Category: Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption

Sarah Palin speaks in Manchester, N.H., Sept. 5, 2011

Yesterday, Ross Douthat engaged in a “counterfactual” what-if about the 2012 primary campaign: Could Sarah Palin have won?

Speculation unmoored from actual facts is one of those games intellectuals love to play. It’s light work for brainy people to imagine what might have been in an alternative universe. By contrast, the business of reporting — trying to get sources to return your calls, for example — is often enormously frustrating and the labor-to-output ratio sometimes makes you wonder if it’s worth it.

Why bother picking up the phone, when you can just speculate?

Successful politics involves telling stories — “narrative arc,” as the intellectuals say. In 2008, Sarah Palin had an awesome narrative arc: Feisty mother of five, husband an oil worker and snowmobile race champ, she fought the odds, beat the Republican establishment, became governor of Alaska, and was plucked from (relative) obscurity as the surprise choice for vice-presidential running mate.

Then her enemies went to work on her, and messed up that story, so she was scapegoated for John McCain’s 2008 loss and was made a symbol of everything anybody might hate about the Republican Party: A religious fanatic. A negligent mother. A tacky, selfish, scheming manipulator. An unsophisticated airhead lacking basic knowledge about major policy matters, who quit before her first term ended under a cloud of ethics allegations, and then cashed in with a book deal, a reality show, and a contract with Fox News.

A 2012 Palin for President campaign would have been about repudiating that negative version of her story, recapturing the narrative arc of the feisty Alaska hockey mom that had made her a heroine to so many people in 2008. And I would have loved to cover that campaign.

Peter Singleton and Michelle McCormick had me half-convinced at one point it might actually happen. (See, “Still Waiting for Sarah,” The American Spectator, Aug. 22.) I traveled to New Hampshire over Labor Day weekend to cover a Palin rally (“The People’s Palin,” The American Spectator, Sept. 6) where she drew a bigger crowd — and vastly more media coverage — than Mitt Romney had the day before. By the time she finally bowed out (“Sarah Says No,” The American Spectator, Oct. 6) Palin’s supporters had endured two months of agony, only to have their hearts broken, and were exposed to sadistic mockery from Erick Erickson merely for having hoped at all.

Perhaps you understand why I don’t particularly relish watching Ross Douthat, Allahpundit and Philip Klein (none of whom were ever prominently pro-Palin) do a leisurely re-hash of the hypothetical counterfactuals of a Palin campaign that didn’t happen. Continue reading Narrative Arc: Second-Guessing Palin, Santorum’s Story and Romney’s Doom →