Palin Unscripted

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At the Republican Governors Association, Palin faces off with the media and talks about political celebrity and her plan to revive the GOP.

Let’s get one thing clear: This morning’s event was not Sarah Palin’s first press conference. As she snipped at CNN’s Dana Bash, “I’ve been doin’ ’em in Alaska for years.” Which is true—but she wasn’t getting as many questions then. Bash’s own question reflected the questions we all had as Palin stood at the front of the room, flanked by some white guys in suits: What is it you want? What’s the point of all this?

The press conference attracted an overflow crowd, and had the same security strictures of a vice presidential event. (I thought it’d be a month before I saw bomb dogs and Secret Service again, but I was wrong.) But at the last moment, event organizers took the emphasis off Palin, or tried to, parading out a series of gray-haired guys with good tans (i.e., the party’s contingent of mostly Southern governors) to stand behind the lady who might still be running for executive office. I think they were supposed to take questions, too. Not that anyone asked them.

Asked how she might go about winning back the votes of women and Hispanics, Palin could only stammer, “I treat everybody equally,” as if the problem were one of personality, not policy.

Palin’s black polished cotton suit and enormous hair contrasted sharply with the subdued pinstripes of her fellow governors—as did the fact that she spoke at all. Aside from an introduction from Texas Governor Rick Perry, Palin was the only person at the press conference allowed to give the message of the moment, which was, ironically, that they were a team. Palin criticized those who might want to use the occasion to autopsy the patient, reporters she characterized as “kinda playin’ that pundit’s role.” Rather, she said, “As far as we’re concerned, the past is the past.” To judge by her behavior, Palin herself was more comfortable looking in the rearview mirror than forward. Of the four questions she was asked, two had to do with her campaign for vice president and those were perhaps the easiest ones for her to answer, because she didn’t have to—or at least she just repeated that assertion. A third questioner asked how she might use her “political celebrity.” “I don’t know if I’d call it ‘political celebrity,’” she replied, all but blushing in front of the dozens of national political reporters who had gathered to hear her talk about exactly that. She has the natural politicians’ genius for saying nothing.

She was less graceful when given a chance to be specific about the problems facing her and her party. Asked how she might go about winning back the votes of women and Hispanics, she could only stammer, “I treat everybody equally,” as if the problem were one of personality, not policy.

Her opening remarks for today’s panel on the future of the party had a similar warped relationship to reality. Tasked with introducing some of the Republican Party’s rising stars, those poised to help the party learn from the ultimately disastrous McCain-Palin campaign, she recited huge chunks of her stump speech. And seemed surprised when a reference to Joe the Plumber did not get the hysterical reaction it got two weeks ago.

When not returning to those nuggets of feel-goodism that earned her a reputation as a brilliant public speaker, Palin was halting and wayward, her voice rising higher in pitch as she veered between polished-by-time references to McCain (“I’ll say this for him because he can’t seem to do it himself”) and calls to move on, including the peculiar instruction, “in respect to our presidential campaign, now it is time for us to go our own way and leave neither bitter nor vanquished but instead confident in the knowledge that there will be another day.” Her closing words were especially awkward, invoking the letters “RGA” repeatedly, as though it was a team she was reminding herself to root for: They would “rise to fight again,” she said, “And in the meantime, governors, I know, RGA, we’re gonna be walkin’ the walk of true reform within our own states. We will lead by example. The nation needs us and, just sayin’, God bless you and your states and thank you for all you are doing for this great country and we’re gonna step it up and do it even more so, RGA, thank you, guys, God bless you.”

There were about five places she could have ended her speech in those few sentences alone, and yet she kept going. It was almost as if she didn’t want her time in the spotlight to end.

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