A friend writes

I just gave a quick perusal of today’s blog and saw your post on Palin:

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On the other hand….

I gotta give Palin full props for this. My sole caveat is “This makes her a great role model for the culture of life. It does not automatically anoint her as having what it takes to be Prez.”
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What struck me about this post was the contrast with your words last week:

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. . . Palin’s hastily-ghostwritten bit of self-promotion will turn up more of what we normal people already know and acknowledge: that she’s a woman with a tenuous relationship to honesty who isn’t too bright and who is obviously not suited to be President.
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The second post struck me as rather harsh, particularly if my assumption is correct that you have not read her book.

I guess that, in general, you seem to be far too quick with cutting words and wholesale dismissal of the woman and almost anything she espouses. I keep remembering that you don’t have a TV (or at least one that’s hooked up to a means of getting news), which makes me wonder how you form your opinions. Have you actually been able to watch/listen to some of her interviews, as opposed to quick excerpts and bites in online news reports or dissections by the likes of Andrew Sullivan?

Just wondering. Your missives of late don’t appear to have much of that famous Chez charity.

I can see how that impression could come across (for which I apologize). Really though, I don’t have very strong feelings about Palin. It’s 2009. The election is years away and only people who get paid to obsess over politics should, in my view, care much about this stuff. I, at any rate, don’t. My general attitude toward politics and politicians is light-hearted disregard. I regard my blog, on my political matters, to be the equivalent of Statler and Waldorf lobbing quips at the passing show. That’s one reason I’m often surprised at how much more seriously reader take this stuff than I do.

So yeah, I mostly dismiss Palin. But not because she’s Palin. Because she’s another pol offering the average admixture of truth and falsehood that inspires me to not be inspired by American pols. I dismiss much of her self-promotion. I think her “Boy am I brave for ditching my responsibility as Governor to go chase after fame and higher office” schtick is crap. I remain unconvinced about her honesty when it competes with threats and opportunities. But I don’t dismiss the things that I actually care about, such as the value and dignity of human life which her commitment to her son exemplifies. On that point I stand up and applaud (and I note the extreme hatred directed at both her and her son from the Freakish Enemies of the Normal on the left. Only a churl could not cheer her on when she exposes their deep deep hatred of children in general and that boy in particular.

I don’t feel a burning need to read her book, nor do I think it necessary to have done so to know it was hastily ghost-written and manifestly self-promotional. The hastily ghost-written part I know simply because I know something about writing books and I know that she can’t have cranked out a tome like that this fast without major editorial and scribal help. Also, her tendency to syntactic linguini when she speaks mitigates rather strongly against her as primary author. Particularly since she only resigned in July and, by her own account, was so busy with all those mean FOIA demands and other gubernatorial duties that writing a book on her own would be rather hard to squeeze in. So yeah, the book is a hastily ghost-written piece of self-promotion. Happens all the time in political circles. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if Obama’s two pieces of self-promotion were likewise ghosted as, for instance, Profiles in Courage was. That doesn’t seem to me to be a crime (I’ve ghosted other people’s books.) It simply seems to me to be a description of what the work actually is. Ghost-written books can be decent books. They are usually written by sitting down with the putative author, doing lots of recorded interviews, and then asking, “How would this sound if the person I am interviewing could say what they mean to say in the very best words they could say it?” That’s not a crime. We hire people to do things we want done the best way they can be done all the time. I have a leaky pipe and I want it fixed. I hire a plumber, who will accomplish my will better than I can. I have something I want to say to the world, I hire a ghost-writer who will say what I tell him to say, better than I can say it.

In Palin’s case, the main thing she seems to have to say is, “Please give me a lot of attention and please vote for me in 2012.” It’s not the only thing she has to say. She says very good things about the value of human life. She says a number of confused things too. And she says some extremely dangerous and worrisome things too.

But I’m not especially inclined to lay awake at night worrying about her, still less to spend all the obsessive energy of the Left hating on her. Cuz I don’t think she’s going anywhere due to her lightweightness. The only reason I’ve talked about her this week or so is a) I’m amazed at the spectacle Andrew Sullivan is making of himself over her and b) I needed to clarify that my amazement over Sullivan does not translate to support for Palin. I could go for years without thinking about her. Not much on the Richter scale for me there, either pro or con.