Talking Points Memo on Sarah Palin’s new add, “Real Missouri“:
Steelman also appears in the ad, touting her pro-life record, while the words “conservative maverick” flash on the screen. […] After Steelman touts her social conservative credentials, she ends the ad by reminding voters that she “loves to hunt” – something Palin is well known for. “Real Missouri” ends with an image of Steelman in camouflage in the woods, a gun beside her.
TPM suggests that Steelman wants to evoke another Sarah who thinks there are “real Americans” and not-so-real Americans -just like Steelman thinks there are “real Missourians” as distinct from folks in St. Louis who don’t know that animals are good for nothing but sport shooting?
Not so, says Steelman’s campaign staff:
Steelman campaign spokesman Patrick Tuohey said any similarities to Palin the ad might evoke “certainly wasn’t anything intentional.”
Yeah right.
But, I can’t help wonderng, is this a wise direction for Steelman? Consider, for instance, another point of comparison between the two women that might not serve Steelman so well. I am alluding to the the low level of esteem accorded to both by right-wing media figures – folks nominally on their side.
Palin was – reputedly – skewered by non other than Fox News’ Chairman Roger Ailes. According to a (subsequently disputed) New York Magazine article, a source “close to Ailes” claimed that “he thinks Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid.” If true, Ailes isn’t the only one who has a less than flattering opinion of her abilities. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, for example, is on the record calling Palin, among other things, a nincompoop. Steelman, for her part, was described by conservative Missouri broadcaster Mark Reardon, as not “the sharpest knife in the drawer“?
I hate to be mean, but somebody has to say it. Is hunting the only thing that Palin and Steelman have in common?
I have been watching Steelman warily for about a decade now. When I first became aware of Sarah Palin via the David Brancachio PBS show “Now” she was new to the governorship, and I looked at my husband and said “There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between her and Sarah Steelman” — the original “Sister Sarah” of my blog repertoire. I arrived at that because I saw thru the Holy Raiments and realized she was just a common whore, a la the Shirley MacLaine movie “Two Mules for Sister Sarah.”
Here is my most recent use of the unkind comparison:
Before there was a Sister Sarah MILFing it up on the national stage, Missouri had the prototype in right-wingnut extraordinaire Sarah Steelman. She was in the audience when the teabagger on stage made his “kill the Claire Bear” comment that resulted in Senator McCaskill getting a beefed up security detail, and she applauded the comment at the time. Now, instead of denouncing the violent rhetoric, she is defending it.