I too got a huge kick out of the Sarah Palin interview in Runner’s World, Jess. I’ll give her a break on the cheeseball factor, since I’ve found that it really is hard to talk about running without sounding totally boring and preachy. But you’re right, she was preaching more than the gospel of endurance. In addition to the “faith in God” line you called out, there was also her weird aside about calling on your rock. Describing running with her dad, she says:

He used to tell us to call on the rock during a race when we were hurting and we were tired and wanted to quit ... We all have a different rock, but Dad inspired us with the knowledge that we could reach down deep and get strength from it. And that's not just a lesson when you're out there dying on the 23rd mile of a marathon but one for getting through daily life. Sometimes you've got to call upon your rock to get through the tough times.

A colleague more familiar with the Christian lexicon than I tells me that “rock” is a fairly common term for God. (Too bad—I was excited about the idea of us all having our own Rock to call on.) Interesting, then, that Palin would say we all have a different one. How very polytheist of her!

Still, I think the nugget of the interview that deserves the closest analysis is this: “I was thankful that I didn't need a whole lot of skills to run.” How tempting to tack on a bracketed “for Vice President” to the end of that one.

Tags: runner's world, Sarah Palin

Anyone who still thinks Sarah Palin isn't trying to use her enviable physique to her political advantage should read this Runner's World profile in which Palin says, "I knew my thighs were going to just throb." The throbbing thighs are accompained by a slew of cheesecake shots of Palin in close-fitting running gear.

More entertaining than the snaps of Palin in spandex are the pot-shots she manages to get at both McCain and Obama.

On McCain's staff: "A great frustration I had during the campaign was when the McCain staff wouldn't carve out time for me to go for a run. The days never went as well if I couldn't get out there and sweat."

On Obama as a runner: "I betcha I'd have more endurance."

But she also manages to work a big-up to J.C. in an interview that's supposedly about running: "First and foremost, like my Mom's inspiration has always been, I have my faith in God."

It's masterful! Oh, how I've missed those dulcet betchas in these long winter months!

Photograph of Sarah Palin by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images.

Tags: runner's world, running, Sarah Palin, trig palin, XX Factor

The moment when the political wife stands (or doesn’t stand) on stage while her husband soberly confesses that he could not, try as he might, keep it in his pants, has proven time and time again to be a moment of high drama. This fall, it will also be the basis for a television show. Jezebel points to the trailer for CBS’s forthcoming The Good Wife, a drama starring Julianna Margulies (aka ER’s Nurse Hathaway) as a mother whose politician husband (played by Chris Noth aka Mr. Big) has up and pulled a Spitzer, but landed in jail for it. The wronged political wife is officially an archetype.

CBS has, however, made some instructive changes to this archetype, in order to make her TV-ready. First, following that painful press conference, Margulies’ character goes back to work, after a 13-year hiatus, as a lawyer. Second, the bad husband is not exactly in the picture, what with him being in the clink and all. These are both departures from the typical, real life script. Most political wives, Hillary being a notable exception, don’t go and get themselves new, non-husband-oriented careers following the scandal. Most political wives also don’t end up leaving their husbands. Depending on how it plays out, in this, Jenny Sanford may actually be a model of something new. CBS' tweaks to the typical wronged-wife story mean this show won’t be about how a marriage gets salvaged, it will be about how a woman “finds herself," by, you know, helping bring criminals to justice. On network TV, heroines have day jobs.

These alterations seem both necessary and smart: The show about how a long-term, broken couple decides to try to make a troubled marriage work, while neither partner has any cause to leave the house, would make for an Ingmar Bergman movie, not a TV series. And during the real life press conferences that inspired The Good Wife, aren't most of us more concerened with the woman, her decision, her feelings, her future, than with the fate of her jacked-up marriage anyway?

Photograph of Silda Wall Spitzer and Eliot Spitzer by Chris Hondros/Getty Images.

Tags: affairs, Jenny Sanford, Julianna Margulies, politicians, Spitzer, The Good Wife

Hanna, perhaps the most enduring lesson of the Mark Sanford unraveling is that when your marriage falls apart, don't call in the AP reporters. I generally side with Ruth Marcus and have been pro-Jenny Sanford. But the danger in claiming the moral high ground is that the air starts to get thin, and the lack of oxygen makes you say stupid things. Like Jenny's offering far too many details about her husband's behavior. (I do however, like imagining the discussions in which Mark asks Jenny's permission to go to Buenos Aires to get laid.)

But in order to retain the public's sympathy, Jenny should stop talking. And how about skipping the references to Job? Jenny Sanford is a wealthy woman with four healthy sons and an adolescent for a husband. That last fact is painful, but doesn't put her in Job territory. Author Christina Nehring, in her defense of being crazy in love, writes that she has "been derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents ..." Mark Sanford must be a fan of the book. Derailed—check; flung around five continents—check; hospitalized—well, if he doesn't stop talking, I predict the next stop on his "journey" will be Belleview.

Tags: Jenny Sanford, mark sanford, mark sanford affair

The Op-Ed Divas have a showdown today about Jenny Sanford. Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post that Sanford is a model of the wronged political wife. She realizes she is not the one humiliated, her husband is, Marcus argues, and therefore she can and does face the press mob with dignity. Maureen Dowd agrees with our own Willa. For her, Sanford is a model of what NOT to do. When your husband publicly calls the other woman his “soul mate” and the heroine of a “tragic” and “forbidden” love, you change the locks and pull down the blinds and talk to your mother, not the AP. (Me, I’m personally fixated on the detail that Mark Sanford asked his wife several times if he could see the mistress. Is this some Southern courting ritual I’m unaware of?) So who’s right? Marcus or Dowd?

Tags: affair, Jenny Sanford, mark sanford

I don’t know that it gives me any special insight into the situation, but I was in Copan, Honduras, the night one head of state was replaced with another. The military had apparently cut the power and water supply, and walking to breakfast, a friend and I saw some armed soldiers jogging in the distance. But waking up in a Central American country and finding that the lights don’t work, the shower won’t turn on, and some armed men are lining up outside isn’t really cause for surprise. I thought nothing of it. Sunday’s La Prensa—the country’s biggest paper—had been printed before the takeover, so it wasn’t much help. Indeed, the paper I read Sunday morning was filled with furious denunciations of the president, his disregard for the constitution, his affinity for unlimited executive power, and his affiliation with Hugo Chavez. And when I boarded a bus bound for Guatemala City the same morning, I still thought it was President Zelaya—not the military—who was transforming the purported democracy of Honduras into something else altogether.

As Brookings’ Kevin Casas-Zamora explains, “There are many villains in this play ... Zelaya pursued his ambition with total disregard of his country’s constitution.” Zelaya’s removal, though carried out by soldiers, was ordered by the Supreme Court and backed by the legislature. Cato’s Tom Palmer drives the point home:

Imagine that George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or some other American president had decided to overturn the Constitution so that he could stay in power beyond the constitutionally limited time. To do that, he orders a nationwide referendum that is not constitutionally authorized and blatantly illegal. The Federal Election Commission rules that it is illegal. The Supreme Court rules that it is illegal. The Congress votes to strip the president of his powers and, as members of Congress are not that good at overcoming the president’s personally loyal and handpicked bodyguards, they send police and military to arrest the president. Now, which party is guilty of leading a coup?

I don’t have the answer to that question, and having been so close and known so little, I suspect very few people really understand what is going down in Tegucigalpa.

Photograph of soldiers in Hondras by Yuri Cortez/Getty Images.

Tags: honduras

Like Jessica, I devoured Todd Purdum's blistering report in the current issue of Vanity Fair about Sarah Palin that draws on sniping from former John McCain aides, shrugging statements of disownment from acquaintances in Wasilla, and sorrowful head-shaking from the Republican intelligentsia. The wide-ranging “profile” of the woman who almost stood second in line to the presidency pre-empts the forthcoming book that netted the Alaskan governor seven figures. And, having undergone the saga of the 2008 presidential campaign—particularly the post-Labor Day sprint that made up Palin’s first months in the public spotlight—it’s astonishing to think that there could POSSIBLY be more to the story.

And yet, writes Purdum:

N]o serious vetting had been done before the selection (by either the McCain or the Obama team), and there was trouble in nailing down basic facts about Palin’s life. After she was picked, the campaign belatedly sent a dozen lawyers and researchers, led by a veteran Bush aide, Taylor Griffin, to Alaska, in a desperate race against the national reporters descending on the state. At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small.

Palin’s lies are rather despicable, but perhaps par for the political course. What really stands out is the swirling background drama (Palin’s “life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure,” says Purdum) that is completely divorced from “politics” as we understand them. Sure, Bristol Palin’s baby (and Sarah’s own last son) implicate big social questions, but more than anything the sideshow, and her handling of if, tags Palin herself as being fundamentally unserious, and unpolitical.

Even Meghan McCain, daughter of Palin’s former running-mate, was a bit confused about how to treat the family during my brief run-in with her at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. “Do you think I have to go talk to him?” she asked, about Palin’s husband, Todd. No one, it seems—particularly the political folks in this article—want to be within ten feet of the sideshow, either.

Is that fair? Not really—politics has always about second acts. But Palin famously “didn’t blink” before charging headlong into the embarrassing stint in the national spotlight that Barack Obama, Purdum reports, knew she wasn’t prepared for. And compare her lack of self-awareness to the GQ-narrated plight of Levi Johnston, father of her grandchild:

The reason Levi often seems like he has about seventy-five English words with which to process and articulate these experiences and their effect on his interior life is that he has been thoroughly traumatized by them.

What’s Palin's excuse? As this article demomonstrates, the governor seems to have no idea what havoc her preening and ignorance wrought on both female politicians and the GOP brand. She breezily tweets about her kids and her plans for Alaska—that welfare state in the sky—without realizing what an opportunity she's missed. And in that respect, she has been as irresponsible with her party as John Edwards, who blundered into a presidential campaign with a love child in tow

(Cross-posted at The Browntable.)

Photograph of Sarah Palin by Michael Nagle/Getty Images.

Tags: Bristol Palin, GOP, John McCain, levi johnston, Republicans, Sarah Palin, todd purdum, Vanity Fair