Scenes From a Marriage

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/opinion/17douthat.html

Scenes From a Marriage
By ROSS DOUTHAT

In every twisted, wretched, ruinous relationship, there are moments so grim,
flare-ups so appalling, that they offer both parties a chance to step back,
take inventory, and realize that it’s time — far past time, in fact — to go
their separate ways.

For the American media and Sarah Palin, that kind of a moment arrived last
week.

It began just hours after the tragedy in Tucson, with a tweet from Markos
“Daily Kos” Moulitsas, the éminence grise of the liberal blogosphere.
“Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin,” he wrote, linking to a map that Palin’s
PAC had put up last fall, placing targets on various Democratic districts,
Gabrielle Giffords’s included. It didn’t take long for the media to seize on
his attack and run with it. Forget a nation’s grief and Giffords’s struggle
to survive: What America really needed, the nation’s pundits and TV
producers decided, was a noisy debate about the possible link between Jared
Lee Loughner’s crime and Palin’s martial campaign rhetoric.

Given how little connection Loughner seems to have to any kind of right-wing
politics, this conversation looked increasingly ridiculous by midweek, and
even a little bit obscene. But instead of letting the frenzy die away, Palin
decided that what the country really needed was for her to use the day set
aside for mourning Loughner’s victims to make a speech complaining about her
own victimization. (Or as she put it, rather more pungently, the “blood
libel” being leveled by her critics.) Which, needless to say, gave the press
exactly the excuse it needed to continue its wall-to-wall Palin coverage for
another 48 hours — and beyond, perhaps, given that she’s slated to appear on
Sean Hannity’s show Monday night.

The whole business felt less like an episode in American political history
than a scene from a particularly toxic marriage — more “Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?” than “The Making of the President.” The press and Palin
have been at war with each other almost from the first, but their mutual
antipathy looks increasingly like co-dependency: they can’t get along, but
they can’t live without each other either.

For their part, the media manage to be consistently unfair to the former
Alaska governor — gossipy and hostile in their reportage, hysterical and
condescending in their commentary — even as they follow her every move with
a fascination bordering on obsession. (MSNBC, in particular, should just
change its name to “Palin 24/7” and get it over with.) When commentators
aren’t denouncing her, they’re busy building up her legend — exaggerating
her political acumen, overpraising her communications strategy, covering her
every tweet as if she were the Viceroy of Red America, and spinning out
outlandish scenarios in which she captures the White House in 2012.

Palin, meanwhile, officially despises the “lamestream” media. But press
coverage — good, bad, whatever — is clearly the oxygen she craves. She
supposedly hates having her privacy invaded, yet her family keeps showing up
on reality TV. She thinks the political class is clueless and out-of-touch,
but she can’t resist responding to its every provocation. Her public
rhetoric, from “death panels” to “blood libel,” is obviously crafted to
maximize coverage and controversy, and generate more heat than light. And
her Twitter account reads like a constant plea for the most superficial sort
of media attention.

It’s a grim spectacle on both sides, and last week’s pointless controversy
was a particularly low point. So let me play the relationship counselor. To
the media: Cover Sarah Palin if you want, but stop acting as if she’s the
most important conservative politician in America. Stop pretending that she
has a plausible path to the presidency in 2012. (She doesn’t.) Stop
suggesting that she’s the front-runner for the Republican nomination. (She
isn’t.) And every time you’re tempted to parse her tweets for some secret
code or crucial dog whistle, stop and think, this woman has fewer Twitter
followers than Ben Stiller, and then go write about something else instead.

To Palin: You were an actual politician once (remember that?), but you’re
becoming the kind of caricature that your enemies have always tried to make
of you. So maybe it’s time to turn off your iPad for a while, and take a
break from Facebook and Fox News. The world won’t end if you don’t respond
to every criticism, and you might even win a few more admirers if you
cultivated a lighter touch and a more above-the-fray persona. Oh, and when
that reality-TV producer sends you a pitch for “Sarah Plus Five Plus Kate
Plus Eight,” just say no.

Breaking up is hard to do, of course. But for the majority of Americans who
are neither Palinoiacs nor Palinistas, here’s the good news: If the press
(including this columnist!) and Sarah Palin can’t quit each other, you can
still quit us.

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