"SARAH PALIN'S ALASKA"

In case you missed the premiere, it's an hour-long political commercial. But unless you loathe her from the get-go (as many of you do), you will find it entertaining. It's charming and heart-warming from start to finish, and it has lots of cool stuff to look at.

As much as I like Sarah Palin, I never thought she could be elected president in 2012. Now I think maybe she can. For aficionados of hard-core politics, her “reality show” is a must-see.

It is sometimes said that generals and military strategists are always practicing to win the previous war. The next war, however, is always different in character from the last one, so the generals are usually unprepared, and often slow to adjust to the new paradigm.

It's much the same in politics. There are many reasons for Barack Obama's victory in 2008, but one of them is that John McCain ran basically the same grass-roots, volunteer-based campaign as George Bush had in 2000 and 2004, (and didn't do it nearly as well). Obama changed the game, however. No candidate had ever harnessed the internet, and particularly the new social media, the way Obama did. Not only did he keep his supporters excited and focused on victory through long months of campaigning, he also used the new media to raise close to a billion dollars, an unprecedented sum, with almost half of it untraceable. With a war chest that dwarfed his opponent's and a friendly media that promoted him unabashedly and saw no reason to investigate or interrogate him, he cruised to victory over a thoroughly decent man who nevertheless seemed hopelessly out-of-date.

I follow Sarah Palin. It's not hard to do. She's on Fox News, she's huge on Facebook, her tweets get reported in the New York Times, and in the recent election there was no one who had more impact for candidates she endorsed and for whom she raised money. (By contrast, there is no evidence Obama's efforts had any effect at all.) But it was not until I watched “Sarah Palin's Alaska” that the lightbulb went on for me. This is it. This IS her campaign for the presidency in 2012. She is inventing something completely new in campaign politics, and while she may ultimately fail, she has leap-frogged past even Obama's brilliant 2008.

It is the only sort of campaign that gives her any chance of victory. For one thing, the elites and what she calls the “lame-stream media” simply hate her. They hate her because she worked her way through Idaho State University rather than having a million bucks worth of prep schools and Ivy League education dropped on her. They hate her because she's the wrong kind of feminist. They hate her because she didn't abort her Down Syndrome child. They hate her because she sometimes says, “Gosh.” They hate her for a thousand reasons. They hate her no less than they did when several hundred reporters showed up in Alaska to investigate corruption at the Wasilla Public Library. In fact, they hate her more now because she won't go away.

So what's a girl to do? Well, since the NYT and the Washington Post and NBC and CBS and ABC and Chris Matthews and Katie Couric will ALWAYS treat her like something that crawled out from under a rock, Palin has decided to see whether it is possible that the leftwing cultural mavens have lost so much influence that a national campaign can successfully ignore them. It's an interesting question. The importance of the old-fashioned media in shaping opinion has been fading for some time. (I don't know anyone under the age of 50 who watches a network “Evening News” show, for example.)

In any case, she has no choice. John McCain's campaign, or George Bush's, or even Obama's, will never win another election. The winner in 2012 will have to do something different.

In her favor is the fact that she seems to understand the new media and how to exploit it. In particular, since she controls the image she creates on Facebook and elsewhere, she can use the leftwing hatred to her advantage. Earlier this year, she was lambasted for using the made-up word “refudiate.” Now she uses it all the time, with a wink and a nod to her fans. Yesterday, the New Oxford American Dictionary named it the best new word of the year. She also frequently makes jokes about things she can “see from her house.”

In addition, the new media tend to be more “personal” and less formal, and this suits her as well. While the reality show is not a high-brow format, it works for her. She has a large, photogenic family, Alaska is a beautiful place, and she's not an egghead. She likes hanging with Todd and the kids and going outside and hiking and fishing and shooting. It's not hard to watch, unless you loathe her with every fiber of your being.

Finally, there's another, more subtle, point being made with “Sarah Palin's Alaska.” She doesn't just think about things. She does things, and sometimes those things are interesting to watch. Imagine an Obama reality show, for example, with him and Geithner and Holder sitting in the faculty lounge that is now the West Wing, debating the finer points of some draconian new regulations for the citrus industry. That's it, pretty much---that's the whole show, unless they break it up with a couple hours of golf on a locked-down golf course at some Air Force Base. Granted, he's the President and he leads a locked-down life, but it's not like he ever did anything interesting before he became president. For him, it seems, life has always been a long stretch in the faculty lounge followed by a round of golf. There's nothing very visual or compelling about a man who lives largely inside his own head. Even for one of his acolytes, an Obama reality show would be pretty dreary stuff.

And then there's Sarah. In 2011 and 2012, considering the media world that now touches all of us, there's something to be said for somebody who can shoot a moose, butcher it that afternoon, and cook up a tasty stew for the family that night.

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki