This is a phenomenon that just keeps giving.
Its very lack of explanation, and ensuing incredulity and apoplexy, propel it.
There may not have ever been anything like it in modern American politics. Well, Ronald Reagan perhaps. But his was, at least, a 20-year phenomenon. In little more than a year, Sarah Palin has gone from zero status to significant opposition leader, contender for the leadership of her party, and one of the most extraordinary media figures in the country.
It is hard to catch up with her. She moves too fast to study. Beside the expressions of incredulity and apoplexy, nobody in the media has been able to offer any satisfying rationale for her fantastic rise. Indeed, every analysis in essence explains why she should merely be a laughing stock, which, curiously, she is, even as her rise continues.
To my knowledge, there are at this point only two journalists even trying to uncover the basic operations of the Palin phenomenon.
Andrew Sullivan, the diligent blogger who, early on, became focused on the discrepancies in the Palin story—indeed, who sees an intricate conspiracy underlying her rise—announced yesterday
his blog was going dark so he could give extra attention to Palin’s book, her latest phenomenological iteration. "There is a possibility here of such a huge scandal that we would be crazy not to take our time either to debunk it or move it forward for further examination," says Sullivan, who regularly loses his cool in his efforts to explain Palin.
Joe McGinniss (author of possibly the most seminal political book of the age,
The Selling of the President) is the other reporter on the case. His book,
Sarah Palin's Year of Living Dangerously, will be published by Broadway Books. But his early efforts to interest publishers in the Palin story met with "indifference to distatse."
McGinniss has feared that "Palin's own ghost-written" book would be "the only lasting record of one of the more amazing phenomenons in American cultural history,” he said in an email to me this summer.
There is, too, Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight.com, who has been looking at the phenomenon not so much in journalistic terms, but as a reflection of marketing nuance. The Palin operation involves, in his analysis, leveraging the power of a passionate audience, albeit a sliver audience, against the passionlessness and even aimlessness of the majority of the Republican Party.
That’s what could make her, in Silver’s estimation, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.
But this is scant attention being paid to the second most important political figure in the nation—and paltry understanding.
Anyway, the phenomenon grows larger and more inexplicable along with, and probably aided by, the laughter.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NewserColumns.
