Palin's Authenticity Problem?

By Jack Cashill

For any number of reasons, some best dissected on a psychiatrist's couch, conservative pundits within the Beltway have as hard a time coping with Sarah Palin as their liberal counterparts.

On Sunday, FOX News commentator and former White House Press secretary Dana Perino did the dishing. Perino found it "very discordant" that one day Palin could be seen camping on her reality show or heard tweeting about some "cute thing" and then the next day produce "a very serious and thoughtful piece about a nuclear Iran." Concludes Perino about the USA Today piece on Iran, "It doesn't sound like her when you read the materials."

This multi-tasking seems beyond Perino, what with her mass communications degree from Colorado State University-Pueblo and her masters degree in public affairs reporting from the University of Illinois-Springfield. "Authenticity matters more than ever," Perino assures us and suggests that Palin's presumed lack of the same is worth our attention.

Whether Palin actually wrote the piece on Iran I cannot say, but like just about everything attributed to Palin, it is as sensible and straightforward as Palin herself. She could easily have written it.

In Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, Palin does not shy from crediting Lynn Vincent for "her indispensable help in getting the words on paper." And yet the story is told honestly and sincerely in Palin's voice. There is no artifice, no postmodern mumbo jumbo, and not a sentence in the book Palin could not have written herself. My personal favorite, "I love meat."

The same cannot be said about the literary pretensions of Barack Obama. "I've written two books," Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia on the campaign trail in 2008. "I actually wrote them myself."

This is easily disproved nonsense. On their own, Palin is the better writer than Obama. Still, I can at least understand the disparate treatment of the two by the mainstream media. Their ideological house of cards requires it. That much I get.

But why our conservative brethren enable this charade is beyond me. Are invites to Georgetown cocktail parties that important?