print“Truth is an endangered species at 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue,” said Sarah Palin to an audience at the Values Voter Summit. Mrs. Palin’s mixed metaphor (truth/species) is by far more offensive than forgetting where the seat of power is situated; who cares that the American monarch sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
The White House is hardly the people’s house. It’s the people’s burden.
Barely A Blog contributor Myron Pauli was right all along about Sarah Palin being political “cotton candy.” She’s a great personality as an Alaskan, a mom, a hunter, runner, oil and gas ace (expertise she has never “tapped”). For the rest, her life has taken on a reality-show flavor. And the spontaneous ability to connect with an audience has been replaced with a weird, disjointed quality.
Who on earth is choreographing poor Mrs. Palin’s public appearances? She has obviously been told to modulate her voice almost like a preacher, lending it the cadence of a crazy person’s voice.
The there’s the governor’s propensity for rambling, run-off sentences, peppered with grating gerunds. Pearls of wisdom are often lost in the prolix. (One kinda cute line in Palin’s odd address to the Values Voter Summit: “Barack’s bombs are The Bomb.”)
And please don’t attack me for Palin’s devolution. Starting with “Sensational Sarah,” I’ve written oodles in praise of the original Palin persona, recommending that she “fashion herself as an expert, not as a generalist. On energy and environmental issues Palin is indeed an ace. When it comes to the ins-and-outs of the oil and gas industry—ownership, extraction, contracts and leases—Sarah Palin is as sharp as a tack. On both the philosophical and pragmatic levels, she grasps the urgent need to commercialize America’s abundant resources.”