Richard Spencer on Sarah Palin and the Sisterhood

From Taki’s Magazine, November 17, 2009

This past weekend, a friend of mine recounted a visit he paid to his wife’s family in Arkansas around the time McCain had scheduled his much-awaited announcement of who his running-mate would be. Watching the coverage on TV, my friend was struck by just how quickly his Southern in-laws empathized with the then-unknown governor of Alaska. She was their gal, even though they weren’t yet sure how to pronounce her last name.

Sarah Palin is, put simply, the goddess of implicit whiteness. She represents the “Real America” as it’s understood, most often tacitly, by the founding stock of the country from Juno, Alaska, to Jasper, Texas. This is, of course, a dangerous thing in many ways, for so far her powers have been used to mobilize white Christian support for John McCain. But even the man who think he’s Palin’s handler and eminence grise must realize that the woman represents a force he cannot totally control, and that someday she might really “go rogue,” as it were.

Or maybe not. No one as of yet has been able to capture her inner personality. And I certainly haven’t learned anything watching her recent television interviews, in which Oprah and Barbara have been fishing for headline quotes about how mad she was at McCain for not letting her make a concession speech yadayadayada… My guess is that Sarah is probably a profound narcissist, most beauty pageant contestants are, but then she also has a flexibility and openness of mind that allows her to embrace, at one time or another, Buchananism, Zionism, Kenyan anti-witchcraft, and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle.

I should read her book and write something about it. At the very least, one can make do with its many tales from the campaign trail, like this one about GOP operative Nicolle Wallace‘s ingenious idea of booking Sarah for an interview with Katie Couric, Wallace’s one-time colleague at CBS News.

From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News. The campaign’s general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn’t have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon.

“Katie really likes you,” she said to me one day. “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom. She has teenage daughter like you. She just relates to you,” Nicolle said. “believe me, I know her very well. I’ve worked with her.” Nicolle had left her gig at CBS just a few months earlier to hook up with the McCain campaign. I had to trust her experience, as she had dealt with national politics more than I had. But something always struck me as peculiar about the way she recalled her days in the White House, when she was speaking on behalf of President George W. Bush. She didn’t have much to say that was positive about her former boss or the job in general. Whenever I wanted to give a shout-out to the White House’s homeland security efforts after 9/11, we were told we couldn’t do it. I didn’t know if that was Nicolle’s call.

Nicolle went on to explain that Katie really needed a career boost. “She just has such low self-esteem,” Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.”

I was thinking, And this has to do with John McCain’s campaign how?

Nicolle said. “She wants you to like her.”

Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

“You know what? We’ll schedule a segment with her,” Nicolle said. “If it doesn’t go well, if there’s no chemistry, we won’t do any others.”

Don’t you love how Palinese translates to the page! What I also find interesting is that while the media would depict the McCain camp as a mean old gathering of cantankerous blackshirts, in reality it was staffed by third-wave feminists who made Oprah-style evocations of female solidarity and you-go-girl spirit. According to Wallace, it was a good idea to be interviewed by Katie because “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom”; “She just has such low self-esteem”; “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.” All that was lacking was my favorite therapy cliché, “Katie’s in a bad place right now.”

As we know, the interview turned into a catastrophe, with Katie questioning Sarah in a cold, contemptuous, almost sarcastic manner that made the governor produce responses that were even more convoluted than usual. Working-mom solidarity was easily trumped by Katie’s snootiness towards a non-east coast, pro-life Christian. In many ways, Wallace reminds me a lot of Marcia Clark, the prosecuting attorney in the OJ Simpson trial who worked hard to select a mostly female jury, hoping that women would empathize with Nicole Brown Simpson and lock up the abusive OJ. The sly Jonny Cochran went along with the scheme, but made sure that they were all black women. The final composition was 10 women, 2 men; 9 blacks, 1 Hispanic, and 2 whites. As it turns out, the battle between “sisterhood” and black racial ideology is no contest.

And as Katie’s interview with Sarah shows, women are meaner, pettier, more jealous and unfair around other women than they are around men.

But then, this isn’t exactly a shocking revelation for anyone who’s ever attended high school.