Sarah Barracuda

Before August bleeds into September, I want to follow through with a post I'd meant to put up weeks ago, when Sarah Palin made her surprise announcement that she would resign as governor of Alaska.

Obviously, she's now the former governor -- which just goes to show how tardy I am with the post. Bear with me.

First, the obvious. During the presidential campaign and continuing into this summer, Palin struck me as a shallow, often shrill, politician who pandered to an easily manipulated base of white, conservative, small-town voters with little education, sophistication or inclination to tolerate (much less understand) those of a different race or religion.

It would have been nothing short of disastrous had the McCain-Palin ticket won last November. She was frighteningly ignorant of international affairs and seemed incapable of speaking in more than scripted sound bites.

And yet, I was willing to cut her some slack. I was willing to think that maybe -- unlike Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck -- she had some redeeming qualities. And so it was with genuine curiosity that I read the much-publicized profile of her that appeared in Vanity Fair's August issue under the headline, "It Came From Wasilla."

The piece went to great length to critique Palin's performance in the 2008 election and argued that McCain and his staff should have seen trouble coming. The author, Todd S. Purdum, relied -- too heavily, I think -- on anonymous sources to build his case. (If you're going to do a piece like this, especially months after the election, I think it's only fair to quote her detractors on the record.)

In short, Purdum writes, McCain should have realized that no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred to Palin than her own ambition; that she has an erratic nature and narcissistic personality; and that she had demonstrated a pattern of vindictive behavior as a mayor and governor. First and foremost, though, he says the Arizona senator could have learned what it means that Palin is from Alaska. And here is where the article offers its keenest insight:

The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.

So, of all the puzzling things that Sarah Palin told the American public last fall, perhaps the most puzzling was this: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

Believe me, it is not.

But Sarah Palin herself is a microcosm of Alaska, or at least of the fastest-growing and politically crucial part of it, which stretches up the broad Matanuska-Susitna Valley, north of Anchorage, where she came of age and cut her political teeth in her now famous hometown, Wasilla. In the same way that Lyndon Johnson could only have come from Texas, or Bill Clinton from Arkansas, Palin and all that she is could only have come from Wasilla. It is a place of breathtaking scenery and virtually no zoning. The view along Wasilla’s main drag is of Chili’s, ihop, Home Depot, Target, and Arby’s, and yet the view from the Palins’ front yard, on Lake Lucille, recalls the Alpine splendor visible from Captain Von Trapp’s terrace in The Sound of Music. It is culturally conservative: the local newspaper recently published an article that asked, “Will the Antichrist be a Homosexual?” It is in this Alaska—where it is possible to be both a conservative Republican and a pothead, or a foursquare Democrat and a gun nut—that Sarah Palin learned everything she knows about politics, and about life. It was in this environment that her ambition first found an outlet in public office, and where she first tasted the 151-proof Everclear that is power.

Not long after the Vanity Fair piece appeared (and I doubt more than a handful of the Palin faithful read it), Palin held her rambling, incomprehensible press conference announcing she was quitting 18 months before her term ends.

The past couple of weeks have shown us what kind of havoc Sarah Barracuda, untethered to public office and unleashed on impressionable Americans, can wreak. Her deliberate misrepresentations and fabrications about Obama's health care reform proposals -- "death panels" that would send our grandmothers to an early graveyard -- are so mean-spirited and so out-of-touch with legislative reality that any shred of respect that I might have had for her is gone forever.

Sarah Palin may be, as Purdum writes, "the sexiest brand in Republican politics," but I don't think many people will be lining up to buy it in 2012.