Sarah Palin is at it again with the one-liners, tweets, and internet videos. This time she’s labeled her brand of feminists “pink elephants,” a nation of conservative women who are at the ready to rear up just like a mama grizzly bear does to protect her cubs.
Don’t do me any favors, Sarah. Don’t fight to abolish a woman’s right to choose. Do not quantify all women as “moms.” And by all means, do not declare all women to be mama grizzly bears, pit bulls, elephants or any other mammal that’s not stuffed and hanging on your wall.
Back in 2008 when the sting of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Presidential campaign loss was still fresh, I gravitated to Sarah Palin. What can I say? My defenses were down. She wooed me with little more than a few snappy soundbytes. One of my favorites was her comment about selling the Alaska governor’s private jet on ebay. Gee, I thought, she’s pretty and bright.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think she’s smart. Scary smart. Just like a mama grizzly. And the fact that she deftly promotes herself on the internet, outside of more traditional news media that afford at least some filtering of content, makes her dangerous. Her messages are short – typically less than 140 characters. Problem is, her simple solutions to complex problems just won’t work.
If a cheerleader were all that was needed to right this country, Sarah Palin might just be the ticket. We all know she can work a crowd into a frenzy. Remember “Drill, baby, drill”? Come the next election, I’m sure the Democrats will run that soundbyte deeper into the ground than the Deepwater Horizon.
A Huffington Post article recently offered an explanation of Palin’s strategy as an appeal to the collective unconscious, Carl Jung’s theory that humans inherit a collective history which consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily, say, for instance, when people are afraid that every economic and political institution they count on is about to fail.
I think that’s a complex explanation for a simple strategy. I think Sarah’s lookin’ for hot buttons and keepin’ it short and tweet. In politics, a vote is a vote is a vote, and it doesn’t matter how you get it.
