Vanity Fair's Sarah Palin

I just finished reading Vanity Fair's hit piece on Sarah Palin which manages to excoriate Palin for being very popular with social conservatives and not saving the flailing McCain campaign. It allows former McCain staffers to snipe and carp about Palin, as though she was the reason John McCain didn't win last year's election.

I'm not defending the things Palin didn't know and should have. But, ultimately, the failures of the McCain campaign are the fault of John McCain and his staff. It wasn't Sarah Palin's fault that McCain decided early on he wasn't going to attack Barack Obama on his seedy Chicago connections and utter lack of experience doing anything. Nor was it Palin's fault that McCain is so despised by regular GOPers that Palin's persona outshone him from the getgo. McCain looked like, acted like and thought like an old man going up against a young one, with predictable results.

The reasons John McCain lost last year's election were (a) he was running against an attractive and, as Joe Biden would say, articulate black man at a time when the country was happy to pat itself on the back as being post racial; (b) his lack of conservative backing (he was the moderate candidate); and (c) his completely inept campaign. None of those things were Sarah Palin's fault. If the bitter staffers want to blame anyone for the failures of the McCain campaign, they should spend their time looking in the mirror as opposed to complaining that Palin was a "diva."

Several feminist sites have spoken about the double standard Palin dealt with and continues to deal with. The press originally tried attacking her for being a working mother, asking how she could raise her children and run the state of Alaska. Then, when she spent a considerable amount on clothes (because, unlike men, women cannot wear the same five suits over and over without comment), she was a "diva." Palin was asked far tougher questions as a vice presidential candidate than the Democrat presidential candidate, Barack Obama. And when Democrat Joe Biden repeatedly bungled the softball questions he was asked, there was little press attention given to it (remember when Biden praised the trimester system of Roe v. Wade, when that section has been specifically repudiated since 1989? Where was the press coverage for that?).

I'm not arguing that there is no legitimate criticism of Palin. She was clearly uninformed of McCain's positions on a variety of issues (and, in fact, held diametrically opposed positions on some), and she was completely unprepared for the viciousness of the press when it decided to go after her. It might have been good if she had been a bit harsher in her responses to some questions, but then, she would have been an even bigger "bitch" than the Left already has portrayed her as.

One truly has to wonder, though, why Vanity Fair and the leftwing media are so fixated on Palin seven months after the election of their guy. Can't find any dirt on Barack Obama, Teh One? That would probably be more timely and important, rather than Palin's Twitters.

Robert Stacy McCain likewise explains that the problems with the Palin rollout were not Sarah Palin, but the handlers on the McCain staff. Part II is here.