It feels a little bit like that moment when you realize you have been wasting your time talking to an unworthy partner to venture on a comment about Sarah Palin, but a recent encounter in an elevator made me realize something about her that perhaps merits attention.
The encounter was between me and a short, thin man who worked at the resort that the elevator was part of. He took one look at me with my fluffy bangs, bun and glasses and said: "I thought you were Sarah Palin."
Now, there are many reasons why I can receive this message in a mixed way. I chose to be grateful and nod smilingly at the man, who then followed his first comment with something to the effect of: "I just stood in line to see her in [insert small Idaho town] last weekend.”
It wasn't right away after this incident that I realized why the small, middle-aged man who would have never been friends with Sarah Palin was enamored with her, in her public-figure status today.
At home, after having straightened out my hair and removed the impromptu, Travel bun, I thought about him again and it struck me that she is the cheerleader whom he could never get close to in high school. Now, suddenly, she is inviting him to come see her, to shake her hand, to talk to her. She is winking at him on TV, speaking his language on issues of patriotism and hunting. He loves her. He loved her in high school.
Today, he and others like him - women, too - are taken aback, perhaps, by the fact that, that stereotypical beautiful girl they could not get close to, socially, is, firstly, inviting, and secondly, of their political and social stance.
I mean to imply that this is all subconscious. Nobody actually thinks that he or she is attracted to a political figure because he could not be friends with the popular crowd in high school. But what else is it when a not-very-well-informed, good-looking, well-dressed woman speaks both the language of high school politics ("ra-ra! yes, yes! let's go! team!") and a colloquial, rural, modern politicism that, from the point of view of pure discourse, smacks of intellectual regression more than of progress?
To whom would such a speaker appeal if not to those who would have wanted to know her when they were young and hoped that she was not the unapproachable figure she appeared?
Sarah Palin is a social comrade-come-true for all Americans who felt intimidated by looks and intellect in high school. I don't have access to the numbers, but my personal memory suggests something like "half," as to the percentage of the population likely to have been affected in this way.
So half of Americans within a certain mid-life age range are candidates for the kind of friendship that Palin's folksy, warm style invites. Remember me?, she says. You always wanted to know me. Well now you can. And I'm not even scary. I'll run for student-body president, yes, but I won't be intimidating with any information that you don't also know or with any intellectual prowess that might cower you. I am your equal, the way you always wanted me to be.
It's heaven.
It's the secret, unearthed dream of the repressed American heart. The timid, the hardworking, the underappreciated person who never expected to be appreciated. Never expected to be approached by anyone who spoke his language but was stronger, looked into his eyes but was more beautiful, extended a hand in a stylish suit.
It sounds as if I am deprecating a certain kind of human, a certain kind of American. I am not.
I am noting a possible psychological basis for the attraction Palin has generated.
She is good-looking, yes, but so are most women in pictures and posters.
She, instead of being just a model, is the living cheerleader from the standard, American high school, come to life in full, female form and speaking like a wind-up doll all the American-cheerleader-all-grown-up expositions we would expect to hear.
She is irreverent, she is ill-read, she is confident. She is a natural. She could be sold by Mattel.
I don't have a personal reaction to Sarah Palin. I don't dislike her. I don't think she is a malicious, invidious confectioner, out to undermine regular American politics. On the contrary. She is a very natural result of the political and social environment in this country, where far fewer than half of all students graduate from college, where chess and surgery are considered occupations only for the uber-smart and where, as a result, a very large class of under-confident workers and citizens thrives on the hope that one day the world will come to it instead of expecting the never-ending and unreasonable improvements of self and situation that are, in some catalyzing conclusion, to constitute the ubiquitous "American dream".
That moment arrives on the screen for many people, when Sarah Palin smiles and winks and fights the battles with the other student-body presidents that are intellectual and well-spoken. She lets 'em have it - her way. She speaks for everyone. She is not afraid to be colloquial. She is proud of who she is. AND - she is good looking! The personal fantasy of conquest for that half of American high schoolers who didn't want to have anything to do with smart and popular people if they were going to be deriding and all mighty. Well now they don't have to choose. Looks, confidence and poise are packaged in an unthreatening, shiny, matte package that manages to dazzle without overwhelming and to win battles without ever engaging in them. In a league of her own, with an agenda of her own, gaining everyone's attention, speaking no one's language, answering to a higher power and to no one else, unapologetic, proud. And looking at you.
Kid.
We can't blame anybody. Not even John McCain. It's part of the mix. Palin's popularity would come out as a positive quotient from the wiggles of some complicated equation about whether or not this type of personality, wielded in this way, would appeal to a certain percentage of the American population. It would be inevitable and, again, positive in value.
