David Dante Troutt

Who’s Not Your Friend? The Sarah Palin Narratives

[Please see the blog epilogue at the end of this essay]

If Sarah Palin’s sudden and remarkable popularity that boosted John McCain’s presidential hopes continues for more than another week, it will be because of the power of narratives to alter reality and affirm voter preferences. Narratives are no small thing—merely the way we tend to perceive the world—yet they are frequently taken for granted, except by Republican campaign strategists. This time, Democrats demonstrated some brilliance in this vein when Barack Obama began his campaign for president many years ago by framing and repeating the compelling narrative of his life in an elegant memoir. In short, he sold story. In fact, he sold a profound story when Hillary Clinton did not, which is primarily what distinguishes them. And now we have Palin’s.

I am ready to admit that I struggle with hers and not just because I am a Democrat and a supporter of Obama. The first clear fact emerging from her appeal is that we are, as so many social scientists have been telling us for years, a deeply divided country. I am not supposed to like Palin because I am black, a feminist, live in a large Northeastern city and worked very, very hard in school to reverse my childhood lack of class privilege. I am the Other American to whom she refuses to speak. Yet, because she could well become my president too, I am compelled to try to understand how her narrative works so well on others.

Sarah Palin is their friend. As the GOP narrative goes, Sarah Palin need be understood by just a few irrefutable facts that frame the narrative of a person people from That America want to very possibly lead the biggest economy and greatest military power and most diverse culture on earth. Hockey Mom of five (including an infant born last spring with Down Syndrome, another off to Iraq, and another soon to give birth at 17 after, we’re told, marrying while still in high school). Moose hunter and field dresser. PTA Mom, city councilwoman, small town mayor, governor. Tax and pork cutter, principled government transparency advocate and reformer against Big Oil. College point guard. Strong on conservative values. Not too good student (six colleges in so many years). Barracuda tough.

That’s the basic package, and, if I lived in those places and voted Republican, I would see in her my friend. She would remind me of myself or people I knew. I would fill in—and this is a very important aspect of successful narratives—various features of her profile to suit me. Give me enough good variables and I will fill in the rest. I will see in this person strength, principle and values. As important, I will not see elitism, a darling of the liberal media, moral equivocation, kowtowing to special interests, PC-istas and others like him—Barack Hussein Obama, the Global Encroaching Them in colors never seen in the Alaska and Idaho where she grew up. Palin is untainted. She is pure. That is enough. That is plenty.

I am trying to figure out why it is enough—not for the wealthy who vote Republican anyway and know this narrative trick as the next version of a game that has worked since Nixon engaged the “Silent Majority” strategy two generations ago. Why does this work for many millions of households who have lost children and spouses to war, lost jobs and homes to deregulated industries (banking and manufacturing) that gambled on them as though they were anonymous units for trade, lost limbs and well-being to spiraling health care costs, etc.? Why do women appear to favor a champion whose beliefs disfavor women?

The familiarity of friendship.

He was a friend too last time, right? George Walker Bush went to Yale, had a daddy who was a Washington fixture before he was president and owned a friggin’ baseball team, but he was still the guy to have a beer with and never make you feel dumb. He spoke in country (club) aphorisms and dodged questions awkwardly and was not even close to being elite. He was almost just like me except for the tax policies, the wealth inequality, the war for no reason, the total secrecy, this recession now and the—but for the grace of God—Katrina response. He too had an aged white man beside him who you could tell by his smile was decidedly unfriendly.

You would expect disastrous circumstances to marshal skepticism among voters. Or all the complexity of a bad situation might instead fatten you up for a good story. Some of Barack Obama’s rock star appeal may be attributable to this—the desperate desire to suspend specifics in favor of compassionate and protective storytelling from a believable voice. Palin is similarly little known, fresh, exotic and therefore an attractive vessel for even an angry brand of populism. War, recession and abandoned faith in government offer a perfect combination for populist messages. Both sides, with the right storyteller, could be persuasive as a populist defender of our more local interests. We are all acutely searching for friends in government now.

Although we have seen four decades of the Republican narrative in which the world is easily divided into us-them, good-bad dichotomies where “small town values” enjoy pure superiority over the coastal urban elites, deregulation gets government off the little guy’s back, and even terrorism can be reduced to racial code words, every narrative is vulnerable. A successful narrative cannot trip easily over its own terms or contradict itself too long. Even while its intended audience fills in terms and suspends its skepticism, they cannot be compelled to pause forever over details. And more than its terms, its internal logic must brook no good rebuttal. Or its integrity dissolves.

This may happen to Palin and the GOP simply with the passage of time. Clearly, their Cold War-era secrecy about her is intended to forestall the gaffes and disclosures that might disrupt narrative flow. Which alone suggests that the story is weak. Questions have a way of compiling upon themselves the longer they go unanswered. They say she’s more qualified because she was an “executive.” All right, but we all know executives. An executive—mayor, governor—of what? Alaska.

Alaska is not you. Alaska has the lowest tax burden in the United States, with no state sales or income taxes. The tremendous federal ownership of land and control results in a huge dependency for subsidies and employment (including the military). Alaska is one of those states New York taxpayers pay for in that it receives far more in federal monies than it pays out, especially in terms of earmarks. Much of the rest of the economy is the oil industry. In this world of governing, every year every “qualified” resident of the Alaska Permanent Fund receives a check reflecting the annual state petroleum surplus from the Alaskan pipeline. Where most of us live, the governor’s spouse is not allowed to receive e-mails about state business and sit in on top-level meetings. Our governor cannot simply hire and fire high school friends into doing the public’s work, as the Times reported.

And shouldn’t someone leading the country at a time in which we fear so many enemies know a few Other people? The city of Wasilla (which is probably some fraction of the South Side of Chicago) is .6% black, 1.3% Asian and 3.7% Latino. The state of Alaska doesn’t do diversity much better with 3.2% black, 4.5% Asian and 5.6% Latino, according to 2006 Census figures. Palin spent the rest of her time in Idaho. Under these circumstances, it would be very difficult for Sarah Palin—whatever is in her heart—to have befriended a person of color. What is a reality to the world would likely amount to an abstraction for her.

Except Alaska Natives, who populate the state in more substantial numbers and who have been firmly excluded from the reports so far from the press. While Palin’s narrative literally imagines her out there shooting Caribou for sport and her husband employed at times in commercial fishing, she has opposed the rights of Alaska Natives to engage in subsistence hunting and fishing according to ancient customs. Palin is currently challenging their once settled claims of tribal sovereignty in federal court. According to some tribal spokespeople, Palin’s greater environmental harm is in denying the connection between oil development and global warming for Alaska Native peoples’ way of life, not for leaving Polar bears unprotected.

Finally, what exactly does the job of president involve? This is where the ordinariness part of the narrative surely unravels. Even our most extreme moments of populism have not given rise to a debunking of credentials. We have always expected national leaders to be knowledgeable, to have facility with policy choices and even to have been a good student in challenging settings. Basic preparedness is one thing. How she would respond in an emergency is another. We are surrounded by the risk of emergency now. An executive so anti-intellectual, so ill-prepared yet accusatory, who possibly does not even know what she doesn’t know will likely do two things in a crisis. First, she will feign power and authority by acting rashly and without nuance. (She will front.) Second, she will surround herself with advisers who actually have a knowledge base and an agenda she will follow. (She will need a posse.) She will be led rather than lead by people who make little pretense at being populist friends of the working people.

And we as a nation will wonder if there is ever an end to what divides us into such profound and often deadly embarrassments.

The other way a narrative loses resonance is when it is eclipsed by a more compelling counter-narrative. That is essentially the Obama campaign’s job right now, and it is embarking on two approaches. One is to show, as Kerry and Gore failed to do, how the tactics that brought the nation Sarah Palin work to fool people out of their truer interests, play upon irrelevant fears and, worse, simply lie. The second is to make a mantra of your specifics on the issue. Hopefully, the constant repetition of your plans to help Americans with the issues they say matter, like the war and the economy, will contrast with your opponent’s resort to exciting issues that rarely matter that much to them, like lipstick and gay marriage.

I offer a third way, because I think it is overdue. Let somebody else talk. As great an orator as Barack Obama is, there is a segment of the population that needs help hearing him as a friend. Joe Biden certainly has a role in this. Hillary Clinton, who forever asserted that she was the friend of women and working people, appears to have forsaken hers. No matter. The Obama campaign should find white working- and middle-class people who, on a series of commercials, can stand on the lawn of the home they used to own or the steps of the employer where they once had a job and calmly testify that they bought the Republican okey-doke in 2000 an 2004, and look what it got them. But not this time.

“I believe this man is my friend, and he’s got my vote in 2008,” they’d say. Fade to black.

Blog Epilogue – September 19, 2008

It is always comforting when you’re wrong about things you hope to be wrong about, and in the days since I wrote the above post the “Palin surge” appears to have evaporated. All this cultural commentary on the political effect of her nomination as vice president may not be entirely for naught. But as polls currently indicate, American voters—women in particular—are rejecting the Republicans’ cynical the narrative. Or at least they are reading it more skeptically in light of changed circumstances, like the imminent collapse of Wall Street and global credit markets.

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