Op-Ed: Swept up – again – in 'Palinpalooza'

Sarah Palin is all over the news again.

Why?

Purportedly because she wrote a book.

That's right. Sarah Palin wrote a book. She appeared on Oprah. Barbara Walters interviewed her. Whoopee! Call in the news brigade.

As far as I can tell, there is nothing earth shattering in her book. I can't say that from my own research because I haven't read the book (and probably won't). But I suspect if there was something supremely newsworthy in the book it would have been mentioned by now during the wall-to-wall Sarah Palin coverage on the cable news networks. At least one of the 11 AP fact checkers would have brought it to light, right?

If you want to learn a little bit more about Palin's life, you probably could do worse than reading her book. I'm sure a lot of people will like it. After all, a lot of people can connect with Palin. An ambitious moose hunter who works hard to achieve great success in Alaskan politics only to wake up one day to be asked to run for the vice presidency of the United States. A working mom simultaneously raising five children, one of which becomes pregnant as a teenager, after which the child's father decides to become a porn star. Hers is the prototypical American family. Well, maybe not prototypical. Or even close to prototypical. But, hey, if you are Jon and Kate, you probably can relate to the Palin eight.

All jests aside, the book is apparently filled with snippets of Palin's life, policy views and some score-settling with her campaign handlers. Some of her accounts are disputed while a few claims have been disproven. This sounds a lot like just about every political book ever written by a politician — or should I say ever ghostwritten for a politician. The content of her book certainly doesn't explain the current Palin frenzy on TV.

The reason, of course, there is this frenzy over Palin's book is because its debut provides an opportunity for talking heads to pontificate on a woman who is unquestionably one of the most polarizing figures in American politics. Those who love her really love her and can see no wrong in their Alaskan Annie Oakley. And those who hate her really hate her and insanely envision Sarah Palin as America's Mullah Omar. With this type of passion on both sides, anything Palin does creates a firestorm. Even her Facebook posts inspire heated debate.

While Palin has played coy about her possible presidential ambition for 2012 in interviews, the fact of the matter is that she gave up that option over the summer when she resigned as governor of Alaska. You can't just resign as governor without any good reason in the first two years of your first term and expect to be a serious presidential contender. If Palin decides to run in 2012, she will most certainly come up short of the Republican nomination, even if she shows well in several primary contests due to her contingent of diehard supporters. I dare say that even her more vocal supporters on television would be reticent to vote for her. For many of them, their passionate support for her seems to be driven, at least in part, by much of the liberal media's passionate distaste for her.

That said, one cannot legitimately argue that Palin is not politically talented. She was engaging on Oprah, even if sometimes stupefying. (How could she think that her D in a college course decades ago was a more significant skeleton in the closet than her daughter's out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy? As Palin might say, that's just "bull crap.") I can also see how a Palin hater might find her personality grating — though I can't understand some of the more venomous attacks on her. Let's just say Palin inspires different things in different people.

But can we please tone down the Palinmania coverage just a bit? She wrote a book, a book that doesn't seem to be particularly groundbreaking.

There are a lot more important issues going on right now that deserve more coverage than Palinpalooza.

Jamie Weinstein's column is distributed by North Star National.