In a sure sign that she won’t be going gently into the good night of post-election obscurity anytime soon, Sarah Palin has accused Tina Fey and Katie Couric of “exploiting” her.
In typically erudite fashion, the Alaska governor said in an interview with John Ziegler recently that “a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh, I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration—that’s a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society.”
What’s more than a little perplexing here, besides the mangled syntax, is Palin’s apparent belief—her defeat in November to the contrary—that the American public remains vulnerable to her brazen disingenuousness.
It’s not that she doesn’t have a point. I mean, let’s be honest; she was used. Everyone uses everyone else. At the end of the day, pretty much everything we do, we do because we’re looking out for Number One. Did Tina Fey and “Saturday Night Live” use her for their own gain? Of course. Did Katie Couric do the same? Absolutely. So did CNN, Fox News, and every TV station, newspaper, political blog and media outlet in the country, if not the world (The Sunday Paper included).
But Palin used all of them, as well. She did the Katie Couric interviews, and went on “SNL,” for a reason—to put herself out there in the public eye in order to help her and Sen. John McCain get elected. That’s the way the game is played. Each party had something the other wanted. The media offered free publicity; Palin, on the other hand, held a lot of fascination for people, conservatives and liberals alike, who knew almost nothing about her.
The governor seems to be suffering from a little buyer’s remorse now that she didn’t get the result she wanted. But had the McCain/Palin campaign prevailed last November, I don’t think you’d be hearing CBS News or “SNL” producer Lorne Michaels complaining that Palin “used” them to get to the White House.
Palin is on less shaky ground when she criticizes her handlers for agreeing to further interviews with Couric after the first one went so poorly. Indeed, even some McCain supporters I know reached the opinion, in those weeks after her selection as his running mate, that less exposure, not more, was what was needed.
In fact, Gov. Palin should be doing a lot more finger-pointing at her own team. If anyone exploited her, it was the party that pressured McCain into selecting her as his running mate; the folks who thrust her into the initially fawning but increasingly harsh media spotlight. If she’s upset because she was ripped apart in the press, she ought to be having cross words with the people who knew she was completely unqualified for the second-highest office in the land, and ill-equipped, at best, to speak intelligently (or intelligibly) about policy with journalists, never mind take a few jabs from late-night talk shows—and threw her to the lions anyway.
But she won’t be doing that—not publicly, anyway. And why not? Because those people can still offer her something she wants: power and fame. And because she knows, her hurt feelings and transparent insincerity aside, that that’s the way the game is played.