The Palin Tragedy

Ross Douthat
NYT

Josh Green has a great piece in the latest Atlantic [posted below] on the Sarah Palin who might have been — Palin the reformist governor of Alaska, that is, rather than Palin the spotlight-chasing, media-feuding avatar of right-wing identity politics that we’ve come to know since the 2008 election. The Alaskan Palin fought corruption within her own party, attacked the nexus of government and big business, avoided polarizing feuds and cut successful bipartisan deals; in the process, Green notes, “she succeeded to a remarkable extent in settling, at least for a time, what had seemed insoluble problems, in the process putting Alaska on a trajectory to financial well-being.” This was the Palin that I liked from afar, before John McCain elevated her to national prominence: The charismatic pro-life working mom who was also a good-government reformer capable of thinking outside the ideological box. (Imagine Mitch Daniels crossed with Michelle Bachmann — in a good way.) And it’s a Palin who was swallowed up, almost immediately, by the national culture war, which made her both a right-wing icon and a left-wing hate figure almost instantaneously, and effectively erased her more interesting and complicated past.

Ruminating on Green’s piece, and Palin’s post-2008 trajectory, John Podhoretz suggests that she has no one but herself to blame:

The fault here lay not with her attackers but within her. She embarrassed herself in two interviews, and decided the blame lay not with her own ill-preparedness but with the media that had come after her. Understandably enraged by the misogynistic and practically psychotic attacks on her, she came to embrace her status as a kind of martyr for the social-conservative views that had not been the truly distinguishing features of her meteoric political career up to that moment.

(More here.)