PrintFebruary 15, 2010
Katie Couric: Return of the Palin Slayer
You know they're worried.
Big government, big media, big Barack -- they're all worried. And they've brought in the knight in designer armor, the savior of all that is Washington and New York and Rodeo Drive, privileged and Democratic -- Katie Couric.
Katie the Palin Slayer is back.
The CBS Evening News anchor is on the cover of Harper's Bazaar this month, all progressive chic and mainstream media glitter. And just a week ago, she genuflected before Barack Obama to open the Super Bowl on CBS.
Call her the anti-Palin. In the 2008 election, the Couric interview with Sarah Palin helped put Obama in the White House and gathered a tsunami of accolades culminating in the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award from the Metropolitan Opera wing of the Democratic Party, also known as mainstream media. With heavily edited snark, Couric stomped the pretender from the wrong side of the glaciers beneath her Christian Louboutin booties ($1,400 a pair at the Dollar General of establishment journalism, Bergdorf Goodman).
Neither her eighth cover for the glamor magazine nor the Super Bowl interview are meant to inform. Instead, in concert with the White House, Katie is hitting the "reset" button on a failing presidency. I'm-Katie-Couric-and-I'm-here-to-admire-you. Barack, Nancy, Harry, Rahm -- don't worry, got you covered.
They need Katie and her media platform. The Tea Party is gaining ground, The U.S. Congress and Obama job approval ratings are at historic lows, newspapers -- long an arm of the Democratic Party -- are failing at a record rate, and the networks -- bastions of liberalism -- are hemorrhaging viewers.
And -- OMG!!! -- Sarah Palin is back! Quick, hand me the wooden stakes and call Katie! Katie Couric isn't doing journalism; rather (or...Rather), she is 911 for the Obama agenda. The natives are restless, and who better to call on than Katie the Palin Slayer?
And so Katie has again swung into action. Hail the "conquering Couric," the Washington Post exults, "a power broker in stiletto heels." Katie's back, and as Robert Browning might have written had he been funded by a grant from the Obama administration, "the condom's back on the banana -- all's right with the world." (The original line read "God's in his heaven"; this is Obama safe schools czar Browning, National Endowment for the Humanities poetry.)
Of course, she had no choice. You see, Katie hearts Barack. They are part of what New York Times columnist David Brooks proudly calls the "intellectual class," a political and media elite that knows what's best for the rest of us.
And when Barack got into trouble -- not, of course, because he is wrong, but because the rest of us are a "nation of dodos" (as it was put by another media grandee, Joe Klein of Time, the Ivy League, and Bill Clinton's tony New York neighborhood), the White House reached out to Katie.
After all, she had made her bones on Palin, urged on by an intellectual class only too happy to indulge its inner "gangsta." And she remained close to the Obama White House, a guest at its first state dinner and the public face of a network advocating the statist agenda of Obama while questioning the legitimacy of anti-tax citizens.
But the sheep have become surprisingly reluctant to be shorn, and Katie has been called back into service to lead a media charge designed to prevent the nation from throwing away its best chance at progressive transformation. It is hard for a journalistic establishment engaged in "a slobbering love affair," as conservative press critic Bernard Goldberg calls it, to imagine a citizenry rejecting a president so smart that the Washington Post noted in open-jawed wonder that he has pondered the legal implications of Einstein's theory of relativity (never mind that there are no legal implications).
Katie is only too happy to help a nation stuck on stupid, a nation of Palin-loving simpletons incapable of comprehending the genius that is Barack Obama. After all, as Barack once so wisely explained, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways."
Wait -- was that Barack? Or was that God...in that book written by a dead Jew named Isaiah? Well, no matter. God, Barack...same difference, according to Newsweek.
And who better than Katie to understand the embattled president? Harper's Bazaar notes that a photograph of her staring at her reflection in the mirror is "iconic." She adores what she sees, as does the president when he looks in the mirror.
And so Katie suited up for the Super Bowl, making sure, in her words, to take an "appropriate tone" that would showcase the president's firm grasp of all that is good and fair. With a Palin resurgence as the backdrop, Katie attempted to point out a simple truth to Americans: Obama is good and Palin is bad.
And so the CBS news executive guides the Obamamedia team into the 2010 battle. And she, like the president, has a people's touch -- or so Harper's puts it. Her Obama-like concern for the less fortunate is evident in every part of her life. Her appearance, for example, on the magazine cover touting her $14-million salary and million-dollar wardrobe coincides with layoffs in the ailing CBS news division that she leads.
"This is complete insanity!" CBS employees facing unemployment complained. But Katie merely smiled a sympathetic smile and said, "I always feel sexy when I'm in a little black dress."
Barack, Katie -- it's all about me. When a library expansion near her $6.3-million summer home threatened to attract children from surrounding middle-class towns, she was one of the homeowners whose representatives urged the zoning board to stop the project. With Obamaesque sensitivity for the chef-less masses, she wanted to protect the children who would feel out of place in a resort town peopled by the likes of Martha Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld.
Imagine the damage to youthful self-esteem, walking by Tiffany and Ralph Lauren and Sotheby Real Estate and checking out a book, only to return at the end of the day to modest homes Palin-large with family. Oh, the horror -- right out of Charles Dickens! Better that they never come. Reading is overrated, anyway.
Katie the Palin Slayer is back, accessorizing with bias and making the nation safe for Obama...and Gucci.
Stuart H. Schwartz is on the faculty at Liberty University in Virginia.
