My Visceral Response to Palin
By Aastha VermaWednesday, September 24th, 2008
I’m guessing I surprised many of you in the September 13th airing with my visceral response to Sarah Palin. Since it aired, I’ve been looking for an analogy to explain why I feel as strongly as I do. I finally found the answer while watching football last Monday night. It was a Texan style shootout between the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles. It was exciting with lead changes back and forth and by the end of it, I didn’t care who won because I was worn out.
For 18 months, we’ve seen the Republicans and Democrats duke it out for the election cycle equivalent of 3 quarters…we’ve even had our own Clinton/Obama quarterback controversy. Now late in the 4th quarter, the game has gotten ugly. Each week there’s a new attack followed by media frenzy, 24/7 loops of speech snippets, and each week the polls see-saw.
Chances are you’ve grown tired or de-sensitized from overload. But if there’s anyone to blame, it would have to be ourselves. The American public has become obsessed with the sensational and the shallow. We’re so attracted by the “beat down” one candidate inflicts on another; we’ve lost sight of the big picture – things like healthcare and the environment and the globalization of the economy. Actually, we hear these words all the time but they are as formless and shapeless as our understanding of the candidates themselves. They have turned these large and complex problems and themselves into two-dimensional sound bites. If we took a poll, they way Jay Leno does, on ordinary topics of real relevance, most of us could probably not articulate two intelligent sentences on the ramifications of oil dependency, but we’d have a lot to say about Brittany’s comeback on the VMAs last week.
Let’s pause for a minute and look at why - Our world is in hyper sensual overdrive - overly consumerist, overly disengaged with the community, overly engaged in tabloid gossip, and consumed by distraction. We rarely enjoy a moment of peace and quiet. Our cell phones ring off the hook, our Blackberries keep us on a permanent leash and now any piece of information we desire is on our fingertips and probably already posted on YouTube.
What’s my point? It is as if we have “devolved” into a people who only respond to stimulation. We don’t afford ourselves the quiet time anymore to think. We simply react and what’s worse, we criticize others who don’t immediately react. Obama has been called “slow on the uptake” for his cool demeanor and “inability” to come back quick against McCain’s constant jabs. We’ve lauded McCain for being first out of the gate with a sound bite. Let’s ask the question – is that a presidential plus? Should the president of the United States be reactive or contemplative? Isn’t the reason we are where we are, because we’ve endured a president who was “gut” reactive? As Americans we ought to reflect long enough on why we are so dissatisfied with our status-quo in order to make intelligent decisions about what we want to change. That is difficult to do when we are so bombarded by disjoint and polarizing messages that render us useless to think on our own.
My visceral response to Sarah Palin by my own admission has little to do with her as a mother of 5, or as the governor of Alaska or her appetite for Moose burgers. It has everything to do, though, with John McCain’s calculation that the American public would be so “taken” by the charming lady from Wasilla, that we, and in particular women, would overlook everything else of consequence. Sadly, the polls suggest he may be right, but if we do, it says much more about our lack of desire to probe deeper than the surface of anything important in this nation - and that our attention span is about the length of a sound bite or a commercial. George Bush’s administration was counting on that and won. Now we have a choice to let it happen again, or to make an intelligent, informed decision. This time it is serious – not just for the 4 disasters we have endured under Bush, but because we could have a new president that does not survive office, a possible president who didn’t get a passport until last year, a president who many can’t separate from his race or his Arabic derived name, and a possible president who has a reputation for spouting off at any moment on any subject.
The new president will have real problems to solve, new global competitors who will challenge America’s dominant position, new crises like energy and healthcare and environment and perhaps, most uncomfortably for some, a new growing demographic divide that looks less like the Utopian Republican convention of early September and more like the panel of Democratic Presidential candidates. To that end, I certainly hope we won’t just vote for the guy who lands the strongest punch or trots out thin but attractive veneers.
Sarah Palin is interesting, no doubt, but a distraction. She may be a player some day, but right now, her resume is thin and we know it. If John McCain really wanted a woman in the White House, he had many career long Republican women in the government and industry to choose from for the position. Instead we’re watching a new “celebrity” and waiting for her to stumble and falter instead of asking how we are going to solve our problems. We’ve got 40 days left so let’s spend them “interviewing” the candidates, with the harshest of criteria, for the highest office in the land, let’s not lower the bar just to enjoy the moment and forget who won the game.
Aastha Verma
