Sarah Palin's Savvy In Poetic Smoke Screens

By Augustus Douw

Before Sarah rushed into the grueling, desperate campaign brawls in 2008 as vice presidential candidate with McCain, she perhaps had not realized so many things about herself. First, she had never appreciated that she was a poet from the breaks, shaped by hunting and proximity to wild beasts. Again there was so much she didn't know about politics and the real world out there beyond the secluded Alaskan frontier.



For a long time, Sarah had figured the only wild beasts to be wary of were the Alaskan wolves and polar bears that she hunted and slaughtered in state-funded campaigns "to protect the moose and caribous", and that the toughest job a man (or woman) could get into was dog racing on a sledge. She had not anticipated that Washington and real wild west politics were another frontier where two-legged beastly politicians ate other humans for a snack, and that beyond Alaska and the the folksy Midwest, there was another world out there like "Ayraq" and "Ayran" which made even the most iron-nerved, resilient presidents lose sleep.



The McCain campaign experience turned out a far cry from running for governor in a sparsely populated state. Sarah had waded into the campaign with her own naive style of showing the Republicans how it should be done. Soon, she was singing from a different page from the McCain campaign, and it was easy to understand after that how she so easily became the scapegoat for the sinking Republican ship. And the experience knocked her sick in the stomach. Sarah begun to realize her own warped ideas of a super go-getter would be vice president virago were only an illusion--or delusion.



Many people think that Sarah Palin had already decided to resign by the time the campaign dust settled. She had too many conflicting issues she realized about herself, the least of which were not domestic criticism and credibility at home. Apart from running off on her people in Alaska, she had wantonly embarrassed them abroad by showing her ignorance about foreign affairs and events, her on-now and off-then folksy talk and extremely shallow touch with economic and current affairs. In a campaign speech in the Carolinas, she was unable to name a single newspaper she had ever read. Someone said Sarah Palin didn't know where Israel was exactly on a world map.



Here are some of Sarah's famous dumb quotes from her nightmare campaign trail:

1. "As for that VP talk all the time, I'll tell you, I still can't answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day?" --Sarah Palin



2. "I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq." --Sarah Palin



3. "I think on a national level your Department of Law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out."...Sarah Palin. (No one has ever heard of such a department in the White House.)



4. "They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan." --Sarah Palin, speaking at a fundraiser in San Francisco, Oct. 5, 2008

When Sarah returned home limping from the brawls in the presidential campaign, she started packing--and crying. The resignation was the only way out of the embarrassing public spectacle. Sarah needed a smoke screen. It was going to be a very painful thing to do, but Sarah discovered a new skill: she had untapped savvy at poetry and art in subterfuge. In a long string of confusing and controversial poetic statements, she kept the country and world at large guessing what and why she would do such a dumb thing.



First, it was something about changing her political stage. Where to, another state, or to Washington? Was she aiming at the 2012 presidential campaign, or was she cutting and running? In another poetic statement, before she left office she continued:

My choice is to take

a stand and affect change

not just hit our head

against the wall and watch

valuable state time and money

millions of your dollars

go down the drain in this new

political environment

rather we know we can affect positive change

outside government at this moment

in time on another scale

and actually make a difference

for our priorities so we will

for Alaskans

and for Americans

"I love my job and I love Alaska, and it hurts to make this choice, but I'm doing what's best for them," Palin said. Some of the other reasons she spewed in subsequent public addresses are:



1. To protect her family, which has faced withering criticism and mockery, and to escape ethics probes that have drained her family's finances and hampered her ability to govern.



2. To protect Alaskans from herself as a lame duck governor. "I'm not going to put Alaskans through that," she continued. "I promised efficiencies and effectiveness. That's not how I'm wired. I'm not wired to operate under the same old politics as usual."



3. Palin said that it was possible to be more effective outside of governance.





Where would she be operating from now, where she would be more effective for Alaska than in the governor's office? Somewhere in the North Pole?



But whatever the reasons Palin really had for cutting and running, most people are still not sure, but some blogs and forums suggest Palin needed a face-saving last act to exit the scene gracefully, something better than the playacting, folksy style she vainly put on in the McCain camp. So she worked out several scripts for the last stage show, spinning them in the air in a kaleidoscope at the stupefied audience before the curtains fell one last time.



As of the moment, Palin is keeping the smokes palling from the safety of her Facebook account, petrified by more delusions of destruction and "death panels" by the federal government, and scary illusions of Putin "flying in from right across the border', and spurring her campaign to exterminate Alaskan wolves and to drill oil in the North.



Palin was a quitter from the beginning. She failed all the tests for anything from governor to vice president to president. She couldn't take the pressure and would probably have quit on McCain from the White House , if (God forbid) they both had managed to get in there, after realizing that you can't make enough time for wolf hunting, dog sledge racing, folksy playacting and GOP-sponsored fashion shows once you are vice president--or president.



But wherever Palin is hiding now, it is getting more and more certain she is not going to show her disillusioned political face for a long time. At least most people hope she won't, and especially the Republicans. It would be one last act of disgrace for them. But the GOP hopes that whatever her folly, she has enough horse sense left to stay behind Facebook with her hunting gear and come out no more to public spotlighting. At least for few years.



e-mail: patlinx@gmail.com