royalty, like the Blagojeviches and the Ozzy Osbournes.
In her spare time, the former governor of Alaska is making speeches at $75,000 a pop. To which she must be flown first class, as per her standard contract, or in a private plane that “MUST BE a Lear 60 or larger.” This is a new, emerging “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” version of Palin. In her public comments, Sarah is still just a down-home gal, making moose chili for the kids and assuring an N.R.A. convention that she and Todd prefer sleeping in the back of their truck to paying for a motel room.
A new Vanity Fair profile by Michael Joseph Gross suggests that Palin does still cut costs by being an extremely bad tipper. The piece also resurrects the charge that she does not actually hunt, and claims that Todd had to scour the neighborhood to find some moose to put in that chili when a TV crew came to call.
This is not the first time Palin’s hunting creds have been questioned. I think it is time for her to take a pool of reporters out into the woods, bring down a moose and dress it on the spot. Maybe she could compete with other allegedly outdoorsy politicians, like Joe Miller. Maybe they could call it “Shooting With the Stars.”
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