The Palin Mess

Rebecca Traister's article in Salon is a welcome wake-up call for some of us who have let empathy cloud our judgment of Sarah Palin, but Traister makes a mistake when she links pity to misogyny.

The Professor is of the lady-persuasion and I've watched the melodrama of Sarah Palin with the rapt attention of any good soap-opera fan (my daytime distraction of choice used to be Days of Our Lives, though these days I am more prone to primetime fare). Her nomination spurred me to make my first campaign contribution, an act motivated by equal parts fear and loathing. But I don't know if anyone has properly understood how high the bar was set for her from the beginning. The blindness of the GOP's flailing choice of a woman, any woman was caused by their inability to appreciate Hillary Clinton as both a woman and an excellent politician. Likewise, Nancy Pelosi isn't some demographically-approved stand in, she's an incredibly savvy congresswoman who was able to keep discipline in the face of a massively unpopular bill (while her counterpart John Boehner fell apart). Most politicians would pale in comparison to the two most prominent women in the legislature. The shockingly out of her league Palin, in comparison, never had a chance to be seen as a peer of either woman. She has illustrated that being a woman is not enough to deserve another woman's support (it may even be necessary, but still not sufficient), and that we must give credit and appreciation only where they are due.

But here's the thing about tragic pity, at least in the Greek sense: the audience is never confused about whether or not the protagonist deserves their comeuppance. The tragic figure always deserves the consequences, even when the payback is huge and the mistakes are small and animated by good intention. Intention was irrelevant. The Greeks were tough people when it came to moral and ethical failings; the small flaws of a great person became the seeds for catastrophic failure (and before questioning whether or not Palin is a great person, I should clarify that this in the Greek sense simply means high-profile or well-known insofar as fame was considered an indication of the magnitude of one's acts).

Because we are human beings, who feel empathy for even those with whose actions we disagree, we see ourselves reflected back in the tragic figure and a great sadness wells up.* Do I know what the Bush Doctrine is? Yes, thanks to my particular flavor of wonkitude. But could I imagine situations in which I had followed my own ambition far beyond my capabilities? Absolutely. The Palin disaster has reached the status of epic political cautionary tales--but cautionary tales only work because we can imagine ourselves in the shoes of the person in the example and wish to avoid a similar outcome.

This is all to say that there's nothing wrong with feeling pity for Sarah Palin. She is astoundingly foolish, she plays to the cultural divisions which weaken the country, she's a petty ideologue, but she was also a pawn in misogynistic GOP machinations, the failing of which will destroy her political career and mark her as an incompetent fool for the rest of her life. The odds are she will be the butt of a national joke perhaps even beyond her lifetime. I could not wish such a thing on my worst enemy, and in smaller part, there by the grace of god go I.

* A lover of Aristotle's Poetics would object that we do not feel pity when bad things happen to bad people, but I would not be quick to label Palin as a bad person. There isn't enough evidence to make such a strong claim as to her nature (or at least I would feel uncomfortable making such a determination--I am a Democrat precisely because I don't believe we live in a Manichean world). I would say petty and intensely foolish.