Palin: How she gained control and then lost it
Alaska Dispatch
By Donald Craig Mitchell
09 July 2009"the first sitting governor in United States history to walk away"
It has been almost a week since Sarah Palin rocked the news cycle by announcing her intention to quit her job as Governor of Alaska. Since then, pundits from Karl Rove on the right to Mark Shields on the left have offered diverse answers to the two questions that every Alaskan has been asking every other Alaskan: Is Sarah Palin really the Whack Job that Tina Fey made her out to be? If she’s not, then What Could the Woman Have been Thinking?
[snip]
After watching the Friday news conference, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said that he thought Sarah "seemed more like a spoiled celebrity than a serious public official."
What Gerson got wrong is that Sarah is a spoiled celebrity. But it’s not entirely her fault that she’s spoiled. Because the media attention that has swirled around Alaska’s governor-girl for the past ten months has altered the brain chemistry of a narcissistic personality that somewhere way back along the line was damaged decades previous.
An Australian friend of mine has theorized that Sarah’s odd behavior suggests that she has been afflicted since childhood with Reactive Attachment Disorder, a rare psychological condition that is described in volume four of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders. Many of the symptoms do seem to fit: superficially engaging and charming, lacks cause and effect thinking, inappropriately demanding, engages in lying, lacks a conscience, has poor impulse control, has abnormal speech patterns, etc. But I am not a psychiatrist. So I don’t know if that’s Sarah’s problem.
What I do know is that in 2002 when she began her statewide political career, Sarah Palin already was a legend in her own mind whose it’s-all-about-me sense of entitlement already was pathological…
This made me think back on the whole arc of her notoriety. Even when she’s being her most altruistic “what’s good for the state of Alaska” self, it’s about Sarah Palin, the feisty woman who takes on the big guys (oil companies, government, media) and fights for the working men and women.
She exploits her family tragedies (Downs baby, pregnant teen daughter in the middle of a presidential campaign) to portray herself as magnificent — a selfless mother who takes it all in stride and still fights for family values. We’ll never know if she really is a good mother to Trig or if she just likes to be seen as a good mother to Trig.
And on top of it all, she’s beautiful, extremely photogenic, and she shoots moose from helicopters. What a woman!!! What an image !!!
What am I trying to say? I can imagine Kathleen Sebelius being all those things and not exploiting them — and at the same time being a smart, thoughtful public servant.
Peggy Noonan (the Wall Street Journal no less) has got the Palin assessment more or less exactly right that I can tell…and right in line with Mickey and Ralph I might add. e.g., “Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124716984620819351.html
I just finished reading the Noonan description: it’s pretty devastating. I love her line: “out of her depth in a shallow pool.”
I hope she gets nominated because there’s no chance in hell she can win. When all but the small base she excites begin to think — not about a VP who could maybe get up to speed with on-job-training — but about this limited thinker and narcissistic disaster as the one with a finger on the button, and who would represent the U.S. at G8 summits, etc — I think that would be the end of the Republican party for some time to come.
Image the 3am phone call ad, redux.