Defending Sarah

Matthew Continetti's new book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin is lite-fare as much as it is red-meat, and should be taken with a barrel of salt.

From the beginning, the Weekly Standard has been on Sarah Palin’s side. As the magazine’s associate editor Matthew Continetti reminds us throughout the course of his new book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin, it was Fred Barnes who first brought the Alaska governor to the attention of grassroots conservatives. And so it’s fitting that his colleague would be the one to pen such a tome, released just days before the governor herself drops em>Going Rogue<. Persecution is lite-fare as much as it is red-meat, and should be taken with a barrel of salt.

I walked into it expecting what I got. The book is filled with complaints of double-standards in favor of the Democrats in last year’s campaign, indignation over the fact that Palin’s center-right record as Alaska governor was ignored, anger about myths that were spread and widely accepted (Africa-as-country garbage, book-banning nonsense, etc.), and a whole lot of disdain for left-wing bloggers.

And yet, what we have here is the other side of the same coin: to take the most striking example, Continetti paints Palin’s tenure as mayor of Wasilla as an idyllic time of growth and proper management. After glossing over and even glorifying the fact that she ran her mayoral campaign on a pro-life platform (?!), the defining issue of Palin’s second term — the Wasilla Sports Complex — is noted only briefly, to mention that while there may have been a teensy little eminent domain problem, it wasn’t really that big of a deal. Indeed, the reader is left with the impression that it was really just a footnote, even though the legal issues have yet to be worked out, as Continetti reminds us, “to this day.” No mention of the crushing debt that it sent Wasilla into.

Continetti insists that since the “factual,” “empirical data” show that Palin put a stop to the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, it was a smear against her to assert that she was spinning the facts by claiming that she told Congress “thanks but no thanks.” Alright, Mr. Continetti, I’ll call uncle: I suppose that Palin, in the very literal, empirical sense, put a stop to the Bridge to Nowhere. But no one in his right mind can possibly suggest that she did not mean to imply that she was a crusader against the earmark. She wasn’t. She put a stop to it after national pressure made it impossible to proceed with it. While reading his prose, one gets the sense that the author realizes that this is so: the “empirical” data are constantly referred back to: did Palin literally stop it or not? Well, did she? This Alaska Democrat website seems to think so! One good spin deserves another, I guess.

Continetti repeatedly equates left-wing bloggers with “the elite media.” Blog post after blog post is cited, especially from writers for the Huffington Post. Using this bizarre methodology, one could quote from RedState and WorldNetDaily, seeking quotes to show that there was a “media persecution campaign” against Barack Obama, alleging all sorts of crazy things, and even questioning his citizenship!

Continetti fares better when he tackles media double-standards. A fact-checking of the Palin-Biden debate reveals all sorts of missteps on Biden’s part that would have sent the media into a harried tailspin had Palin asserted it. The classic example serves best: could Palin have possibly gotten away with saying that France and the United States went into Lebanon to kick out Hezbollah? It would have been proof that she’s a total dunce, a complete know-nothing on foreign policy issues. Not so on the part of “Joe being Joe.” But this is standard media bias; par for the course every way you cut it. Similarly, when Continetti compares the softball questions Katie Couric asked Joe Biden — “Do you like campaigning?” — with the tougher questions Palin was asked, there’s a fair point. But that merely shows that the media need to be tougher on Democrats. If Palin's partisans regard it as "persecution" to expect their candidate to produce intelligible answers when asked tough questions, we are rapidly approaching a world in which even journalists themselves have lost their understanding of the dividing line between reporting and flacking.