ANALYSIS: For Women, The Lowlights Of Palin's Decision
I can't stop pondering AK Gov. Sarah Palin's holiday eve decision to implode her gubernatorial career in the hope that her WH dreams will rise from its ashes.
With a slowish news cycle afoot, reporters gave Palin the 'Michael Jackson treatment' this weekend. She was roundly criticized by the talking head set for exiting the job hastily, after just two-and-a-half years, and with an incoherent statement that made her '08 interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson seem polished.
I find it hard to believe, as Palin suggested, that she's abandoning her responsibilities to save the state money, to show she's a reformer willing to do her part to curb the globetrotting ways of lame-duck govs.
"Many just accept that lame duck status and they hit the road, they draw a paycheck, they kind of milk it, and I'm not going to put Alaskans through that," she said Friday outside her Wasilla home.
Phooey, Palin. You want to play on the nat'l stage, you've got to take a page out of Gov. Mark Sanford's playbook.
And anyone who thinks Palin is not still eyeing a WH bid, no matter how burned she's feeling by the frenzied tabloid coverage of her and her family (see the feuds with Levi Johnston and David Letterman), think again. She said nothing Friday to rule it out, and her lakeside remark about passing the ball for victory, well, she had to be alluding to her ultimate personal or political victory, not the triumph of her announcement over the booming cries of whatever AK waterfowl competed for the microphone.
And while the men commentators weigh the political genius of Palin's move, I say, there's nothing smart about it -- no matter if a newly educated Palin miraculously emerges as a formidable contender for '12.
The move conveyed an unwillingness -- inability? -- to juggle a job and bigger ambitions with the work of family. In large measure, the original, perhaps oversimplified, appeal of Palin, no matter her family's foibles or her subpar knowledge of the issues, was her seeming realness as a mom with kids just trying to make it in the wildnerness.
Meanwhile, her toughness -- not her mastery of geography -- was her calling card. Seems to me the hockey mom cum pitbull forfeited that this weekend. Certainly, Palin is unconventional and has proven again that she's unwilling to play by the party's rules or to cater to the all-male Republican establishment. But more importantly, she also showed she doesn't have, say, a Hillary Clintonesque ability to know when to stop crowing and get down to business.
"So if she's starting to run, it will be as the same reporter-avoiding, generalization-spouting underachiever that she was last time around," wrote Gail Collins in the New York Times. "Now we know she not only doesn't have the concentration to read a policy paper, she can't focus long enough to finish the job she was hired to do."
Michele Norris, writing for NPR, suggested that Palin, having weathered the '08 storm and subsequent battles might emerge with advice to the next round of modern-day mommy candidates.
"Like everybody else interested in politics, I am dying to know what Sarah Palin does next," Norris wrote. "But I particularly want to know if her time in the hot seat has left her with any more compassion than she has demonstrated to this point about how hard it can be for so many other people to put a life together. And even more importantly, I'd like to know what ideas she has about how to make things better for the next Sarah Palin."
With little gratitude for the opportunites that have fallen her way over the last year, Palin proved in resigning this weekend that she's only worried about her next act. Not the political women who follow.
(JENNIFER SKALKA)
