The small-town-mayor-who-would-be-president is now without a paid news job.
The National Journal reported Monday: "The news that Sarah Palin will no longer be a paid contributor to Fox News puts an exclamation point on the end of an era, or at least a chapter, in U.S. political history. She could land somewhere else, and she still has her Facebook friends, but it’s hard to imagine she’ll find a more visible or influential platform than Fox."
Evidently her departure means that her ratings have sagged. In other words, not too many people are listening to her these days.
Not that she ever had much to contribute to informed public discourse.
Take her final appearance on Fox, in a December 19 interview with Greta Van Susteren's On The Record. As the National Journal observed, Palin's chat "was like a time warp back to 2008."
"She still makes up words ('electioning'). She still repeats sentences and phrases, padding her answers with filler. She still talks in vague generalities, leaving one to wonder how much she really knows. At a time when some conservatives reportedly have concluded it's time to challenge liberalism rather than keep trying to stoke hostility toward Obama himself, she still attacks Obama in highly personal terms ('Mr. Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning president of ours'). Her diction is still, shall we say, unusual ('I believe that it's many, many things that he would say and do being deceptive')."
There already is a growing school of Palintologists poring through her life's work. A University of Minnesota researcher, Eric Ostermeier, tallied up all the words Palin uttered during her stay at Fox, and divvied them up by the $3 million she collected in salary. His conclusion: Palin was paid $15.85 per word.
The researcher did not attempt to assess the quality of Palin's words. Knit all of them together using the best fibers you can find, and still you would lack enough garment for a fig leaf of reasoned political analysis.
Throughout her public career, Palin seemed to learn only enough to get by. She hopped from job to job, first as a sports announcer at a local TV station, then mayor of Wasilla, then a couple years as governor of Alaska and then her brief campaign for vice president. So far as I can tell, her three years at Fox were probably the longest time she spent at any of her jobs. Even then, it was part-time work; she devoted the rest of her time to writing books, doing a "reality" TV show, making numerous paid speeches and otherwise publicizing herself.
Most pundits took seriously her flirtations about running for president in 2012. I did not. She basked in the limelight. But she dared not take the plunge. It would have required too much focus and effort on her part to make a serious run. Her utterances on Fox revealed that she had learned little about world affairs since her ill-fated interview with Katie Couric in September 2008.
Imagine, for instance, how Palin would have handled herself in the marathon series of Republican presidential debates in 2011 and 2012. Put her on the debate stage against Mitt Romney. Or Newt Gingrich. Or Rick Santorum. She could not expose the limitations of her knowledge in a side-by-side comparison.
Still, Palin has done well for herself. She had the show to herself for a couple of years, enthralling the conservatives and giving everyone else something to talk about. And she pocketed a good deal of money from Fox and her other ventures. If she has invested it wisely, she can retire comfortably and quietly to private life. Quietly? Private? Well, perhaps that's asking too much.
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