No Boys On The Second Floor

If you think you've already heard enough about Sarah Palin to last you until doomsday and beyond, my advice is that you take to your bed, cover your head with a pillow and don't come out until Thanksgiving of 2012, because it's about to get a lot worse. Tonight TLC airs episode 2 of "Sarah Palin's Alaska", Monday is Bristol's Dancing With The Stars finale, and Tuesday brings the debut of "America By Heart, Reflections on Faith, Family and Flag," Sarah's second book. Wow.

With the amount of media attention this woman and her family get, you'd almost think she's the next President of the United States, which is a thought that drives me to despair and makes me want to pack up my stuff and move to Tahiti. When I calm down and think it through, however, sanity returns and I remember that Sarah Palin is a media phenomenon, not a serious politician. She gets media coverage because she's good for ratings, not because she's proposing good solutions to the serious problems facing our country. If you don't believe me, ask yourself this: Would any of this be happening if Sarah Palin looked like Susan Boyle?

Anyway, if you look beneath the surface of the nonstop media deluge, you'll see that some serious Republicans are beginning to state that the emperor (empress?) has no clothes. Peggy Noonan, Republican columnist for the Wall Street Journal and speechwriter for President Reagan, recently called Palin a "nincompoop." Mark McKinnon, who was a media advisor for George W. Bush and John McCain, said "Palin is getting close to her 'sell by' date... her stock is falling and pretty rapidly now, I think." Karl Rove recently expressed concern that Palin lacks gravitas, a perception not likely to be erased by shots of Sarah on television, wearing running shorts and hollering "No boys on the second floor" at her 16-year-old daughter Willow. Conservative blogger Mona Charen piles on, stating that Palin "quit her job as governor after two and a half years, published a book (another is due next week) and seemed to chase money and empty celebrity. Now, rather than being able to highlight the accomplishments of Sarah Palin's Alaska, we get "Sarah Palin's Alaska," another cheesy entrant in the reality show genre... Palin as a presidential candidate? Absolutely not." And I loved hearing former first lady Barbara Bush tell Larry King, in an interview to be aired tomorrow night on CNN, that Palin is "beautiful, and I hope she stays in Alaska."

Even the Weekly Standard, usually the usually the loudest and cheeriest of Palin's right-wing media cheerleaders, calls her TV show "tacky," and that's before we've even seen the very special episode co-starring Kate Gosselin.

Will Sarah Palin run for President? I don't think so. Running for President is really, really hard work. More to the point where Palin is concerned is that you do it as a volunteer. There's no salary that comes with declaring yourself to be a candidate for president. That fact alone reassures me that I probably won't have to move to Tahiti.