The Persistence of Nonsense

La persistencia de la memoria (The Persistence of Memory) – also known as Melting Clocks – is the famous 1931 painting by Salvador Dalí. It’s quite mad, but then, he was quite mad. After all, he also thought that the railway station in Perpignan was the cosmic center of the universe. Our friend Ric has been there – it doesn’t seem to be. That’s okay. People get these sorts of notions all the time. After all, Sarah Palin thinks she’s the cosmic center of the universe.

And maybe she is. As the July Fourth weekend began, Sarah Palin abruptly announced she was quitting after just two and a half years on the job as governor of Alaska, in what most people found a bizarre, rambling speech. You can watch all six minutes of it here and decide for yourself. The basketball point guard stuff was just surreal. Salvador Dalí would smile.

Her ardent supporters didn’t smile. Out here they cringed a bit, and all the big gun Republicans voices, after they were done with their own cringing, made it clear they believed the Alaskan governor had done serious harm to her political future – she was toast.

But Republican voters, the rank and file, seem to see things differently:

Sarah Palin’s bombshell that she is resigning as Alaska governor actually has boosted her a bit among Republicans, a nationwide USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, though it also has dented her standing among Democrats and independents.

Two-thirds of Republicans want Palin, the party’s vice presidential nominee in 2008, to be “a major national political figure” in the future. Three-fourths of Democrats hope she won’t be.

Independents by 55%-34% would prefer she leave the national stage.

The findings underscore how polarized opinions of Palin were even before Friday’s surprise announcement. Seven in 10 polled say their views weren’t affected by her decision. Among those whose opinions shifted, Democrats by a 4-1 ratio and independents by 2-to-1 view her less favorably. Republicans are somewhat inclined to see her more favorably.

Steve Benen notes that even now, seventy-one percent of these folks would vote for her for President of the United States. She should be president, which leads Benen to add this:

Inexplicably quitting, for less-than-clear reasons, has managed to endear Palin to her party more.

Somewhere, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are probably smacking their foreheads, saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

And maybe Dalí was right about that train station – it’s the persistence of something or other, without the melting clocks.

But it’s never that simple. Charles Franklin at Pollster.com reviews Palin’s problem outside the base – “Of all the dimensions on which Palin can be viewed, the one that is most crucial for any national ambitions she may hold is the most fundamental: is she qualified to be president?”

He presents a ton of data, with handy charts, with cool trend lines, of all polling data since McCain plucked Palin from obscurity, but it comes down to this:

…the ultimate problem Palin faced with the electorate at large is not about individual events of the campaign, but about the overall trend. From the beginning to the end of the campaign, Palin steadily lost ground with the electorate. Each week more voters perceived her as unqualified to be president. Her base of support was about 40%. Those seeing her as qualified declined from the high 40s to a stable 40% through the last 2/3rds of the campaign, with one final poll falling a bit below that.

The “not qualified” trend rose, from the low 40s in early September, to nearly 60% by Election Day.

This didn’t go well for McCain – bad move by him. And it does not bode well for her:

Of all the things about Palin that might be relevant to her future, this is the most important. During a campaign in which she had her best chance to present herself to voters, and in which she chose her message to a considerable extent especially after the VP debate, Palin failed to convince voters she was qualified for the presidency. In fact, she did the opposite.

The enthusiasm and size of her crowds late in the campaign is testimony to her appeal to the base… But to be a contender for the presidency requires her to dramatically lower that 60% that thought her unqualified by November 4.

For all the commentary about Sarah Palin, this is the fundamental perception she must change. I doubt that Friday’s announcement has done anything to improve those perceptions outside her base.

Manu Raju at Politico points out, however, that the party will still find her useful:

Leading Republicans on Capitol Hill see Sarah Palin’s bombshell announcement last week that she’ll resign as Alaska governor as a potential win-win for her and their party. Their thinking: As a private citizen, she’ll be free to raise big bucks for 2010 candidates and at the same time restore her credibility and stature within the bruised party.

The reasoning goes against the grain of the current political conventional wisdom.

Of course it does. No one as yet has asked her to come and campaign for them. She’s still toxic, but may be a useful cash cow in safe settings – general party fundraisers where no one candidate is tarred by her explicit endorsement. She would, of course, resent the cow metaphor, and no one should allude to Little Black Sambo and the Tar Baby – but there you have it.

But like the Michael Jackson crap persisting here in Hollywood (and on CNN, endlessly) – he’s still dead – she persists in the political world. It’s not what Dalí called the persistence of memory – and there are no melting clocks. It’s the persistence of nonsense.

And the ever-thoughtful Andrew Sullivan says that’s fine with him, as he considers the endless, mutating and expanding Palin drama actually important:

It’s not because of her: she’s a delusional, narcissistic and disturbed person who would be voted off a reality show in the first rounds. It’s because of John McCain, the Republican establishment and the mainstream media. What happened last fall was a warning sign to all of us about how corrupt and cynical the GOP, McCain and the MSM [mainstream media] are. They colluded in such a way that this unstable, erratic, know-nothing beauty queen could actually have been president of the United States. What matters is that all those in on this scam be exposed and their way of conducting themselves be reformed until they stop risking the fate of the country and the world on their own vanities and cowardice.

And he gets specific:

McCain knew full well that Palin was unqualified to be commander-in-chief at this period of time; and he knew there was no way she could ever learn enough to do the job. So his decision to pick her was pure cynicism and irresponsibility. The MSM knew full well that there were very serious questions about this unknown person’s background, lies, mental stability, and secrecy – but they were so terrified of being called biased they refused to do the proper vetting.

The Republican establishment has long condescended to the pro-life, anti-gay, de facto socialist, de jure capitalist heartland voters – and they cynically believed they had found a formula to get them to vote for McCain on ground of pure class resentment and sex appeal to older white males. Even sane decent people like Matt Scully and Mark MacKinnon signed up. Peggy Noonan was caught lying on national television. The convention was a surreal implosion.

Sullivan says he agrees with Richard Cohen:

Naming Palin to the GOP ticket – a top-down choice by McCain – was the most reckless decision any national politician has made in the longest time, and while it certainly says something about McCain, it says even more about his party. It has lost its mind.

So Sullivan wants all the reporters to dig into things more, and expose what needs be exposed, but not to be mean to her, as there’s something more important:

The reason we need to get to the truth of what happened is that these people nearly took this country off a cliff. They need to be held accountable. They need to be removed from their positions of power. We cannot move on until they are. And John McCain should retire from public life. After that decision, nothing he says can be taken seriously on the national or international stage.

Still, Palin, on her own merits, does have her fans, even on the left. Consider Camille Paglia:

It’s pretty obvious that Palin still lacks that cadre of trusted pros who are the invisible elves behind every successful national politician – the assistants who gather and vet material and who filter proposals and plan logistics. In a way, this is part of her virtues – her complete freedom from routine micromanagement and business as usual. She does her own thing with seat-of-the-pants gusto. It’s why she remains hugely popular with the Republican grass-roots base – as I know from listening to talk radio. Callers coming fresh from her rallies are always heady with infectious enthusiasm.

Ah, you have to admire her spunk, and not be all Lou Grant.

Or maybe not… Dahlia Lithwick in Slate does a pretty good Lou Grant in her piece Lost in Translation – “Why Sarah Palin really quit us.”

She thinks everyone is missing the point:

When America is finally ready to reckon with the phenomenon that was Sarah Palin, I suspect we will discover that whatever she represents actually had less to do with her gender, class, or ideology than we now believe. It’s easy to look at the soon-to-be-former governor of Alaska as an iconic feminist, a path-breaking working mother or noble rabble-rousing populist.

Well, people do – for the iconic feminist thing she recommends this, for the path-breaking working mother argument she recommends this, and for the noble rabble-rousing populist argument she suggests the man the New York Times hired to replace the woeful William Kristol, Ross Douthat:

If Palin were exactly what her critics believe she is – the distillation of every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualism to apocalyptic Christianity – then she wouldn’t be a terribly interesting figure. But this caricature has always missed the point of the Alaska governor’s appeal – one that extends well outside the Republican Party’s shrinking base.

Douthat argues people beyond the base have to love her because she’s, well, ordinary:

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal – that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal – that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

This ideal has had a tough 10 months. It’s been tarnished by Palin herself, obviously. With her missteps, scandals, dreadful interviews and self-pitying monologues, she’s botched an essential democratic role – the ordinary citizen who takes on the elites, the up-by-your-bootstraps role embodied by politicians from Andrew Jackson down to Harry Truman.

But it’s also been tarnished by the elites themselves, in the way that the media and political establishments have treated her.

He admits she was willfully ignorant and a disaster on the campaign trail, but people want to see a community college flake win it all – it would make them happy, and happy about themselves.

At Daily Kos, David NYC is amused by that idea:

Don’t forget that she also quit four different colleges en route to getting a degree in journalism. It seems that the one lesson Sarah Palin’s learned her whole life is that quitters always win.

Of course she always has that martyr thing going for her, as reinforced on Fox News by Sean Hannity in this video clip:

Hannity: You know, Jennifer, it makes me mad, because Obama had zero qualifications – he was a state senator, he didn’t even serve a full term in the U.S. Senate, he’d never had executive experience. He never got asked tough questions about his radical friends and associates, except by me and others. I find – why does the double standard exist here?

David Neiwert along with the clip does point out that “Obama was regularly asked about his ‘radical friends’ by not just Fox News anchors but also a number of other journalists.” He was asked about it in a national debate with John McCain and was challenged about it by Hillary Clinton. But Hannity speaks for many who think no one has been fair to her, as she endlessly tells us all. That works.

Dahlia Lithwick is having none of that. There was just one problem. Palin made no sense:

Her meteoric rise and dubious fall will say less about America than you think, beyond the fact that America likes its politicians to communicate their ideas clearly. We will someday come to realize that while it’s all well and good to be mavericky with one’s policies, it’s never smart to be mavericky with one’s message.

Lithwick argues that is what sunk her:

Whatever you may think of Sarah Palin, she’s widely celebrated as a rare and perhaps raw political talent. She’s gorgeous, charismatic, warm, and funny. She has a remarkable ability to connect with her listeners. But – with the exception of a well-scripted performance at the Republican National Convention – it’s tough to find an extemporaneous Palin speech, statement, or tweet that contains a coherent message. From her acceptance speech last August in Dayton, Ohio, when McCain first tapped her as a running mate, to her circular and swooping prime-time interviews, Palin’s political skill lies in selling a persona but not a message. And in the end, this may explain why she quit.

Gee, how did Wittgenstein put it? Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen – Whereof one does not know, one must not speak.

Lithwick argues Palin just didn’t get it:

Palin’s completely inscrutable resignation speech last week was only the most recent example of a lengthy political communication from her that explained nothing, clarified nothing, and expounded upon nothing, save for the fact that she speaks in riddles and koans. Watch it as many times as you like; you still come away feeling you’ve been treated to a cozy chat with the Mad Hatter. The media are bad. Those ethics complaints are expensive. Alaska was a great idea. She is not a dead fish. Put it all together and what do you get? A born fighter who has given us no sense whatsoever of what she’s fighting for.

Had Palin simply quit without giving a press conference, there might have been a lesson in this exercise. Feminists would be free to say there are double standards for women, and conservatives could argue she was too visionary for her time. But Palin’s act of explaining her resignation to us in a torrent of unconnected sentence fragments left everyone wondering, What was the point of Sarah Palin? If she cannot even communicate a simple idea (“I’m quitting because …”), why should we care that she’s quitting?

It comes down to wanting to talk when you have nothing at all to say. And Lithwick argues that urge was bizarre in this case:

That’s why the strangest part of the Sarah Palin saga will always be her loathing of the media. She never failed to remind us that she didn’t like being “filtered.” She only wanted to talk directly to us, her listeners. Yet the reason Sarah Palin continues to have any kind of political force at all in this country is because of the media “filter.” The media helped refine and define her Dada statements and arguments into something that briefly sounded like a coherent worldview. Yesterday morning, Gov. Palin excoriated Andrea Mitchell for “not listening to me” in an NBC interview. You have to go back and watch the clip before you can apprehend that Mitchell was indeed listening. It was Palin who was speaking in half-expressed thoughts and internal contradictions.

If you watch it you’ll see. Andrea Mitchell looks very puzzled, as if she were trapped in that Dalí painting. There were words. They were in English. But in the background those clocks were melting.

Lithwick argues the trick is to understand Palin’s needs:

It’s too easy to characterize Sarah Palin as an irrational bundle of bristling grievance. But I think it’s more complicated than her simple love for playing the victim all the time. If you think of Palin as someone who never felt herself to be fully heard or understood, not truly politically realized in the eyes of the American public, her rage toward the country, the media, and those of us who fail to love and understand her is easier to comprehend. Think of an American visiting France who believes that if he just speaks louder, he will be speaking French. Palin has done everything in her power to explain herself to us, and still we fail to appreciate what she is all about. I’d be frustrated, too, if I thought I was offering up straight talk and nobody was getting the message.

That should clear up everything:

Once you understand that Palin’s only actual message is the importance of loving and understanding Palin, it becomes easier to understand why she quit. The more Palin tries to explain herself, the more we all fail to get her. Every time she goes off script, she makes less sense. No wonder she didn’t want to do debate prep or be coached by the McCain communications team. Instead of thanking those who packaged, explained, and spun her, Palin resents them. And because she believes she has been crystal clear all along, she’s come to resent us, too.

But of course that is what Lithwick misunderstands about the persistence of Palin’s appeal – it’s all in the nonsense itself. Think of all the people who feel angry and left out, who just can’t clearly say what they think, who aren’t even sure what they think, really, but who feel deeply aggrieved and upset – and flummoxed by the language itself. After all, it is tricky and all those words, which may not be right, can get you in trouble. Such people end up frustrated, not having the words, or even the fully formed ideas – and they lash out. Damn it, you know what I mean!

You don’t, and they don’t, actually, but you feel their pain. For them, now that George Bush has left office, they’ve found their hero-martyr. Palin fills that role, and she, or someone like her, will be around forever. Call it the persistence of nonsense if you wish, but those who are uncomfortable with thought, and what makes it possible, language, will always find their hero, and worship that hero, precisely for the incoherence. It makes them feel less alone.

Dalí and the surrealist Dada gang got it, after all.