Greg Krehbiel
The Palins are just plain weird
by Greg Krehbiel on 10 January 2012
So Todd Palin has endorsed Newt Gingrich, but (as far as I can tell) Sarah Palin hasn’t endorsed anybody yet.
What the heck?
Why does Todd Palin’s endorsement matter, except that he’s Sarah Palin’s husband? If she also endorses Newt, then was the Todd endorsement some kind of trial balloon? And if she endorses somebody else ….
It’s just goofy.
2012-01-10 » Greg Krehbiel
10 January 2012 @ 9:06 am
The Palins are becoming the Kardashians of the properly dressed right. The only distinction was that initially, they were famous for something other than being famous, but now they’re pretty much just famous for being famous.
10 January 2012 @ 9:18 am
Sarah Palin is the perfect example of what’s wrong with affirmative action.
Affirmative action in education takes someone who could have been a star student at a good college and makes them an average to poor student at a fancy college.
In politics, it takes someone (like Palin) who could have been a great Alaska governor, and makes her a lousy presidential candidate.
But you have to give them — both the Palins and the Karsashians — credit for taking advantage of their celebrity.
10 January 2012 @ 9:30 am
No, I don’t have to give people credit for exploiting an opportunity in an unprincipled and destructive way. Sure, it’s shrewd, but shrewd doesn’t get credit from me in the service of bad ends. Not that I want to be on a high horse about it — I understand the temptation. I just withhold the stamp of approval.
10 January 2012 @ 9:39 am
Okay, but I just mean they’re effectively exploiting their opportunity.
10 January 2012 @ 10:39 am
Everyone’s harsh this morning!
I don’t get how anything in the story supports the idea that the Palins are just plain weird, though. Is it weird that Todd likes Gingrich? Weird that he said anything about it? Weird that Sarah might endorse Romney instead? (I think that’s what Greg was getting at with the dangling periods, but I’m not sure.)
My personal theory about why Todd said that anyone is fine but he admires a lot about Gingrich even though Sarah hasn’t said who she’s endorsing is that Todd thinks that anyone is fine but he admires a lot about Gingrich and that Sarah hasn’t come to a conclusion about who to endorse. I can see how that might seem weird, but I swear there are people who act like that.
10 January 2012 @ 10:54 am
For saying how much they despise the “lamestream media”, they sure know how to manipulate it towards their own ends. When is the last time you heard the media report on the endorsement by the spouse of a failed vice-presidential candidate? Heck, when was the last time the media reported on the the endorsement of a successful vice-presidential candidate? Who are Marilyn Quayle and Lynne Cheney endorsing?
Anything you need to know about the Palins is in what I heard Sarah say on her TLC show: “Todd is a good helpmeet.”
10 January 2012 @ 10:59 am
Okay, DSM, but really — put together all the stuff you’ve heard about the Palins — not just the nasty-nasty rumors, but the baseline stuff about how their kids are turning out, how they have to go out there and say daffy stuff all the time, etc. Take that for a moment out of the “I feel defensive about the Palins because they’re had a lot of undeserved garbage thrown at them” sphere, and put them into the “how normal people spend their lives and talk about life” sphere. Compared to real normalcy, well, no matter how much sympathy you have for them and how much slack you’re willing to grant them (and I do, as well) — well, they’re just not normal.
I also think what Greg means is that it’s weird to be, or to be put into, a position where what you say matters to the whole country when there’s no reason it should — not because of your position, or because you’ve really earned credibility in any important way. Why *should* anyone care what the husband of a retired governor/failed VP candidate has to say about the GOP nomination?
10 January 2012 @ 12:02 pm
Without getting into specifics, I suppose my family isn’t particularly normal by those standards either. If I imagine how we’d look under the Alinskyite attacks of our enemies and the sympathetic tsk-tsking of our friends, I figure we’d be downright Palinesque. If my wife were a retired governor and someone asked me what I thought, I might very well tell them, and if someone gave me a megaphone I could imagine using it, so if I thought it could have an impact I’m not sure I’d turn down an opportunity to talk even if the opportunity was only given to me because of my wife.
Or then again I might not. Who knows? Given how “normal people” behave in front of cameras, I could easily argue it’d actually be weirder *not* to take advantage of it.
It’s possible the resemblances are biasing me in the direction of being overly sympathetic, but given the whiff of how the cool kids treated the previous year’s popular band in junior high about the whole thing, I don’t think that’s the only nonrational motive floating about where the Palins are concerned, even on the conservative side. I like the Palins but don’t think much about them, frankly, while people who think they have too much influence seem to talk about them a lot more.
IOW, I’m not particularly interested in Todd’s opinions myself, but then I also wasn’t interested enough in them to object to them, or to mind particularly if others were. Caring about someone’s opinion merely because of their connection to someone else who you like isn’t a great motive, but it’s certainly normal enough.
BTW, @smitemouth: what’s your objection to the help meet comment? Is it that it’s too much on the gender equality/gender complementarity revisionist side for your tastes?
10 January 2012 @ 1:13 pm
DSM, I hear you — but I think your family might come in for it if you made the normalcy of your family an issue in a political campaign — and then we found out what they were really like.
Nobody seems bothered by the unconventionality of the families of other candidates. That may be because their alleged conventionality was never touted.
See the difference?
I don’t pick on the Palins for being imperfect, or even unconventional and I’ve cut them a ton of slack over the years. But it’s hard to keep pretending that there isn’t something of a falsely rosy image connected with them, that just keeps getting more and more wilted. If they hadn’t started with that, no one would care now.
10 January 2012 @ 1:21 pm
I’ll grant DSM that there’s not much in the story that supports the notion that the Palin’s are weird. To me it’s just one more thing.
The thing that’s weird in this story is that Todd would come out with his own endorsement when he knows perfectly well that Sarah’s endorsement is the newsworthy thing. It makes it sound like they don’t talk.
It’s hard to imagine a situation where, maybe ten years from now, Michelle Obama would endorse somebody without having coordinated it with Barak. You would think that she would know that she’s not the main story and that she would defer to him.
10 January 2012 @ 1:27 pm
The Bible, and certainly the OT, does not seem to promote an egalitarian world view. The only time I have heard the phrase used other than on the Palin’s show was in religious contexts that the woman was created to be the man’s “help meet”. Since the Bible is not egalitarian, the phrase is not egalitarian. If so, it also means that the usage by supposed evangelical christians like the Palins could not be considered egalitarian. Instead, Sarah using it towards Todd sort of turns it upside down from a patriarchal term to one matriarchal. IOW, Todd is not Sarah’s equal, but in colloquial terms, he is her b—–.
10 January 2012 @ 1:30 pm
I agree with sm that it’s awfully odd for an Evangelical woman — who supposedly knows the Bible — to use that term of her husband.
10 January 2012 @ 1:52 pm
I think she’s self-consciously being an evangelical egalitarian and saying, “In most families, the wife is the help-meet, but since I’m called to be an Important Political Figure, we do it the other way, and that’s fine, too.”
And for the record, I think it’s weird, too.
10 January 2012 @ 11:00 pm
If I’m going to criticize John for redefining “extreme” to mean something like “in disagreement with John”, then I think to be fair I’m going to have to question those on my side of the aisle on this new use of the word “weird” and the phrase “just plain weird”. What seems to be striking everyone else here as weird strikes me as a Tuesday.
*shrug*
FWIW, my first thought when reading the help meet comment was of the solemnization of matrimony: “Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.” It took me a minute or so to remember where the help meet phrase was originally from, and to be honest I cheated. It definitely didn’t leap out at me in the way that (say) the word Godself does.
11 January 2012 @ 8:33 am
“Godself” is definitely one of those “finger in your eye” words.
11 January 2012 @ 9:24 am
DSM, I’ll agree that the word “weird” is rather flippant; my sympathy with Greg is based on a common feeling that they just aren’t the paragons of stability and normalcy that their projected image would have us believe — not on an absolute defense of the word or any connotation someone might derive from it. They sell themselves as what the American family would look like if everyone were normal, only they…aren’t.
But as for the “helpmeet” thing — nah. They aren’t BCP folks and have probably never heard the form of marriage you quote. *For them,* it’s not coming from there. Western American Pentecostals just don’t have contact with that stuff. They are taking a phrase thrown around in evangelical circles straight out of the KJV translation of Genesis 2:20 and always used to refer to a wife, and turning it on its head to show that they have a traditional Christian marriage, except, well, they’ve switched things.
11 January 2012 @ 10:56 am
I didn’t say that I thought that Sarah got it from the BCP. I said that it was the first thing *I* thought of. It’s why it didn’t leap out at me as weird, because I’m used to the “mutual help” idea and didn’t immediately place the phrase, so it didn’t set my “pattern of sound words” antennae tingling.
This thread does reaffirm my sense that I’d never recommend that anyone run for office, ever.
11 January 2012 @ 11:03 am
Yes, I know you didn’t mean that — I just wasn’t sure if, with that background, you quite knew the context it probably has for her.