Sarah Palin – Political Idol

Having witnessed the Palin “effect” firsthand at the Xcel last week, I have to tell you the most apt comparison that crossed my mind was American Idol. Watching the Republicans react to Palin—whom 99 percent of them knew nothing about—zero—was like watching one of these massively hyped prime-time talent shows. A stranger from nowhere appears, and if she looks good and hits the right notes, she instantly becomes your emotional favorite, the vessel into which you pour all your uncritical hopes and dreams. As Americans forever treading water in a regenerating sea of mass-marketed celebrities, we’ve seen this pop-culture phenomenon hundreds of times before. Hell, we saw it in the run up to the “eagerly anticipated” presidential run of . . . Fred Thompson. He was the last Next Great Standard Bearer of Conservative Values, if I remember correctly.

For all the shots at Barack Obama’s “messiah” status, the . . . fact . . . remains that he has been an extraordinarily visible, accessible, regularly interrogated and scrutinized public figure now for more than two years. If you “don’t know anything about him,” you’re either lying or hopelessly clueless. No doubt there are thousands of people investing ridiculously high hopes in Obama, but at this point, his appeal has at least much to do with serious bedrock critical assessments as starstruck delusion. We know what he thinks, and how he thinks. We’ve seen his “judgment” tested on and off the campaign trail.

I accept the religious-like hysteria over these flaring pop idols as a wearying facet of American culture. It is worse now with the segregating partisan technology of cable news and radio frequencies, each of which can serve up precisely “the facts” its listeners choose to hear. As a result, someone like Palin can accelerate from dead-stop anonymity to wall-to-wall ubiquity literally in the course of several hours. What’s wearying is, as I say, the stunning lack of critical thinking. Picking a pop idol, I don’t give a damn. But vice president to a seventy-two-year-old man with a history of melanoma—I give a big damn.