Opinion: America's favorite refudiator, Sarah Palin, publishes again

As a viewer of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” I thought it was about time that I discovered what Palin does when not clubbing halibut with baseball bats or shooting clay pigeons.

So this Thanksgiving break I sat down with “America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag” and “Going Rogue: An American Life.”

The recently released “America by Heart” is a slimmer volume than Palin’s first book. It seems more hastily assembled as well.

If “Going Rogue” is the story of Sarah Palin’s heart, “America by Heart” is, somewhat misleadingly, the story of America by mind.

Unlike “Going Rogue,” it offers only minimal comment on Palin’s private life. The book only resembles a reality show when she digresses briefly to slam Levi Johnston for not showing up until the last moments of Bristol’s labor.

Rather, it attempts to present Palin as a reflective essayist who weaves together long citations from Tocqueville, Reagan and John McCain to present a candidate’s optimistic argument for American exceptionalism.

As in “Going Rogue,” Palin is at her best when writing about gender discrimination. The anecdotes tend to be less humorous and trailblazing than her “Going Rogue” accounts of trouncing Alaska’s good old boy league.

Still, she rightly takes the mainstream media to task for asking her, but not male candidates, how they would balance care for their young families with official duties.

She admirably attempts to set colonial American women on equal footing with the Tea Party’s much-revered Founding Fathers. She profusely praises Abigail Adams, though her use of Adams turns out to be questionable.

According to Palin, the Constitution protects families because the Revolutionary generation’s family values, she alleges, were basically the same as those of conservative 21st century Americans.  

While Palin tries to escape essentialist feminism, she has ironically become a spokesperson for a new brand of self-proclaimed feminism.

She rejects traditional issues such as abortion rights even while challenging the workplace sexism of the glass ceiling.

Though Palin admits her skin has been toughened by the personal attacks she has faced as a political figure, she’s clearly still sensitive to charges that racism motivates many Tea Partiers.

In “America by Heart,” Palin wrestles with the inadequacy of constitutional literalism to confront the Founding Father’s most egregious failure: slavery.

Judging by the frequency with which the topic arises throughout the book, Palin is haunted by the legacy of race and slavery.

She ties herself in knots trying to prove that following the original intent of the Constitution’s authors would have led us to abolish slavery and end Jim Crow.

“We believe it’s a good thing that we came so far in achieving racial justice while keeping faith with our Constitution,” Palin writes.

The careful expression “keeping faith” conveniently conceals the contradiction of simultaneously claiming that the original intent of the Constitution cannot be literally followed with regards to slavery even as it must be followed literally without exception.

The obvious holes in the argument aren’t likely to win over many moderate or left-leaning voters. Then again, that probably isn’t her intent.

Palin isn’t looking to preach. “America by Heart” sets out to convince those who already ascribe to her world view that she’s capable of being the Tea Party’s intellectual standard-bearer.

It attempts to present her as a political figure in maturation.

Unlike the Palin of the 2008 campaign and “Going Rogue,” we no longer hear insistences that serving as a small-town executive amounts to better experience than Obama’s eloquent speechmaking and legislative career.

To position herself as the anti-Obama, Palin instead grounds her refudiation of the president in the past and present of American exceptionalist thought, offering herself as the spokesperson for unabashed American supremacy.


E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu