Sarah Palin vs. Newsweek: David Loftus

I have not seen the photo, and I will not take the trouble to seek it out, since I have less than zero interest in Sarah Palin or her fortunes except as a comic sideshow, but this is an easy call.

Yes, Newsweek probably took the low road with the photo -- but Palin hasn’t done anything to deserve better. Yes, too much attention is being paid to a magazine cover, but Palin probably doesn’t really mind -- despite her pretended dudgeon -- because it’s more attention for her and will sell more books. As a former journalism major, she should understand how news magazines operate; and as a publicity-hungry, manufactured celeb, she too “will do anything to draw attention.” Her apparent umbrage is simply playing to her constituency and its love-hate relationship with the press: they’ll devour anything that strokes their prejudices while automatically deprecating “the media” as a whole.

Part of the tension here comes from Palin’s desire to have it both ways: she wants to amplify her “girl/mom next door” appeal and to be taken seriously as a potential world leader. One can’t really blame her for this, because it’s worked for others: people voted for Dubya because he seemed like a dude you could go out and have a beer with -- they said so -- and even Reagan played this game to some extent. What’s astonishing about the election of Barack Obama is that not only was he manifestly not a white guy, but he didn’t bother to hide his intellect the way even Clinton sometimes did to work his Bubba schtick.

It would be nice, for the nation and the world, if more voters realized the qualities you’re drawn to in a friend and neighbor are not necessarily the qualities you should vote for in a leader. Most Americans might not have liked George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, or Dwight Eisenhower in person, but these men were either qualified for the job or grew into it, in a way that George W. Bush never was and did (and, I would argue, Reagan failed to as well), and Sarah Palin is probably unlikely to.