Unmentionables, Pt.2: Some Thoughts on Class

I finally did it. It may have taken me a week, but I finally did it. I watched John Ziegler’s interview of Sarah Palin. I was loath to do it, but now it’s done. All near-ten minutes of it.

So that you don’t have to suffer any extra time with Mrs. Palin (though if you’re in a masochistic mood, the video’s been provided below), I’ll skip to the quote that I’d like to explore, spoken after Ziegler asks if Palin believes Caroline Kennedy will benefit from a dose of the infamous “liberal media" bias:

“I’ve been interested also to see how Caroline Kennedy will be handled, and if she’ll be handled with kid gloves or if she will be under such a microscope also. It’s gonna be interesting to see how that plays out, and I think as we watch that we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here also that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be.”

If there’s one thing John Ziegler deserves credit for, it’s that he got Palin comfortable enough to dish out this kind of blasé ignorance. The interview as a whole reminded me of that brief interview in Bowling for Columbine when the world got to see Marilyn Manson (formerly known as the anti-Christ) in a vulnerable moment; just one weirdo (I say that affectionately) sitting across from another weirdo (Michael Moore, the anti-Ziegler*), trying to make sense of the senseless. The only difference is that in the case of Manson, when all was said and done a lot of people seem to have thought the same thing: Perhaps we’ve underestimated this one – whereas with Palin, one almost lets out an involuntary sigh of relief, suggesting that one’s calculations were just right.

I do agree that Kennedy hasn’t been particularly well examined, and I question her motives and timing – but there is a fundamental difference between Caroline Kennedy and Sarah Palin that does have to do with class, though certainly not the type that Palin seems to be implying, that makes Kennedy’s candidacy in higher office far more palatable.

There are some macroscopic concerns about Palin that have been repeated ad nauseum and require paltry amounts of scrutiny to discover. That she is deaf to these issues says more about her than it does about our wretched “society” she goes on about in the Ziegler tape (whatever happened to always being proud of America?). Caroline Kennedy graduated from Columbia law school and is a member of the NY & DC bar associations. Palin majored in journalism in a spectrum of institutions and, when pressed, could not summon the name of a single news publication she read at the time, though now in the Ziegler interview she breezily says that she pores over the local Alaskan papers (again, without naming any), snubbing Couric as a self-indulgent and ambiguous interviewer.

The questions Couric asked, if you recall, were rather straightforward:

KC: What newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped [to be McCain’s running mate] to stay informed and to understand the world?
SP: I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media–
KC: But like, what specifically?
SP: Um, all of them – any of them that have been in front of me over all these years…
KC: Can you name a few?
SP: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news too – Alaska isn’t a foreign country…

It takes a certain amount of huevos rancheros to pass that kind of an abysmal performance off as a narrow-minded denizen of the Lower 48 taking advantage of a helpless Alaskan, but Palin seems to be attempting to do just that. Classy? I think so.

I’m sure the mudslinging over Kennedy will reach its crescendo in the coming weeks – a la “she’s getting a free pass because she’s an elitist from an urban center with a famous name” – but I don’t really care. She’s an intelligent, very evidently capable person who has made her views on policies plain. She doesn’t kill unsuspecting animals from helicopters, or attend a church spearheaded by a monster (though who knows – in this I may be speaking too soon, if the ’08 campaign was any indication). If you think getting a leg up in politics for being wealthy or a brand name is an unfair surprise, you clearly haven’t been reading your American (or world) history.

So no, maybe it’s not the most just electoral process we could conceivably ask for, but I think New York can take care of its own and would much rather prefer the “you knows” of a Caroline over the “gosh darn its” of a Sarah. You know? (No, but seriously, I’d like your thoughts on the subject.)


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*Both, however, are documentarians in the same way I am Mongolian – in a very flimsy, distant, and approximate sense of the term (Korean-American, for anyone who’s confused now). Despite this, Moore is certainly the more entertaining of the pair, and although he does have a habit of lapsing into polemical hissy fits, he also seems to ask more challenging questions, if the Palin interview is any indication.