Word: palin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what's a Real Sarah Palin to do? First, she has sensibly laughed it off. If she had lumped Fey in with the evil media "filter" persecuting her by asking follow-ups and expecting her to answer debate questions, she would be Dan Quayle jousting with Murphy Brown. She may even go on SNL, perhaps by the time you read this...
...also have given her cover on the campaign trail. Fey's Palin is no love letter--falsely confident, hapless, antiscience and calculatedly adorable--but she's harmless compared with the Real Palin we've seen lately: a culture warrior cannily playing on resentments, a mouthpiece for the McCain campaign's ugliest character attacks on Barack Obama...
...same weekend Fey spoofed the former beauty-pageant queen as bringing a flute for the "talent portion" of the debate, Real Palin was blowing a harsher tune. She cast Obama as a suspicious other--"not a man who sees America like you and I see America"--in a line of attack the Associated Press called "racially tinged." Fey's Palin hasn't set up mass viewers to see this side of her--not yet, anyway. It's not the funny, bumbling Sarah we know! We're conditioned to expect her to ask to "phone a friend," not accuse Obama...
That could change. Real Palin may have given Fey more material for Public Palin--just as, in her debate skit, Fey turned maverick from an honorific into a punch line. Public selves are moving targets, and as the comedians and media redefine them, a candidate can fight the definition, embrace it or use it as a shield. How Real Palin deals with her Fey-controlled image over the next few weeks will determine if Public Palin is her new best friend or her own worst enemy...
...purple state and gained small but solid leads in several large red states, including Ohio and Florida. John McCain was already bound by a limited set of combinations to reach 270 electoral votes; now, without a major change in the race's dynamic, he has no clear path. Sarah Palin revitalized her image with a folksy, defiant presentation, and McCain found a way to attack Obama with a smile, but neither performance changed the trajectory of the overall race. Obama and Joe Biden didn't take any big risks, but they didn't have to--and polls uniformly showed that...