I Watched Sarah Palin’s Channel So You Don’t Have To | Vanity Fair

I Watched Sarah Palin’s Channel So You Don’t Have To | Vanity Fair:


Author Bruce Handy recounts his experience paying for and perusing the new Sarah Palin channel ($9.95/month or 1 year for $99.99).  In summary of the content he notes that Palin's identity is constructed primarily in anti-thesis to Barack Obama.

"In that regard, as Ian Crouch points out on newyorker.com, Obama is her ultimate foil, what with his Ivy League degrees, his slender, vaguely metrosexual airs, and his condescending habit of speaking in diagrammable sentences. Palin needs him the way the Harlem Globetrotters need the Washington Generals, except that Obama is the one who usually wins, which is his greatest service to Palin. Because imagine an alternate universe in which Palin wins. She herself did, which is why she’s no longer knocking around the Alaska statehouse, and why, it says here, she’ll never run for president. Crusades are more fun than governing, plus you can’t monetize the latter, not legally, anyway. There is a clock on the S.P.C. homepage counting down the days, hours, minutes, and even seconds to the end of the Obama administration, an allegedly blessed day."

Eric and I noted in our review of Palin's keynote speech for the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, TN (spring of 2010) how well it portrayed Obama as the symbolic devil Hoffer describes.  4 years later, that anti-thesis - and I would argue clear fanaticism - it still driving and defining Palin.

Handy's review and observations fit and illustrate the theory of fanatical rhetoric I've presented elsewhere.



A countdown clock.  Seriously.





'via Blog this'