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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Sarah Palin is like the mole in that addictively frustrating, ultimately futile carnival game whack-a-mole. Just when we think we've driven her back into her hole, out pops the side-swept updo and rimless Kazuo Kawasaki eyeglasses from another burrow. Katie Couric plays her the fool; she discovers Twitter. The hard right champions her as the frontrunner for 2012; she leaves office. Lawsuits threaten to sack her; she comes up with death panels.\n\nThis is why Palin has us by the short and curlies. Just when we think we've got her sorted out, she comes up with an entirely unexpected, out of far-left-field move, which you can underestimate at your own peril.\n\nToday is a big day for everyone trying to draw meaning from Sarah Palin. First there's the publication of Going Rogue, the tell-all about God and the GOP and the Cheechakos and Sourdoughs and the awesome thrill of shooting wolves from helicopters. Good luck trying to make sense of any of that.\n\nFor those who aren't so keen to partake in the aforementioned self-mythologizing, there's Going Rouge\u2014also out today\u2014an anthology of essays compiled by Betsy Reed and Richard Kim, two senior editors at The Nation. The difference is more than the transposition of letters. Going Rouge collects the Palin-inspired rants and exhortations of more than 20 liberal journalists and scholars. There's Tom Perotta on why Americans love \"sexy Puritans,\" Naomi Klein explaining how Palin is the Death Star of the American capitalist empire, and Juan Cole drawing comparisons between the former Alaska governor and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.\n\nLike everything Palin-related, the book has already stirred up controversy. In an online forum for the Atlantic, lawyers asked whether Going Rouge's cover, with its likeness to the cover and title of Palin's biography constitutes copyright infringement. (It doesn't.) A couple of outlets\u2014Fox News, NPR, Keith Olberman, even Entertainment Tonight (\"I'm pretty sure I'm the first-ever Nation editor to appear on ET,\" Reed told me)\u2014asked whether Reed and Kim intended to confuse would-be buyers of Palin's book in order to sell their own. They say no. According to Kim, their intention is more about balance: \"If you have to buy Palin's biography for your Republican parents for Christmas, you should also buy them ours.\"\n\nGQ recently met with Betsy Reed and Richard Kim at The Nation's offices in New York to talk about Sarah Palin, her Mad Libs approach to public speaking, and how she makes us long for the good old days when politicians didn't actually believe all the crazy shit they said. Going Rouge is on sale exclusively at www.ORBooks.com.\n\nGQ: Sarah Palin isn't in government anymore. Why does she continue to hold such fascination for all of us?\n\nBetsy Reed: Sarah Palin is a microcosm of a certain part of America. She's very good at pressing all the hot buttons\u2014aggrieved Christianity, patriotism, certain people's fears and anxieties. It's important to look at what those hot buttons are, that way you can start to understand the movement that she represents.\n\nRichard Kim: The essays try to explain her appeal and contextualize her in a larger political movement\u2014one that is very dangerous, and that we're very opposed to.\n\nGQ: I'd rather just ignore her, maybe then she'll go away.\n\nRK: I don't think you can ignore her. How do you ignore someone who routinely finishes at the top of Republican Party polls for the 2012 nomination? How do you ignore someone who manages in a month to actually shift opinion against the public option by creating this whole death panel hysteria? How do you ignore someone who has a book that is number one on the Amazon bestseller list, with 1.5 million copies in print, before it's even out?\n\nBR: Sarah Palin is a double-edged phenomenon from progressives' standpoint. She may be catastrophic to her party, but she also has such a poisonous effect on the whole political culture. Just because they're not going to win elections doesn't mean they're not going to impact the ability of Obama to govern.\n\nGQ: The GOP was initially very pleased with Palin\u2014certainly in the early days right after she was tapped as McCain's running mate. Now there seems to be a bit of buyer's remorse. Has the Republican party sown the seeds of its own demise with Palin?\n\nBR: They're freaked out, as well they should be. They have a real problem on their hands. They thought they were going to be able to groom and manage her.\n\nRK: What's lacking with her is a strategy for how this will actually turn into a winning electoral platform for them. Whatever you want to say about Reagan, at least he had [a winning platform], and it actually worked for an electoral coalition for a while. I put her more with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. I look at what they're doing, and it doesn't seem that there's anything more to it than simply torpedoing democracy, rather than trying to ert control and influence of it through democratic means.\n\nGQ: Liberals have many complaints about Palin\u2014what do you find most troubling about her?\n\nBR: One of the most exciting things about Barack Obama [when he was running for president] was that he would put this new face on America to the world. We had been dealing with George Bush\u2014the swaggering, macho, cowboy stuff\u2014and now, finally, here's a man who would actually speak to the rest of the world with respect. But then in comes Sarah Palin: defiantly ignorant, threatening, disdainful of the rest of the world, combining lack of knowledge with war mongering. She showed the world America's worst face.\n\nRK: Not to mention the lack of shame and embarrassment that she has about what she doesn't know\u2014that somehow her lack of knowledge actually was supposed to be a good thing, that she represented this \"just-folks\" America. That was the appeal of George Bush in some ways. I see her as a continuation of that trend.\n\nGQ: Going Rouge shows that she's a continuation of a lot of trends: proudly ignorant, like Bush; the \"Sexy Puritan,\" like Anita Bryant; and emplifying what Richard Hofstadter termed the paranoid style, or the influence of conspiracy theories on American politics. What's new about Palin?\n\nRK: The difference with Sarah Palin is that she is much closer to that right-wing, paranoid, patriotic base. She personifies it. Reagan and Nixon and Bush were to some degree cynically manipulating right-wing populist paranoia. With Palin, it doesn't seem to be for the craven end of just winning an election. She actually wants to pursue those policies. That, to me, is quite scary. No one can say where this all might go.\n\nGQ: Many of the essays in this book are by well-known feminists for whom Sarah Palin represented something very dangerous. Generally, how do feminists respond to her?\n\nBR: I think feminists saw Palin's nomination as the ultimate act of cynicism by the Republican party. In the wake of the Democratic primary, to see Palin and the Republicans exploit her gender and her beauty in order to give them a female-friendly face was particularly galling. She's anything but friendly to the interests of the vast majority of women. That's always been a shifty move on the right: Put women and blacks in key positions in order to mask the real nature of their politics. Feminists were divided over Hillary, but almost uniformly opposed Sarah Palin right out of the gate.\n\nGQ: Part of what I find so shocking about Sarah Palin is how inarticulate she is when speaking off the cuff. Half the time I don't understand what she's saying; she often seems without substance.\n\nBR: It would be wrong to think there was no substance. She has an amazing knack for tapping people's emotions through her language and using these very potent, loaded catchphrases\u2014even if there's no noun, no verb, no object, and it's just stream of consciousness. She's representing something that people clearly respond strongly to. It's a whole worldview. The potency of someone who can provoke that kind of visceral reaction should not be underestimated.\n\nRK: I see her as a megaphone. She takes values and views and conspiracies that are in the right-wing political culture\u2014paranoia, aggrieved Christianity, patriotism\u2014and she amplifies them and takes them to an entirely new and far more dangerous level. She was recently at a Wisconsin right-to-life dinner and raised this thing about how Obama was moving the \"In God We Trust\" to the edge of the presidential coin, insinuating some kind of conspiracy. This idea was going around in mass emails [among conservative conspiracy-minded groups] for a while. She didn't just invent that lie\u2014it actually does come from somewhere, and people believe it.\n\nGQ: Do you think she believes the things she says, like that kind of conspiracy-mongering?\n\nBR: In some ways I think her politics are sincere. She really is anti-choice, even in cases of rape and incest. Did she come up with that opportunistically? I don't think so. She's always had those positions. Her church in Alaska is extremely fundamentalist.\n\nRK: On the other hand, I don't believe for a minute that she actually thinks there are death panels. She knows what end-of-life consultations are\u2014she signed a bill in Alaska hosting an event supporting them! This was a very cynical and crafted statement that she put out, intended to provoke all of this.\n\nBR: One of the reasons she's writing Going Rogue is to make the claim that she has this unruly spirit that Republican handlers couldn't tame. But you also don't want to fully buy that version of the narrative. She did go out and buy the clothes, and she has her own image managers. They may have different aesthetics, but they're still managing image.\n\nGQ: Do you think she's stupid? I can't figure it out. Is Sarah Palin dumb or slyly intelligent?\n\nBR: I think she has a sort of savant quality. She's clearly not well-informed or well-educated, and she doesn't care about being articulate or intelligent or focused in her speech or her thinking. But she does have a certain primal smarts.\n\nRK: She has an ability to absorb and telegenically project the right emotional mood for her base. Take her Facebook posting on healthcare, which started the whole damn thing. It was a remarkably efficient and effective piece of writing. In two sentences, it packed in God, her Down syndrome baby, and state-run socialism. What she's able to do that other right-wing ideologues can't do is really compress the hot buttons into one space. Ask yourself, was there any there there with Reagan? Or George W. Bush? Remember, politicians don't necessarily need to be substantive or deeply thoughtful people, or even to be consistent, to be highly effective, world-changing, history-making figures."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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