Two Sarah Palin Theories

At the end of a weekend filled with as much Sarah Palin speculation as BBQ and fireworks, two theories. The first is that she is in real trouble, the kind that will outshine all the ethics charges against her when it comes to light. The second is that Palin will flirt with a potential presidential run to the best of her considerable ability, however outlandish the idea of her in the White House may be. She'll figure that either it could actually happen—see people in Alaska who've watched her checking off the diagnostic boxes for narcissistic personality disorder in Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair piece—or that she'll sure sell a lot of copies of her upcoming memoir. Not to mention position herself to be the next Oprah, or design her own line of running clothes or hair products or Bibles. Hanna, I love your divorce metaphor for Palin's antics in abandoning her governorship and her state. In classic Becky Sharp fashion, she is trading up. If she weighed her decision in terms of scoring celebrity points instead of political ones, it's hard to see how she can lose.

Photograph of Sarah Palin by Mark Hirsch/Getty Images.

Tags: sarah palin resigns as governor of alaska

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Emily Bazelon is a founding editor of Double X, and a writer and editor at Slate.

Comments

Nixionan overtones

By: grocer | Mon, 07/06/2009 - 09:14

Palin keeps reminding me of Nixon, except compressed into our current media cycle...of course, Nixon actually managed to get himself elected to Congress (both the house and senate) then ingratiate himself with the Republican Party to earn the VP spot...I have to wonder if there's anybody to be Palin's Eisenhower or if she's just wandering the wilderness until 2012...to be drummed out in the primaries.

Definitely Undine Spragg

By: emptying_nest | Mon, 07/06/2009 - 06:36

Spragg used her son as a prop and left a trail of destruction behind her; very Palin-ish. Palin also bears a resemblance to "Lonesome" Rhodes, the opportunistic hillbilly who rises to fame in Elia Kazan's 1957 film, "A Face in the Crowd."

She's no Becky Sharp

By: jessicadennis | Sun, 07/05/2009 - 23:27

Becky Sharp was evil, but she was intelligent and talented to an extent that Palin wouldn't even know how to aspire to. Becky certainly knew more about foreign policy. Palin is, maybe, Undine from Wharton's The Custom of the Country though, aspiring toward whatever she discovers is better than what she has, and doing anything at all to achieve it.