Fish on Palin

Stanley Fish was always a controversial academic whose work influenced my own when I taught writing to law school students. He had the unusual role of being both a professor of English as well as a professor of law at Duke, among other institutions. He is now a columnist for the New York Times.

Yesterday's column on Sarah Palin and Marc Sanford, the two confessing governors from the ultra-right, deserves a read. Both politicians were accused of giving rambling, incoherent speeches: Palin resigning from her first term as governor of Alaska with sixteen months left go to despite national aspirations and Sanford, after jumping into the public spotlight by refusing Obama economic stimulus money, admitting to a love affair, well, not just one.

The pundits were surprised by the illogic of both speeches. I also found them humorous, illustrative of Palin's erratic and narcissistic behavior and Sanford's hypocracy. However, for Stanley Fish, both politicians were giving speeches about how they feel, and that is not what we expect or even respect from public figures.

Rather than find no reasons for Palin's surprise resignation, Fish found plenty of consistent reasons: It is true that her statement was not constructed in a straightforward, logical manner, but the main theme was sounded often and plainly: This is not what I signed up for. I’m spending all my time and the state’s money responding to attack after attack and they aren’t going to let up because, “It doesn’t cost the people who make these silly accusations a dime.”

Fish continues to describe the reasons that he felt she so clearly gave: But the pundits didn’t want to hear them or, rather, they were committed to believing that the real reasons lay elsewhere, and were strategic. They couldn’t fathom the possibility that she was just giving voice to her feelings. It must, they assumed, be a calculation, and having decided that, they happily went on to describe how bad a calculation it was.

Regarding Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, Fish also criticized the pundits' inability to understand that he was being emotional, not logical: ... he wasn’t doing politics; he was doing cri de coeur, serial meanderings about sin, weakness, mistakes, duty, responsibility, irresponsibility and, above all, passion.

The ineptness of his remarks on every level was staggering; politically he was busy digging his own grave; personally, in terms of his family life, he was digging another. He declared in one breath that he was trying to fall back in love with his wife, and in the next he told the world that this was a love story, “a forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.

Earlier in the week, Ross Douthat, another Times columnist, also had some interesting things to say about Sarah Palin's resignation. When she appeared on the national stage as John McCain's running mate, Palin wasn't ready. According to Douthat, she should have resisted and said no, because from everything we saw, she wasn't prepared for the position, for the scrutiny, for the responsibility.

A Sarah Palin who stepped down for the sake of her family and her media-swarmed state deserves sympathy even from the millions of Americans who despise her. A Sarah Palin who resigned in the delusional belief that it would give her a better shot at the presidency in 2012 warrants no such kindness.

The personal story of Barack Obama embodies the myth of meritocracy: anyone, even a racial mutt, can go to Columbia and Harvard Law School and become President. Palin's story is appealing to a different segment of America: her story is about class. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

She didn't do it right, because she was unprepared, but according to a Pew poll: 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

Obama was able to diminish his race, and continues to, so that Palin's class issues become more prevalent. Interesting?