Sarah Palin was once a contender: a no-nonsense mom and a serious politician. Now she’s just a greedy celebrity with a grasping family, says Alexander Chancellor
Sarah Palin’s ignorance and inarticulacy are so constantly on display that she can’t just be simulating them to strengthen her popular appeal. They are also attributes in which she takes pride. As Jacob Weisberg writes in the introduction to his new anthology, Palinisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin: ‘Palin’s exuberant incoherence testifies to an unusually wide gulf between confidence and ability. She is proud of what she doesn’t know and contemptuous of those “experts” and “elitists” who are too knowledgeable to be trusted.’
It is this unquenchable self-confidence that is so striking about Palin. When she was widely ridiculed for calling on Muslims to ‘refudiate’ the building of a mosque at Ground Zero in New York, she said that she was only being like William Shakespeare who also had a habit of making up new words.
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