Save us the suspense Sarah, can the world breath a sigh of relief or not?
This time, it’s the resignation of the Governor of Alaska.
Now, let’s be honest, if a governor of almost any state in the United States resigned it wouldn’t normally cause an emotional ripple, except perhaps in their home area.
But the Governor of Alaska is the woman introduced to the wider world by John McCain, who’s likely to go down in history, not as a war hero and presidential contender, but as the man responsible for wishing the ultimate hockey mom on us.
That’s a tragedy for an interesting man, and it isn’t a barrel of laughs for the rest of the world, either; although it would be only grand if we could be sure that Sarah Palin was now – at last – headed for obscurity.
The problem is that obscurity and Sarah don’t mix. She may be dumb as a post on American foreign policy, but when it comes to getting coverage, this woman’s a genius. At precisely the point where we were beginning to forget her, she ups and resigns.
Not only does she up and resign, she does it on the fourth of July, thereby getting more headlines, worldwide, than she could have achieved on an ordinary day.
Give that girl a job in PR, someone. With the in-built caveat that you’re going to have to give her a bit of training before you let her loose on clients, because she doesn’t quite get the timing issue.
You know how, when you want journalists to turn up at a reception, you give them a bit of notice? She didn’t. So three and a half hacks turned up to her announcement, and all the rest gave out yards about her disrespecting the media.
Which slightly misses the point. One of the unacknowledged truths of PR is that if you’ve got a big enough story, you can announce it backwards and upside down in the middle of a wardrobe malfunction and you’ll still get the column inches. Even the moaners add to the coverage.
The great thing about Sarah is that, in common with many politicians on both sides of the pond, she never saw a TV camera she didn’t like, and so, sometime after the initial announcement, she did a press conference in the back garden with her family lined up on either side of her, like they were ready for the start of an egg-and-spoon race.
Not only, at that press conference, did she announce she was not running again for the governor job, she announced she was stepping down right now. Well, maybe not right now, but certainly within the month.
You might have thought the job of governor was sufficiently important to require three months’ notice, but you’d have been wrong.
Anyway, Sarah made the point that the people of Alaska deserved better than a lame duck governor, by which she meant that once she’d announced she wasn’t going to run again for the top Alaskan job, she would be less powerful and influential, because everybody would be looking past her to see who the next office-holder would be.
You have to hand it to her. This woman has the interests of Alaskans constantly at heart. Human Alaskans, that is. Four-legged Alaskans she seems to see as annoyances to be hunted down and stored in the freezer.
Like Willie O’Dea, she’s happiest with a gun in her hand, although – to give our Minister for Defence his due – the wildlife around Limerick doesn’t cower when he comes out of his house on a Monday morning.
It might seem a teeny weeny bit inconsistent to ditch the day job right now because you’re not going to seek reappointment a year and a half down the line.
Particularly since you took several months’ leave of absence from your responsibilities in order to run for the presidency of the United States alongside Sen John McCain.
But let’s assume the best. Sarah doesn’t want Alaska to have a lame duck governor, and it’s good to know she cares about lame ducks, since she spends her leisure time wiping out ducks that have nothing wrong with them.
Going back to the PR genius on display this weekend, it should be noted that Sarah, apart from the lame duckery, was a bit vague about why she was resigning, and even more vague about what lies ahead of her.
Not good, an unimaginative publicist might think, believing that if you’re telling a good story, it has to have a beginning, middle and end. But the fact is that Sarah’s vagueness allowed everybody to have fun playing the odds on what might be the real reason for her sudden departure.
One possibility was that a stinker revelation was coming down the tracks and she wanted to be off the tracks before it hit. Another was that David Letterman’s nasty jokes about her daughter entertaining members of a football team was, for her, the last straw in the invasion of her privacy. (Never mind the fact that her privacy and that of her family was sacrificed without much trouble when she was part of the anti-Obama team).
A third explanatory option was that she was going to go back to her earlier calling as a TV presenter, albeit with smaller hair.
The chill-up-the-spine revelation, after the initial announcement, was that Sarah is not just quitting. It’s not that simple. Oh, no. Roll those drums, Mr Percussionist.
Sarah’s decision came about because she hears a higher calling.
The first time I heard that mooted, I thought, for one exciting moment, she was going to become a nun. Now, that would be a headline-grabber. Counterintuitive? You betcha. If she did that, never mind not putting lipstick on a pig, she wouldn’t be able to put lipstick on herself, unless nuns in America are more forward than our lot.
Then the grim reality dawned. The higher calling Sarah Palin hears may not be religious, but political. Sure, she’s fed up with politics, but that’s understandable, if you confine politics within the State of Alaska where, apart from mowing down the wildlife, the only fun she seems to get is seeing Russia from her window.
The fact that Sarah is fed up with local politics does not necessarily mean she’s turning her back on that area of life.
The theory is that the Republican Party would seriously consider taking the next couple of years to groom Ms Palin for a run at the top job. Of course, it would require a couple of years to bring her up to speed on US foreign affairs alone, but let’s gloss over that.
I just wish she’d tell us, right now, what her higher calling is. Being forced to wait and wonder is stressing me out.
Bad enough to have to dread the budget for the next few months without that extra pressure.
