Word: paliner
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...earnestness, Palin also has a media pro's awareness of herself as a TV construct. Summing up her family's public experience for Barbara Walters, she said, "Our life has become kind of a reality show." It's a near perfect analogy. Like a reality contestant, she was plucked from nowhere (or a Bridge to Nowhere), "cast" for her dynamism and compelling personal story. Like a good reality-show premise, she pushed every cultural hot button in reach (gender, parenting, sex, class resentment). And as with that of Jon and Kate Gosselin, her fame devolved into a tabloid feud, with...
...does a reality star regain control of her narrative? First, she blames her producers and the editing. Going Rogue's villain is Steve Schmidt, the very McCain mastermind who vetted her as a running mate. Palin argues that if you didn't like her last year, really you didn't like the version of her that her handlers put forth. The botched rollout of her daughter's pregnancy, her getting pranked by a Canadian DJ pretending to be Nicolas Sarkozy, the campaign-wardrobe bills--blame it all on Schmidt and the stuffed shirts. They couldn't deal with the rogue...
Ditto the Katie Couric interview--which Palin, to her credit, admits was a bust. (Note to future candidates: never assume a network-news interview will be "lighthearted" and "fun.") But it turns out your impressions of her from Couric are probably mistaken too. Did it seem that, when Couric asked what newspapers and magazines she read, Palin filibustered, unable to think up a single title? Wrong! What the untrained eye saw as flop sweat was actually annoyance at Couric's condescension, says Palin; also, she was edited to look bad. (Palin has a way of making edited sound sinister...
...Couric interview, Palin had to convince voters she was ready to lead the country if need be. For her relaunch with Oprah and Barbara, the bar was lower: to show America that she could make it through interviews with Oprah and Barbara. (A full-court press from The View--now that would be a challenge.) She reined in her wild syntax, tossed about folksy-isms like "bullcrap" and called President Obama's economic policies "back-assward." And she stressed her average-Jane image: she let Oprah's cameras follow her to the gym; in her book, she recalls going door...
Gone, at least for the big-network audience, was the culture warrior who praised the "pro-America areas" of America. (Though her book-tour itinerary looks like a battleground-state campaign map.) Invited by Walters to rate Obama on a scale of 1 to 10, Palin gave him a 4--a charitable score for a guy she accused of scheming to deny lifesaving care to the elderly and disabled. Whom do you have to kill to get a 3 around here...