13 Responses to What on Earth Explains Sarah Palin’s Appeal?

1. Jason Rosenbaum November 23rd, 2009 at 12:42 pm 1

   Interesting analysis. I’m not sure it’s totally psychosomatic. Her message has its perks, too, for those inclined to a paranoid/libertarian mindset.

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2. Nathan Aschbacher November 23rd, 2009 at 1:14 pm 2

   1) She dresses like a naughty librarian, and winks like a hooker.
   2) Her base is dominated by chauvinism.

   Mystery solved.

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3. Blub November 23rd, 2009 at 3:10 pm 3

   “What on Earth Explains Sarah Palin’s Appeal?”

   1. a fifth the country is functionally illiterate
   2. a third of the country never reads another book after leaving high school

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4. kurtniece November 23rd, 2009 at 4:07 pm 4

   All good responses, and I’m thinking “Blub” is pretty accurate. There IS a lot of illiteracy out there, and simple people and simple minds crave easy answers. Unfortunately it’s a complex world, and after 8 years of “W” it shouldn’t be a surprise that those simple people are out there, in droves. Now, if only the media, particularly MSNBC would stop giving her so much free publicity for her “platform” and her book, I think she really would eventually fade away!

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5. Cujo359 November 23rd, 2009 at 5:54 pm 5

   While the previous comments have raised good points, I’m impressed with the rigor of your analysis. I’d have just left it at “She’s good looking and appeals to stupid people.”

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6. ADC14 November 23rd, 2009 at 7:34 pm 6

   If she looked like Janet Reno, her ass would have been out of the headlines a year ago no matter what stupid, right wing crap she spouted—except, of course, if she were male.

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7. Grumpy November 23rd, 2009 at 11:05 pm 7

   In response to Cujo359 @ 5

   “I’d have just left it at ‘She’s good looking and appeals to stupid people.’”

   And miss a chance to play the race card? Bite your tongue!

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8. niet November 24th, 2009 at 12:20 am 8

   excellent analysis roger, thanks

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9. libbyliberal November 24th, 2009 at 4:52 am 9

   She still has the older version of Gidget going on. Female with moxie in deep water who can be witty and sharp at times. Bold. But her xenophobia is seriously ugly. But confidence is very sexy to people. And she is attractive.

   Also she talks from her “pig parent” .. a child ego state that masquerades as a parent ego state. It enthralls and probably people bond with her because their parents might have gone into that pig parent power and control mode, too.

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10. bluebutterfly November 24th, 2009 at 7:28 am 10

    When asked, her supporters had no idea, either. Some of the military police at Fort Bragg like her. I saw one picture where this guy had two copies of her book in his hand.
    ***********
    “On November 20, 2009, Sarah Palin visited Columbus, OH as part of her book signing tour for “Going Rogue.” When her supporters were asked broad questions about why they why they thought she should be president, the responses were vague: She’s “real.” She’ll “stick up for America.” ”

    http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102×4158781

    http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/93332889/Getty-Images-News

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11. knowbuddhau November 24th, 2009 at 8:49 am 11

    I somehwhat agree. But I don’t think it’s as simple as you make it out. There’s no mention here of the most important aspect of her appeal to evangelicals and fundamentalists.

    Packaging has a lot to do with it, of course. Would Obama be prez if he wasn’t handsome and eloquent? But you left out the influence of her patron, the lesser Kristol and his neocon crew of practitioners of “the noble lie,” what I would call a carefully crafted myth.

    Thanks, bluebutterfly @10, for bringing her supporters words to the discussion. That’s it right there.

    That she is “real,” and will “stick up for America,” are both myths. It’s all PR, and by that I mean propaganda, as explicitly described by that industry’s founder, Edward Bernays.

    Excerpted from Mourn on the Fourth of July, by John Plger, originally published in New Statesman 09 July 2009

    Meanwhile, the “city on the hill” remained a beacon of rapaciousness as US capital set about realising Luce’s dream and recolonising the European empires in the postwar years. This was “the march of free enterprise”. In truth, it was driven by a subsidised production boom in a country unravaged by war: a sort of socialism for the great corporations, or state capitalism, which left half the world’s wealth in American hands. The cornerstone of this new imperialism was laid in 1944 at a conference of the western allies at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire. Described as “negotiations about economic stability”, the conference marked America’s conquest of most of the world.

    What the American elite demanded, wrote Frederic F Clairmont in The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism, “was not allies but unctuous client states. What Bretton Woods bequeathed to the world was a lethal totalitarian blueprint for the carve-up of world markets.” The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank were established in effect as arms of the US Treasury and would design and police the new order. The US military and its clients would guard the doors of these “international” institutions, and an “invisible government” of media would secure the myths, said Edward Bernays.

    Bernays, described as the father of the media age, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. “Propaganda,” he wrote, “got to be a bad word because of the Germans . . . so what I did was to try and find other words [such as] Public Relations.” Bernays used Freud’s theories about control of the subconscious to promote a “mass culture” designed to promote fear of official enemies and servility to consumerism. It was Bernays who, on behalf of the tobacco industry, campaigned for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation, calling cigarettes “torches of freedom”, and it was his notion of disinformation that was deployed in overthrowing governments, such as Guatemala’s democracy in 1954.

    Above all, the goal was to distract and deter the social democratic impulses of working people. Big business was elevated from its public reputation as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic force. “Free enterprise” became a divinity. “By the early 1950s,” wrote Noam Chomsky, “20 million people a week were watching business-sponsored films. The entertainment industry was enlisted to the cause, portraying unions as the enemy, the outsider disrupting the ‘harmony’ of the ‘American way of life’ . . . Every aspect of social life was targeted and permeated schools and universities, churches, even recreational programmes. By 1954, business propaganda in public schools reached half the amount spent on textbooks.”

    The new “ism” was Americanism, an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology.

    [...]

    Barack Obama is the embodiment of the “ism”. From his early political days, Obama’s unerring theme has been not “change”, the slogan of his presidential campaign, but America’s right to rule and order the world. Of the United States, he says, “we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st-century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond their borders.”

    Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie. Having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition. The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan, which are Obama’s wars. Mourn on the Fourth of July

    And Sarah Palin is being marketed as the far-right’s embodiment of that “ism.” That’s why Jon Stewart doesn’t like her: when you peel back the layers, there’s no there there. She just spouts litanies of buzzwords and catch-phrases meant to push the hot buttons of their base.

    What makes us think the same method of jacking electorates isn’t being used on us?

    Sarah Palin is the “anti-Obama.” It’s a shrewd, cynical, perverted use of the power of myth, just as is being done by myth-makers on the Left. We were sold a candidate who doesn’t really exist. Noami Klein explained this brilliantly yesterday on Democracy Now!:

    AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, I wanted to talk specifically about the kind of branding that you begin your introduction with in No Logo at Ten, how branding has changed. Give us some specifics.

    NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I mean, it’s–it always–branding is expert at absorbing its opposition. So, I gave a couple of examples of companies that had gone “no logo,” an example of Absolut vodka taking their label, their logo, off the bottle. And Starbucks opened, interestingly in Seattle, a store without their brand on it at all. They’re trying to make their brand disappear. So, you have this evolution in corporate branding.

    But, what I decided to focus on is not how corporate–the latest gimmicks and techniques of corporate branding, but, rather, how politicians were–and, indeed, how government has absorbed the techniques honed by the corporations in the ‘90s in creating and selling their super brands. And now they’re being used by political parties, by politicians really, to sell themselves.

    And I’m afraid, I think, that that’s where Obama fits in, that he really is a super brand on line with many of the companies that I discuss in No Logo. And he has many of the same problems as the companies that I discuss in No Logo, like Nike and Apple and all of these–Starbucks–all of these, sort of 1990s, sort of, lifestyle brands that co-opted many of the, you know–the iconography of the transformative political movements like the civil rights movement, the women’s movement. And that was really the hallmark of 1990s branding.

    One of the things in this–you know, a large part what I write about in No Logo is the absorption of these political movements into the world of marketing. And, you know, the first time I saw the “Yes, We Can” video that was produced by Will.i.am, my first thought was, you know, “Wow. A politician has finally produced an ad as good as Nike that plays on our, sort of, faded memories of a more idealistic era, but, yet, doesn’t quite say anything.” We think we hear the message we want to hear, but if you really parse it, the promises aren’t there, it’s really the emotions.

    And, you know, I think that that explains in some sense the paralysis in progressive movements in the United States where we think, Obama stands for something because we–our emotions were activated on these issues, but we don’t really have much to hold him to because, in fact, if you look at what he said during the campaign, like any good super brand, like any good marketer, he made sure not to promise too much, so that he couldn’t be held to it.

    Afghanistan is a very strong example, Amy. I mean, it’s hard to build the case that Obama is breaking a campaign promise when, in fact, this–he is doing what he said he would do during the campaign, even if he made us think that he was a pro-peace candidate, even if he used the iconography, the imagery of the peace movement, even if he, you know–it’s the same thing with labor. “Sí se puede. Yes we can.” This is the imagery of, this is the slogan of the farm workers. Even, you know, Obama’s–you know, the famous poster, you know, this is like the poster of Ché, but this isn’t a real social movement because it never made those transformative demands.

    And that’s what social movements have to do. We have to get back to basics, Amy. And we’ll see it in Copenhagen. Namoi Klein on Climate Debt

    Everything said here by Klein applies equally well to both Obama and Palin. Sarah Palin is a stalking moose for the lesser Kristol’s neocon crew. I’m certain she is. And Obama? For whom is he a stalking horse? Goldman Sachs?

    So while we are exposing Kristol’s pawn as a fraud, we should also take a good look at how we, too, are being jacked with carefully crafted myths.

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12. GDC707 November 24th, 2009 at 9:04 am 12

    The Palin phenomenon has “legs” so to speak, because she is hot. She has star quality. She seems bubbly- especially compared to all the dry mashed potato personalities of the political world. Her voice has a sharp piercing quality that seems to cut through the air. I’ve noticed that people who have distinctive, projecting voices tend to get listened to, especially if coming from a mindset of absolute certainty. It does’nt matter if WHAT they are saying is pure nonsense, people still listen.

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13. robspierre November 24th, 2009 at 11:18 am 13

    Come on! Palin isn’t THAT good looking. Personally, I suspect that the popularity of Palin (and Beck, Hannity, and the rest) has more to with heavy use of drugs and alcohol in the ’80s and ’90s. Remember when the APA said 30% or something of the population was mentally ill based on drug use? That was the year Reagan got elected. Now, two decades later, all the worst dopers and drunks have been saved, inherited/stolen some money, found Jeezus, and think Palin is a moral and intellectual giant.

    Clearly the stuff doesn’t affect your brain as long as you are a Gawd-feerin’ Republican.

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