Palin is beyond a joke

Sarah Palin was once a contender: a no-nonsense mom and a serious politician. Now she’s just a greedy celebrity with a grasping family, says Alexander Chancellor

Sarah Palin’s ignorance and inarticulacy are so constantly on display that she can’t just be simulating them to strengthen her popular appeal. They are also attributes in which she takes pride. As Jacob Weisberg writes in the introduction to his new anthology, Palinisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin: ‘Palin’s exuberant incoherence testifies to an unusually wide gulf between confidence and ability. She is proud of what she doesn’t know and contemptuous of those “experts” and “elitists” who are too knowledgeable to be trusted.’

It is this unquenchable self-confidence that is so striking about Palin. When she was widely ridiculed for calling on Muslims to ‘refudiate’ the building of a mosque at Ground Zero in New York, she said that she was only being like William Shakespeare who also had a habit of making up new words. (Surprising, perhaps, that she should risk identifying herself with such an egghead as the bard of Stratford-on-Avon.)

Weisberg, who used to collect and publish ‘Bushisms’ during the last presidency, says that these often hinged on a single grammatical or factual error, whereas ‘Palinisms’ consisted of ‘a unitary stream of patriotic, populist blather’. Palin is completely unfazed by the fact that her pronouncements are not merely devoid of substance but are so syntactically convoluted that they frequently defy comprehension.

One of Weisberg’s examples is a statement she made during the 2008 presidential campaign shortly after John McCain had made the ridiculous claim that she ‘knows more about energy than probably anybody else in America’. ‘Oil and coal?’ said Palin. ‘Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not… So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here.’