The Palin Factor: Austin Lee

Sarah Palin is fascinating because her life is full of drama.  It's the same reason people watch "Jersey Shore", "The Hills", or any other not-reality show.  People gravitate toward drama.  I am of the mind that most people lead fairly mundane lives.  So, when they see someone like Sarah Palin, whose life is filled with drama that only keeps getting bigger, they are drawn like a moth to a flame.

This drama, however, is not completely her own doing.  She is an evangelical Christian and in our society those who are public figures and identify themselves in this way are immediately subject to a higher level of scrutiny.  So, when it was discovered that her teenage daughter was pregnant and not married, immediately the already elevated scrutiny was ratcheted up another notch.  So, while Hollywood starlets can have babies out of wedlock with positive news stories about their "baby bumps", Sarah Palin's family and daughter are subjected to negative stories and accusations that she might be a bad mother.

She is also an outspoken, woman, Republican.  This in and of itself seems to require Hollywood to lampoon her as if she were Satan incarnate.  Katie Couric may have done the only hard news interview of her whole career with Sarah Palin.  Does anyone think for a second that Joe Biden would have been subjected to that kind of questioning from the third place news anchor.  (I place the blame for that interview solely on the back of the McCain campaign.  Katie Couric shouldn't have landed that interview.  Her ratings get beat by reruns of Jeopardy.)

The part that is her fault: She didn't just shut up and go away for a while.  If she would have just gone home to Alaska and finished out her term as governor, I wouldn't have had to write this column.  If I was her handler last November I would have said, "Governor, when the press ask you about your political future you should tell them, 'I am going to get back to serving the great people of Alaska until my term is completed.  I have no intention of focusing my efforts on anything else until that time.'"  She could have just faded away as the answer to this Jeopardy question: "I was the former Governor of Alaska that was a Vice-Presidential candidate."

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