Sarah Palin has commanded the attention of a nation and its media for the past few weeks. Critics wonder why the press has backed off from the many obvious issues in her personal and professional life that have most people wondering if she's qualified to hold any job, let alone that of Vice President. I'm not sure that it's true that the press has any desire to give her a pass or to let things go untold. I think, perhaps, they're overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what may be in her closets.
I think that the problem is that she's given the mainstream media a case of ADD. While most people associate the disorder with the inability to pay attention to anything, it's more aptly described as the inability to shut out anything. Those with ADHD pay attention to everything while focusing on nothing. And therein lies the trouble with Sarah. There's so much to pay attention to that no one is focusing enough on a single issue. It's the sheer volume of her issues that are impeding the process of letting one discredit her.
The media, along with our liberal strategists, need a figurative dose of Ritalin, and then they need some time in a distraction-free environment in order to get a grip on her. As scandal after scandal erupts around her, it becomes something akin to herding cats to keep track of all of the players and all of the scenes and all of the acts. I think that's what the GOP is counting on now. They're not trying to squelch the stories. They're trying to keep all of them going, all of the time, all at once. While we're busy trying to keep track of them all, they're walking off with the message that they're the agents of change.
Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice discusses how consumers become overwhelmed by choices and the processes through which they go to make decisions about purchases. He posits that people often become overwhelmed by the number of options and either select poorly or don't select at all. I wonder if, in the face of so many issues that swirl around the former Miss Wasilla -- Babygate, Troopergate, Dairygate, Librarygate, Extramarital Affairs, Teen Pregnancy, Teen Marriage, Special Needs Babies, Earmarks, Drilling in ANWR and what animals do and don't wear lipstick, among the multitude of others -- there is just too much going on to focus in on a single thing of import because it all seems important.
And it is. Don't get me wrong.
The trouble is that because it's all important, and there's so much, the sheer volume makes none of it important.
As long as we discuss her in terms of micromesses -- the individual questionable activities in which she's involved, we avoid the macromess that is whole of Sarah Palin.
No other candidate in history has been so fraught with so very many diverse and widespread scandals and drama. And this is what the GOP is offering America as its best and brightest.
She's a polebrity. A shiny thing they've paraded out to distract the poor and tired masses from the fact they want 4 more years of the last 8 years. She's a small town politico with a tabloid life whose sole purpose is to make us think and talk about her so that we forget that we were thinking that McCain was too old and too odd before she came onto the scene.
That should be the focus.