Sarah Palin’s Alaska
I regret not seeing this.
I’d read a bit about the TV show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” before. But I’d never watched it.
Last night I was doing some idle channel surfing, and I happened across the program. The impression I got from it of Palin was of almost unstoppable energy; this woman is a physical force of nature, always on the go, relentless and tireless. Even if Palin had never entered politics, she most likely would have brought her natural exuberance to whatever it was she chose to do. And she would never have chosen to do just one thing.
Palin’s idea of a vacation is a jaunt that would exhaust most people. It was especially fascinating to watch her take daughter Bristol out on a commercial halibut fishing boat for some rather unconventional mother-daughter bonding. The moment when Sarah held a fish’s just-removed but still-beating heart in her hand is likely to make her political opponents shudder.
Commercial fishing isn’t for sissies, and Palin is no dilettante, since she and her husband have worked in the commercial salmon industry. The TV show shows us the enormous halibut, which have to be stunned with a club before being killed so they don’t flop around so much on the deck that they injure their meat. Sarah is fully up to the task (another image that probably doesn’t send joy into the heart of any liberal Democrat watching—Sarah clubbing a jumungous halibut into senselessness).
Watching the show, I got a feeling for the character of Palin’s husband Todd, as well. He’s far more taciturn than she but hardly glum, and they are hotly competitive with each other in a friendly sort of way. Watch them skeet-shooting or kayaking and you see that they each play to win.
When Palin first came on the scene, I noted that she reminded me somewhat of Teddy Roosevelt. Not politically—he was a Republican but a progressive—and not for his ivy-league education, but for their shared gutsy, rugged, outdoorsy nature, and huge level of energy. This is what I wrote back then:
…another president sharing some traits with Palin: the muckracking, hunting, wild Western: Theodore Roosevelt. Other similarities: five children, not a great deal of prior national-level political experience (Teddy’s highest offices before being tapped for VP were Assistant Secretary of the Navy for one year and NY Governor for one year—although his military exploits with the Rough Riders had made him nationally known). Teddy was also extraordinarily young; at 42, he remains the youngest President ever.
And again, there were those wire-rimmed glasses.
It seems to be that in general the show can only help Palin, although it certainly won’t convert the haters to Palin-fans. But it indicated to me how very genuine and unique Palin is as an American type: the gung-ho straight-shooting spunky frontier woman. It’s not a type most of us are familiar with any more, as urbanized as we have now become. But it speaks to our American heritage and values.
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