Palin is Not Saving Alaska from ‘Lame Duck’ Woes
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Sarah Palin says she wants to save Alaska the injustice of watching its governor galavant around the country visiting fellow governors in a “politics as usual” lame-duck end to a first term. The “lame duck” problem arises, of course, only because she has chosen not to seek re-election. And a woman who professes to be presidential material is now stepping down after just two and a half years as governor of a state with population 686,293.
The fact is: Sarah Palin is using her folksy style and unprincipled rhetoric to paint what is essentially a failure as a kind of “maverick” maneuver that one could never expect from those sinister enough to engage is “politics as usual”. But the pejorative “politics as usual” cannot exactly be made to fit the situation of public officials who serve the term they were elected to serve, and in fact, she rather conveniently ignores its intense relevance to the kind of spin game she is already playing with this resignation.
The Washington Post gives what might be a more appropriate description of her resignation:
Palin offered few clues about her ambitions but said she arrived at her decision in part to protect her family, which has faced withering criticism and occasional mockery, and to escape ethics probes that have drained her family’s finances and hampered her ability to govern. She said leaving office is in the best interest of the state and will allow her to more effectively advocate for issues of importance to her, including energy independence and national security.
There is room, even for hardened political critics or for liberals who detest her methods and her politics, to see a note of human frailty in this story, and to feel the sadness that might come with a life of public service so affected by the spotlight and by the hounding of investigations, that it leads an ambitious person to step down from a job it would probably be in her own best interests to keep. There is room for this, but it is not necessary to make that sympathetic view the final word on Sarah Palin’s sudden resignation.
She may have done it to save her family additional hardship. She may have done it because ongoing ethics probes were uncovering problems that would have her tied up in legal battles indefinitely. She may have done it because she wants to run for president, though this seems an improbable way to go about demonstrating leadership potential or the ability to juggle a dizzying array of responsibilities. She may have done it because she was tired. There may be personal reasons, still secret, and which need never be known.
But Sarah Palin’s immediate spin-machine approach, claiming to be doing this out of some extreme, even fundamentalist devotion to fiscal discipline —”I cannot stand here as your governor and allow the millions of dollars and all that time go to waste just so I can hold the title of governor“— has made this resignation a political stunt of the first order.
She wants the stunt effect (spin the whole issue so that what is becomes what it is not and in the process win attention for yourself), but also the authenticity points (she’s doing it out of a rarefied devotion to the public good), without realizing they contradict each other. And that’s exactly the problem with Sarah Palin’s bursting on the national scene last year: she wanted to be both something she is and everything she is not, and she wanted for no one to notice the contradictions.
Maybe she is saving herself from the public eye, or maybe she’s saving her pursuit of the presidency from the stresses of government. Maybe she is saving Alaska from her sort of governance. But it is so patently absurd to say she is saving Alaska from behavior she finds reprehensible, by removing herself from the picture, that it defies all logic: if she had any self control, she could simply perform as governor in the way she sees fit.
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