The Brambles

Baby daddy tells all

Levi Johnston spills the beans about the Palin family in Vanity Fair. Frankly, I think it is more than a little rude of Levi to dish like this, but nobody ever accused him of being genteel. He is, by his own admission, a “country boy.”

In any case, the continuing psychodrama that surrounds Sarah Palin’s strange political career is a case in point of why politicians in pursuit of power make a point of not associating with the hoi polloi — at least, not by the light of day.

Here are a few choice bits from the article, with my comments below:

The Palin house was much different from what many people expect of a normal family, even before she was nominated for vice president. There wasn’t much parenting in that house. Sarah doesn’t cook, Todd doesn’t cook—the kids would do it all themselves: cook, clean, do the laundry, and get ready for school.

Actually, this is exactly what I’d expect to see in a family with a lots kids in it. Why shouldn’t the older children take care of their younger siblings, especially if dad and mom are both working full-time jobs? It sounds like the Palins did a fine job of training their children to take care of themselves. Levi is showing his out-of-touch social conservatism — an artifact, no doubt, of his blue-collar roots.

Throughout the years I spent with them, when Sarah got home from her office—almost never later than five and sometimes as early as noon—she usually walked in the door, said hello, and then disappeared into her bedroom, where she would hang out. Sometimes she’d take an hour-long bath. Other times she sat on the living-room couch in her two-piece pajama set from Walmart—she had all the colors—with her hair down, watching house shows and wedding shows on TV.

Again, sounds like a typical contemporary mom to me.

Todd was always out in the garage working on his snow machines and drinking beer or screwing off. (Eighty percent of the time he’s in the garage. Once winter is here, he’s out riding every other day.) He’s not supposed to have beer, because Sarah doesn’t like him drinking. (She only goes to church four or five times a year—mostly on holidays—but Sarah doesn’t drink or cuss much.) So Todd will hide his beer, go out there, and work on his sleds.

Well, now we know why Sarah takes those hour-long baths.

In all the time Bristol and I were together, I’ve never seen [Sara and Todd Palin] sleep in the same bedroom. (I don’t know how she got pregnant.)

Slanderous! This whippersnapper has no idea how complex a married couple’s sex life can become. I can say from experience that almost every anniversary brings something strange and new.

In February—just after Bristol and I broke up and I moved back to my mom’s house—I went to the courthouse for my mom’s hearing [for a prescription drug charge]. As we walked out, I started talking to Rex Butler, the lawyer who had taken on her case, and Tank Jones, a private investigator who worked with him. They were both huge African-American men, wearing tailor-made suits with their names on the cuffs of their shirts.

Only in America!

Concluding thoughts.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if Sarah Palin responded to this article with complete candor?

What if she said: “I read the article, and I have to say that Levi got some things right, and he exaggerated others. I don’t really appreciate Levi talking about my family to a magazine, but now that it is out there, so what? We’re a normal family. Is your family any better? If it is, congratulations, but I suspect that the American people aren’t scandalized to find out that my family isn’t a 1950s sitcom cliche. I’m glad we’re not that.”

But Sarah Palin seems to have gotten a bit more savvy since the election. Voters don’t want politicians to address them in terms that relate to their everyday experience. The assumption that voters favor honest politicians we may call the Bulworth fallacy.

Instead, voters want politicians to present themselves as ideal types of an easily recognizable demographic group: the soccer mom, “America’s mayor,” the black guy. They also want their politicians to personify a set of values that they themselves are reputed to possess, but are too weak and venal to live up to. The pol is expected to act as the superego to the collective id.

When you think about it, this is a very tall order, so most pols try to fake it by being as bland as possible. This is not an option for Sarah Palin.

Lucky for her, white Southerners, Christian fundamentalists and Republican activists are seething with resentment that America turned against them in the last election, and she has been able to channel the resentment via social media.

Ultimately, however, I think Palin’s main limitation is that she not enough of a chameleon to compete on the national stage. She doesn’t know how to be different things to different people. She couldn’t even hide her true self from her daughter’s redneck baby daddy.

The Glenn Beck variation

I like to analogize politics to chess, mainly just because I like both politics and chess. Both games, however, demand strategic thinking, and in this sense the chess analogy is apt.

There often comes a moment during the latter sequence of an opening variation where the chess player must give back some previously gained material. For example, White is up two pawns, but he faces a choice between gaining development at the cost of a pawn (or even two) and keeping his material advantage at the cost of going into the middle game potentially unprepared for a massive counter-attack. It’s dangerous to get too smug about being up a pawn or two. Having two more pawns than your opponent will be of great advantage to you in the end game, but those pawns will turn into fool’s gold if you get checkmated in twenty-five moves.

That said, any player who accepts material losses with complete equanimity is a fool. First of all, gaining material gives your opponent a psychological boost. The gambit would never work if it didn’t feel so good to eat pawns for free. Moreover, material advantage is usually the decisive factor of a win. Most chess players (i.e., those that don’t commit variations to memory) can’t see more than one or two moves ahead, so material advantage is the hedge against unforeseen eventualities.

What has all this got to do with politics?

The conservatives went into the health care fight down a couple pawns. Their political party was decimated in the 2008 election and the President’s popularity was high.

The Democrats pushed health care reform to the top of the agenda, just below economic stimulus. Health care was always going to be a tough fight — may the toughest of all domestic issues — so the Democrats wanted to fight it when they were at the peak of their strength.

However, the conservatives gained at least one pawn back in August by disrupting the town hall meetings on health care. They inserted terms like death panels into the lexicon. The hope for the Democrats was that the conservatives would expend most of their energy before the public began paying attention to the issue in earnest and/or conservative tactics would embarrass the GOP as they had, for example, during the Terri Schiavo episode.

The Glenn Beck 9/12 march on Washington has shown that this hope did not materialize. If anything, the Tea Party movement is gaining strength. The GOP doesn’t have to officially endorse that movement to reap the political gains it is creating.

The Democrats can’t let the conservatives take another pawn in September. If they do, it is likely health care reform will be dead by Halloween.

How do the Democrats stop them? Frankly, I don’t know. In chess, when you start to lose momentum you have to reevaluate your strategy. That’s not easy to do. Personally, I start by trying to pinpoint one or two of my opponent’s weak spots. Has he neglected to castle? Has he left any developed pieces unprotected or in position for forking? I try to resist the urge to attack the king prematurely. This almost always fails, especially when you’ve recently lost the initiative.

Most of this does not relate to the health care fight in any way, which is why Garry Kasparov will probably never be the president of Russia.