Sarah Palin has peaked. Her future as a political/entertainment phenomenon is problematic. Her celebrity will eventually become caricature, her political ambitions an historical curiosity. She is on the wane. Sarah Palin has peaked.
Sarah Palin is in a bind. She has no good options. She is caught in the immutable truth of American popular culture: you're only as good as your last trick. If you're not on the way up, you're on the way down. Only talent can sustain a meteoric rise, and Sarah Palin simply doesn't have the stuff. Where can she go from here? What canny set of moves might lift her higher? What options does she have?
Given the way Palin has tightly braided politics and popular culture together, there's really only one way for Palin to propel her celebrity any further: run for, and win, the White House. She must run for the presidency. If she does not, her influence will be diminished and her "people" will begin to drift away. If she does run, however, she'll lose, her influence will be diminished, and her "people" will begin to drift away. And losing seems assured. Indeed, the Grand Poobahs of the Republican Party (and the conservative intelligentsia) are beginning to murmur that a Palin candidacy would be disaster, and each day seems to find another party surrogate grunting about Palin and the political peril she represents. Sarah Palin is in a structural bind. Palin can't win the Big Prize without her base, and she can't win as long as she is so intimately tied to that base. There is no way to square this circle and Palin's response to last Saturday's horrific events in Arizona illustrates this problem.
When Palin was quickly challenged last Saturday over her part in the squalid and divisive rhetoric that passes for American political discourse, a Palin surrogate made the patently absurd--and needless-- claim that cross-hairs were simple surveyor's marks on Palin's now (in)famous map. (A claim so transparently inept it is undercut by Palin's own words.) Why this reflexive response? Why the default position of victimhood? Why didn't Palin seize the opportunity to elevate herself and join the emergent conversation about the toxic nature of our discourse? Why doesn't Palin take a step toward the middle (where elections are won) and agree that the temperature needs to be lowered, that super-heated speech about death panels, and socialism, and Nazis, and Islamic community centers, and Bill Ayres is hyperbolic and does damage to the body politic? Why can't she agree that we can hold two truths simultaneously: the shooting in Arizona cannot be blamed directly on individual political players, and, the shooting in Arizona has provoked a much needed conversation about the nature of our current political discourse. (Palin's inability to do this is reflected in the minute-by-minute scrubbing--her "Don't Retreat, Delete" approach--of her Facebook page of any critical comments.)
Whatever she actually thinks about all this, the problem for Palin--and her apologists--is the surety that stepping toward the middle will alienate the base. Palin's cultural/political message, her "brand," is so rigid, so reliant on an appeal for Manichean and ego-centric solutions to complex grievances, that it cannot develop meaningful policy. It can't deliver. Politically, Palin is caught in this static world where an aggrieved and childish victim will, childishly, see moderation as betrayal, compromise as appeasement. There is little room to move. To keep her base, Palin surely believes she must remain confrontational. To keep her base, Palin surely believes she must remain divisive. And that belief will be her undoing.
Yes, Palin can likely continue to monetize her celebrity in a variety of ways, but she will do so only as an increasingly marginal player. If it's only about the dreary pursuit of money and celebrity, only about pushing a white-hot rhetoric for personal gain, she won't last. She will fall victim to that immutable truth of American popular culture. If it is about true political ambition, then, in the end, the very identity Palin has crafted is the road to defeat, caricature and irrelevancy. Either way, Sarah Palin has peaked.
Of course, I could be wrong.