Regarding Sarah Palin in underpants

So last night, after finishing dinner with Lily and Sam, my fifteen-year-old twins, and talking about the very funny Sara Benincasa Palin parody on uTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2gxrQrMGv0 that I had just sent to everyone in the family (ok god another uTube link from Mom!), Sam said, "No, I want to see the real interview with Katie Couric, the one where Sarah Palin talks about her foreign policy experience because she lives close to Russia."  So there in the kitchen, Sam standing in his underpants, we go online and watch outakes of the interviews.

It is appalling.  It is so much worse than any comedienne--even Tina Fey--could do.  Sarah Palin reminds me of myself at my least prepared, your kind of worst-nightmare-version of yourself:  overeager, too quick to be pleasant, completely jumbled in terms of logic, sense, or ability to make a point, nervous, relying on the old standards for women of BE PERSONABLE, TRY TO BE LIKED even if what you are saying is completely without direction, self-possession or content. Palin seemed terrified.

Sam's response was bewilderment and wonder, mixed with a kind of begrudging pathos and sympathy.  "It's really kind of sad, Mom.  It's not comfortable to watch it."

I couldn't agree more.  Since she exploded into the political fermament only a few weeks ago, Sarah Palin has evoked so many responses in me, a woman who is profoundly far away from her in terms of geography, political understandings, ideas about how to live life, and volunteering at Planned Parenthood clinics in our twenties.  (Me, to help women GET birth control and abortions; Sarah, to DENY women access to these services.)  We are both mothers of lots of children (I have four teenagers), are both trying to combine motherhood and a career (but goddammit my husband doesn't stay at home, and sure as hell doesn't respond to "First Dude,").   I never had anything as big as the Alaska state budget to manipulate, but I do have to pay the mortgage, ultility bills and my childrens' cell phone tabs every month.  Although I have degrees from institutions of higher education where I stayed put for more than a couple of months, I've also done a fair amount of driving and sitting around hockey rinks, soccer fields, lacrosse practices, and engaged in some intensive, high-stakes carpool scheduling. (Sarah, meeting Hamid Karzai at the UN last week was nothing compared to the intensity of "You are NOT available to drive EVERY Tuesday at 5:45?"  Yea, I know.)

Although Sarah Palin and I hardly agree on anything, and her stands on national defense, women's reproductive rights and Jesus Christ scare me completely, I ended up feeling vaguely sorry for her, as afterwards Sam, my husband and I watched some of the wake of the Couric interviews--Jack Cafferty slice and dice her http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8__aXxXPVc  or Tucker CArlson discuss her on Rachel Maddow.  ("The Republicans are going to lose anyway so they figured, hell, experience doesn't matter!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XgJMZZy8Qk 

Like Sam standing around in his underpants in the kitchen on a Sunday night, Palin just wasn't--isn't--ready for prime time.  She isn't ready for the national scrutiny and press club oral exams, isn't ready to describe John McCain's thirty-year history of deregulation of the banking industry (oh John, do you really care so much about Main Street as you gaze at it from one of your seven houses?), isn't ready to say why Israel might be a "bad guy" at the same time it is also a "good guy."  It goes without saying she isn't ready to be vice president--as someone on Cafferty said--her vetting for the job consisted of pulling her name out of a hat.  Palin's intensely embarrassing and difficult performances of gustatory ego and bravado, mixed with the womanly charms and instincts of First Hostess at IHOP, are painful.   And from a feminine point of view, evocative. She's doing us no favors, showing up looking so underprepared.  She's everything we fear about ourselves when we are trying to do something we're really not ready for, not prepared to do, when we are really in over our heads, and we know it.  (Can't you just hear the men going to their sterotypes as she speaks?)

I feel sorry for you girl, and I'm amazed you're sticking with it.  The heat has only begun, I'm afraid to say--the Couric interview is going to look like a picnic a month from now.  I feel mixed up watching you--and sorry.  It's awful.  It's revealing.  It's a Rorschach.