Fri Dec 18, 2009 at 06:10:05 PM PST
There are days where the punchlines really do write themselves:
Sarah Palin released a statement yesterday announcing that she and husband Todd have cut their Hawaiian vacation short, after some controversy over a McCain campaign visor Palin wore with former running mate John McCain's name blacked out with a Sharpie.
The mini-flap began when the pop culture/gossip icons over at TMZ published photos of Palin sitting in Hawaii wearing a McCain visor with the McCain logo blacked out using a marker.
This led to the fairly understandable supposition that Palin was taking a little shot at her former ticket mate, resurrecting all the stories of the 2008 campaign about tension between Palin and the McCain campaign apparatus.
Not so, protested Palin:
“I am so sorry if people took this silly incident the wrong way. I adore John McCain, support him 100 percent and will do everything I can to support his reelection."
So why black out the McCain brand on the visor? To just about every media outlet she has discussed this with, she gave the same rationale: she was trying to "go incognito."
Heh. Yeah...right. HuffPo's Roy Sekoff isn't buying it:
"I don't [believe her], because her t-shirt said 'this is America and if you don't love it, get the hell out'... so that's always a good way to be incognito."
(Psst....Hey, Sarah! Here's a wild...some might even say "rogue"...thought: if you want to be nondescript, you always could purchase a plain black visor at any one of a couple of thousand tourist shops on the island. Hell, you might not even had to have left the Honolulu or Kahului Airports to do so.)
After the TMZ story broke, and the political outlets quickly lapped it up, Sarah Palin went to a familiar tactic: she quit, cutting her vacation short while complaining the press had made it impossible for her to enjoy her time at leisure.
Vis-a-vis "Visor-Gate", let's stipulate that there are only a couple of explanations for this, and none of them are particularly laudable for Mrs. Palin.
- Our own David Waldman was spot on a year ago when he declared Sarah Palin as "The Chiseler Supreme". Is it possible that Sarah Palin has a garage full of gimme hats, t-shirts, and hoodies from the McCain HQ, all dutifully sharpied to help in her drive to be "incognito"? If that is the case, the hotels that have housed her on the book tour might also want to inspect their inventories of bathrobes.
- She knew precisely what she was doing. John McCain's name is still mud with many on the GOP's right flank, who remain convinced that his insufficient fealty to hard-right ideological mores is what cost them the presidency in 2008. If Sarah Palin is still really thinking about 2012, and making a legitimate bid from her perch as the reigning queen of the Tea Party Republic, a little separation from her former ticket mate would not be a bad thing at all.
- She has reached the point of obsessiveness about being the center of attention, and knew this would thrust her back into the public conversation. I agree with Sekoff here--her choice of that hat (with it's redaction) coupled with a t-shirt that reads like it came from the lyrics sheet of a John Rich song is not something designed to avoid attention. Quite the opposite--she is not naive.
As potentially clever as her hat trick might have been, it has led to an outcome that is pure comedy. She actually quit a vacation. And, for someone who has spent much of the last few months desperately seeking adulation and celebrity on a protracted book tour, the complaint that she had to curtail her vacation because too many people were noticing her rings rather hollow, does it not?
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