Watching the Sarah Palin Channel

Image associated to article

There are two featured players on Sarah Palin’s new subscription-based Web channel, which launched on Sunday night. The first is, naturally, the former Alaska governor and Republican nominee for Vice-President, who appears in a series of homespun videos offering, in one, her solution to the current upheaval in Ukraine (it involves drilling for oil), and, in another, her thoughts on her home state’s long summer growing season. The second is the country’s current President, Barack Obama. On Monday night, a photograph of him in the far right’s favorite outfit and pose—tuxedoed and leaning back, laughing—was leading the site, accompanying an article in which Palin attempts to answer the question: “How many things can you name that Obama has failed at?” Lower on the page there is a large countdown clock, ticking away the days, hours, minutes, and seconds of Obama’s time left in office. Palin, in the site’s articles and videos, sometimes speaks of the President in familiar, if not friendly, terms—his Administration is “Team O”—as if they were old sparring partners, longtime rivals who have exerted different, yet roughly equal, influence on American history.

President Obama offers his thoughts for free from the White House. For $9.95 a month, or $99.95 for a full year, subscribers get unmediated access to Sarah Palin’s, direct from her house in Wasilla. “Together, we’ll go beyond the sound bites, and cut through the media’s politically correct filter,” Palin says in an introductory video. There will be “no need to please the powers that be.” The channel is backed by TAPP, a digital-media company run by Jonathan Klein and Jeff Gaspin, two powers that used to be, respectively, at CNN and NBC.

What does Palin, unshackled and generally gone rogue, sound like? On the immigration crisis: “Without borders, there is no nation. Obama knows this. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants has been deliberate. And this is his fundamental transformation of America.” Later in the same video, which was first posted on Palin’s Facebook page, a few weeks ago (more original content is presumably forthcoming), she adds, “It’s because of Obama’s purposeful dereliction of duty that an untold number of illegal immigrants will kick off their shoes and come on in. They’ll be competing against Americans for our sparse and sparse number of jobs and limited public services.” This is all vintage Palin: odd idioms mixed with stiff clichés, and a world view in which immigrants are somehow both lazy and frighteningly industrious—nine-year-old Honduran orphans here to take your factory shifts. Which is to say that Palin sounds like she already does on Fox News, where she still has a contract, or on the other high-profile platforms that she occupies.

It is perhaps a testament to Palin’s eagerness as an entrepreneur that it is not entirely clear just what this new channel is promoting: there is a plug for her book, from last year, about the so-called War on Christmas; a behind-the-scenes look at the next season of “Amazing America,” her show on the Sportsman Channel; and a link to her daughter Bristol’s blog. “The channel is about you!” a button on the site promises. Palin says that “this is a community, where we’re going to be able to share ideas, and discuss the issues of the day.” But, based on the channel’s early offerings, subscribers will mostly be paying for thoughts on the issues of her days. In one clip, Palin reads a story to her son. In another, she appears in her kitchen talking about vegetables.

The most instructive video is one in which she leads the camera to a framed print of “Callin’ the Blue,” a painting that features former Republican Presidents chumming it up around a pool table. Lincoln holds a cue while Nixon, in a polo shirt, smiles over his shoulder. The picture was a gift, and the sender included a photograph of Palin at a Tea Party rally within the frame. In the video, Palin recalls that she’d been holding a sign with the words “Party Like It’s 1773,” which she says brought her in for criticism from “every idiotic broadcaster” who seemed to suggest that she had misremembered the year of the American revolution. (She was referring to the date of the Boston Tea Party.) In her political manifestos, Palin occasionally appears bored, or else straining to keep a hold on the thread of her ideas, but here, talking about herself, she is in her element as a performer. “Of course, at that time I didn’t have so much of a platform or a microphone to counter some of the falsehoods and goofy, stupid things that some of the news channels say and do.” Then, becoming sunny, she continues, “But now I do, and now I can correct a lot of the things that perhaps you’ve seen and heard about what we have done, what our record is, what we stand for, and what we do today. Now, on our channel, we get to talk about that stuff, and clear the air.”

This is the real purpose of the Sarah Palin Channel, which is simply a new, digital act in an ongoing passion play, with Katie Couric in the role of Pontius Pilate and Palin in the self-appointed role of martyr on the cross, paying for the sins of everyone who’s ever pretended to read more newspapers than they actually do.

But remember, subscriber, “the channel is about you!” Somehow, that manages to be nearly true, owing to Palin’s own rather deft mode of political and cultural populism. By exercising her grievances and emphasizing her outsiderness (despite enjoying all of the trappings of being an insider), Palin turns her six years of national public life into a kind of metaphor for her audience’s own experiences. This is the connection that she is talking about—saying, in effect: I’ve been mistreated in the same way that you have, and by the same kinds of people, disrespected by the same coastal élites who monopolize the culture and take your money while laughing in your face. That is, perhaps, why Obama is such a vital presence on the site, a reminder of everything that Palin isn’t, and never can be. Palin inspires passion and outrage in her fans, but also a note of protectiveness; she’s managing a particular cult of personality, in which vulnerability and seeming artlessness are key components of her appeal. Her plain, anxious need to correct the record becomes, if not necessarily endearing, then at least emotionally persuasive. She has described the project as an attempt to foster community, but that may just be another word for fan club. The paywall keeps the haters out.

As for the political dialogue that she says the site will generate and support, it seems unlikely, at this point at least, that the Sarah Palin Channel will rival what Glenn Beck has managed with his personality-branded news site, the Blaze. So far, the comments on the site from readers have been uniformly adoring. The closest thing to dissent comes from one user, who gently chides Palin: “Sarah you were picked to run as Vice President, what a mistake! Instead of Vice President you should have run for President.”