Sarah Palin and How to Ruin a Family Get-Together

Discussing politics is one of the easiest ways to ruin any family gathering. In my past I have managed to spoil visits from several of my relatives. One time involved my lobbyist uncle and his “artist” wife — who, depending on the incident, either would not stop complaining about how they could barely afford to keep both their maid and their grown children employed due their unconstitutionally high taxes, or about the dangers of vaccination. Another time occurred with my grandparents after my grandmother explained to me that she was a Republican because, when she was growing up near Boston, all of the Democrats were either Irish, Catholic or Irish Catholic.

Needless to say, I have mostly learned my lesson by now and I was determined to make it through Thanksgiving dinner without so much as a crack about the Fox News story claiming that Socialism almost killed the Pilgrims. This reduced my possible appropriate topics for conversation to school, skiing, my fish and all the shiny new gadgets that I wish I could buy. When, halfway through the first course, my mom made a disparaging comment about Sarah Palin — something along the lines of: “Sarah Palin is such a moron” — I cringed and tried to remain focused on my gravy-covered mountain of mashed potatoes.

Much to my surprise, the segment of my extended family at my house this holiday has a deep antipathy towards the former half-term Alaskan Governor. My dad’s sister and her family are what Palin would call “real Americans.” They come from one of the most rural parts of upstate New York, possess a love of fast cars and big trucks that clearly eluded my parents and are more comfortable with guns than Palin can ever pretend to be. One of my cousins built a secret compartment into his truck where he could keep his pistol and he seems to get immense satisfaction from nailing woodchucks with a sniper rifle.

I expected them to be a bit more enthusiastic about Palin, or at least to complain about Obama. Instead, they agreed wholeheartedly with my mom, and my cousin’s wife Diane joked about smashing her TV if Palin’s daughter Bristol — apparently qualified as a celebrity by her status as the poster child for the failure of abstinence-only education — won “Dancing with the Stars.” This would have been less of an overreaction than when a Wisconsin man took a shotgun to his TV because Bristol advanced another round.

Sarah Palin is running for President. Of course she will try to keep people guessing for as long as possible; once she announces her candidacy, TV shows will not be able to pay her money for her unsophisticated political analysis or cheesy documentaries about her charmed life in the sticks. Her candidacy, entertaining as it might become, is no laughing matter. If George W. Bush seemed uncurious, at least he knew which Korea is a United States ally. He also never resigned his office as Governor because it was not enough fun.

My point here is not just that Sarah Palin is a moron. She was, after all, accepted to five colleges in four years — three more than I was — nominated as a Vice Presidential candidate and invented the Oxford Dictionary “word of the year” with her confused combination of “refute” and “repudiate.” Neither am I calling her the anti-Christ, although here I have no proof to the contrary.
Her problem is that, despite sky-high ratings among Republican loyalists, she attracts less independent support than any other possible candidate. She could potentially win the Republican nomination in 2012, but party heavyweights correctly believe that this would be a disaster for both their party and, potentially, America. Palin’s nomination is the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi winning the Democratic nomination, except without the policy experience or the Botox.

If she did not look so much like Tina Fey, no one would give her a second thought. Now that’s a woman all Americans can support.