World News Korner

Despite attempts to change her brand, Sarah Palin will forever simply be a kook.

Courtesy of Forbes:

The previously unknown Alaska governor quickly became a new breed of working mother. A strong conservative woman. An unlikely but believable candidate to shatter the glass ceiling. A rallying force for the Tea Party and other right-wingers. A maverick, a rebel, a politician unafraid of speaking her mind—and who cared if it was uninformed or inappropriate?

With John McCain (who is so not a kook that I can’t understand how his brand ever got commingled with Her Kookiness, because brands are judged by the company they keep), she tried her best to give Obama a run for his money and earn that erstwhile place a heartbeat away from the famous 3 a.m. phone call. When that didn’t work out, she traded politics for much-more-lucrative punditry and remained a force that shaped the American conversation, for better or worse.

Last week she launched the online Sarah Palin Channel. “Join us as we discuss the great issues of the day and work toward solutions,” it says on the site, which includes posts ranging from her mother’s Word of the Day to a video called “The Truth About the War in Israel.” Even with this new development, Palin is in danger of becoming irrelevant, a punch line, a blooper in the historical record.

That’s the danger of choosing kook as part of your personal brand. It gets attention, but it has an inherently limited shelf life. Eventually the novelty, controversy and “maverickness” of it wear off, then you have to amp it up and do something even kookier in order to remain in the public consciousness.

The author goes on to list a few of Palin's kookier moments, and then sums it up thusly:

Thirty years ago, Geraldine Ferraro cracked the glass ceiling with dignity and grace, and she remains positively regarded by many Americans, whether or not they shared her politics. Her respectable brand endured, and she didn’t become a historical punch line. For 20 years, Hillary Clinton has been chipping away at it, making more cracks even as she endured scandals and cruel judgments.

But the latest woman who was poised to reinvent American politics is now just coming off as cracked. Forget the ceiling. She needs a quick brand reinvention just to pick herself off the floor.

Oh yeah, I love reading things like this from what is ostensibly a conservative magazine about Granny Grifter, and knowing that the rest of the world has finally come around to seeing Palin as most of us have all along. As a talentless political opportunist, with the ethics of a street hooker, and the intelligence of a garden slug.

At this point Palin really cannot do anything to repair her reputation, and the choices she IS making only further demonstrate her lack of credibility and her inability to participate in an actual conversations about politics or world events.

The woman has now become so frightened of being called out for her ignorance, that she is reduced to filming uninformed soliloquies where there is no one to correct, criticize, or request clarification from her. (And you know there is somebody who goes through those comments for her so that she is never confronted with a negative response to the stupid things that she says.)

She is like the woman who tries on a two piece bathing suit in the mirror, deems herself breathtaking, yet lacks the courage to wear it on the beach for fear of hearing a dissenting point of view.

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