What happened to Sarah Palin?

I’m sure you are probably ready with the easy answer: Nothing has changed. She has been giving half-cocked, barely coherent speeches for years, and this year, just a few days removed from the grand oratorical opus she delivered at the 2015 Iowa Freedom Summit, she’s still offering up the same rambling diatribes — with or without a teleprompter, it makes little difference — consisting of a strange mix of middle-America colloquialisms and a tinge of bitterness that comes from losing badly in 2008 and being relegated to the hinterlands of reality television ever since.

But Matt Lewis with The Daily Beast has touched on something that I don’t think most people have pointed out, at least not recently. After 2008, Palin actually had a chance to dust herself off and hit the reset button on her political career. He lays out the scenario thusly:

In fairness, Palin was once a reform-minded governor who enjoyed an 88 percent approval rating. But something happened on the way to Des Moines. I suspect the most vicious attacks (especially the “Trig Truther” stuff) radicalized her and embittered her, but I also suspect she also took the easy way out. Instead of going back to Alaska after the 2008 defeat, boning up on the issues, continuing her work as governor, and forging a national political comeback, she cashed in with reality-TV shows and paid speaking gigs.

This isn’t an original or new observation, In fact, back in July 2009, I wrote: “The tragedy of Sarah Palin’s recent press conference announcing her resignation as governor of Alaska flows from the sense that so much potential has been wasted.”

The trouble with taking the easy way out is that it doesn’t last forever. The people who truly last in this business don’t rely on shortcuts or good looks or gimmicks; they survive on work ethic, wit, and intellect. (That’s why, no matter how grandiose he gets, Newt Gingrich will always have a gig. Newt will always be interesting, because he will always have something to say—something to contribute.)

This is why — and it seems many conservative writers are now ready to concede this point — that Palin never really had any staying power or substance in the first place, without laboriously going back to Alaska to study up, and when she is left to her devices, especially without the teleprompter, this is what we get in raw form, which is a shell of someone like Gingrich or John McCain, who are, however much I might disagree with them on specific points, at least capable of manufacturing interesting ideas independent of anyone else.

Bobby Jindal’s abortive first ‘election’ appearance

At the same time that a slew of potential Republican presidential candidates, none of whom will likely be in contention for the presidency, were courting far-right voters this past week at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines, Gov. Bobby Jindal was off crusading in Baton Rouge, La., at The Response prayer meeting held by the American Family Association, as he joined about 3,000 fellow evangelicals — and I don’t think this language is an exaggeration — “to save America, through prayer and fasting, from the threats of Sharia, homosexuality, pornography, and abortion.” Indeed, according to Slate’s report:

Materials promoting the event described natural disasters including Hurricane Katrina, as well as the national debt, as the just result of America’s sins, punishments akin to the biblical wave of locusts.

Despite claims to the contrary, and despite federal tax law stipulating that preachers and religious organizations can’t take political positions or endorse candidates lest they run the risk of losing their tax-exempt status (Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS tax code), The Response gathering contained numerous political elements:

Jindal and other speakers prayed for the different branches of government and for President Obama. Louisiana state Sen. Jonathan Perry called for more “born-again Christians” to be elected to political office. Another speaker said, “When our government sanctions [abortion], it brings reproach upon our land.” She insisted that “the right to abort will be overturned,” but in the meantime, the “payment for bloodshed is blood.” Pastor Bob Phillips announced that a group of pastors was “rising up” against “America’s pestilence” and fighting against people who wanted to “silence the voice of those who would make biblical application” to politics. He said that pastors were ignoring requirements of their churches’ tax-exempt status that they not make political speeches from the pulpit, and they were sending the IRS videos of themselves endorsing political candidates in their sermons.

The event was so political that the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, despite participating in a pro-life march nearby, declined to take part. Rob Tasman, the LCCB director, said, “The event was viewed more as an evangelical event with a political tone to it, and the bishops don’t participate in such events.”

Kudos to the bishops. Needless to say, the nation apparently didn’t miss much, as a significant amount of attendees had already cleared out by the time Jindal got up to talk about his religious conversion:

The Response kept reminding me of high school. Jindal’s story of his conversion was couched entirely in his high school experience, including a pivotal moment in which he talks with a “pretty girl,” whom he had a crush on, about her dream of becoming a Supreme Court justice and overturning Roe v. Wade. Everything was superficial and black and white, in the way adolescents see the world. Jindal didn’t want to look deeper than this: “In the end, our God wins.”

Jindal might have been better served, politically, by casting lots with the sea of crazies up the road in Des Moines. At least then he couldn’t be accused of trying to conflate politics and religion. As a Slate commentator named Stafford opined:

Wasn’t Jindal the one who, only a few years back, called on the GOP to stop being so stupid? He should have stuck with that.