Palin vs. "Palin": When SNL Parody Becomes Campaign Reality
By James Poniewozik
It's hard to tell where Tina Fey ends and Sarah Palin begins. Even before Fey lampooned Palin on Saturday Night Live--the updo, the wink, the syntax--people noted the resemblance. And for a politician new to the national stage, being likened to the intelligent, witty, popular Fey was not exactly a bad thing.
Until now, anyway. The governor's comedian doppelgaenger has essentially taken control of Public Sarah Palin: the composite of images, biography and attitudes that stands in for the actual person in voters' minds. Every politician creates a public self--with the assistance, wanted or not, of the media--and a good one is invaluable. If you make a gaffe on foreign policy but Public You is a foreign policy expert, the slip is not a story.
National politicians usually have years to build these homunculi of themselves. The race to sculpt Public Palin was instant, and Fey had the sharpest chisel. Where Palin's campaign projected a smart, tough, folksy reformer, Fey showed a posing, in-over-her-head maverick-bot.
But if this is not the Public Sarah Palin her campaign would have wanted, it may be useful to Real Sarah Palin yet.
First, the damage. The brilliance of Fey's Palin is how closely it matches Real Sarah Palin. Not physically or in her accent--glasses, wardrobe and a few viewings of Fargo could have taken care of those. It's the extent to which Fey uses Palin's words. Spoofing Palin's Katie Couric interview, she began an answer on the credit bailout with Palin's actual meandering phrases--vaguely connecting the crisis, health care and canned-sounding bits on "job creation"--before taking her own detour into the frozen tundra of incomprehensibility. But what was fact, and what was invention? Unless you went back to the original video, it was hard to tell.
The result: a seamless blending of reality and parody. When voters close their eyes now and envision Public Palin, likely as not they see Tina Fey.
It's impossible to say whether SNL drove the drop in Palin's public approval or simply followed it--whether it was the chicken or the egg-throwing. After all, Real Palin really sat down with Real Couric and gave a Really Bad Interview. That still counts for something, right?
But in an era glutted with satire--The Colbert Report, the Onion, JibJab--there is still a special power to an old-fashioned SNL impersonation. It's shamanistic; it's like owning a voodoo doll: capture your target's soul, and you can make her dance just by waving your arms.
A Google search, for instance, turns up plenty of blog references to Palin's claim that she could see Russia "from [her] house" as her way of saying that being governor of Alaska is a foreign policy credential. The only problem: Real Sarah Palin never said it. Fey did, spoofing Palin's argument that one can see Russia from Alaskan territory. But who can remember those details? If Real You gets in an argument with Public You, Public You wins every time.
So what's a Real Sarah Palin to do? First, she has sensibly laughed it off. If she had lumped Fey in with the evil media "filter" persecuting her by asking follow-ups and expecting her to answer debate questions, she would be Dan Quayle jousting with Murphy Brown. She may even go on SNL, perhaps by the time you read this.
But SNL may also have given her cover on the campaign trail. Fey's Palin is no love letter--falsely confident, hapless, antiscience and calculatedly adorable--but she's harmless compared with the Real Palin we've seen lately: a culture warrior cannily playing on resentments, a mouthpiece for the McCain campaign's ugliest character attacks on Barack Obama.
The same weekend Fey spoofed the former beauty-pageant queen as bringing a flute for the "talent portion" of the debate, Real Palin was blowing a harsher tune. She cast Obama as a suspicious other--"not a man who sees America like you and I see America"--in a line of attack the Associated Press called "racially tinged." Fey's Palin hasn't set up mass viewers to see this side of her--not yet, anyway. It's not the funny, bumbling Sarah we know! We're conditioned to expect her to ask to "phone a friend," not accuse Obama of befriending terrorists. So the Fey version makes it harder to see Palin as an Agnewesque hatchet woman.
That could change. Real Palin may have given Fey more material for Public Palin--just as, in her debate skit, Fey turned maverick from an honorific into a punch line. Public selves are moving targets, and as the comedians and media redefine them, a candidate can fight the definition, embrace it or use it as a shield. How Real Palin deals with her Fey-controlled image over the next few weeks will determine if Public Palin is her new best friend or her own worst enemy.
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