Un-Presidented, Undefeated, Unattended: Has Palin Peaked?

What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little. - Lord Byron

The highest form of vanity is love of fame. -George Santayana

Sarah Palin recently debuted her new movie with the improbable and inaccurate title of Undefeated.  In her crazy world view, she conveniently ignores that she was quite thoroughly defeated in the 2008 election for vice president.  That is like, well, like ignoring the 8 ton bull(shit) GOP elephant in the middle of the room.

What is more significant than any content in the widely panned movie, for which I could not find a single positive review, is that to me it seems as if Palin is winding down in popularity and influence.  I think she's 'peaked', and done so far too early.

Palin was very clever in capitalizing on her post 2008 campaign popularity; those who loved her didn't care about looking too closely at her lack of real accomplishment, or her ignorance.  They were curious, they were perhaps even charmed.  Palin did an excellent job of turning that interest in to self promotion to enrich herself; she made herself a relatively wealthy woman in doing so.


Palin's first sort-of book, in that she didn't write it, was Going Rogue, which because of bulk buyers who gave it away, as a premium for a magazine subscription for example, became a best seller....if you can call it selling when so many people received their copy for free, and the bulk buyers got their copies at a fraction of the jacket price.  Or because Palin bought so many copies herself to give away, above and beyond author's courtesy copies, in an attempt to fake popularity and contrive interest. The first book doesn't have the substance to be of lasting significance, nor did her second.

Her next book, American by Heart, another book she didn't write, had far fewer sales, reportedly off some 70% from Palin's first book.  If - big if - she can find someone to pay to write a third book for her, she would probably have to pay people to buy it, and even then, she'd probably have to publish it herself, through some vanity press.

Palin didn't cover herself with glory when she was on Fox News as a contributor / commenter; instead, it showed off how dumb she really is.

"Roger [Ailes, CEO of Fox News] thinks Palin is an idiot. People like her haven’t elevated the conservative movement.

Palin's debut on Fox News, which might have been expected to generate interest, had lower viewership numbers than the regular programming for that time slot, despite plenty of hype. Palin's reality show premiered with the curious watching to the tune of 5 million viewers; by the second episode, that had dropped by nearly half, to 3 million, a steep drop off.  Not only was Palin not particularly entertaining, but she left the show under the cloud of having benefited from the show directly from tax credits, benefiting from a law that she signed during her term as governor before she quit.  That was an inconvenient truth, one might say, in contrast to the policies to which she give lip service.

Then we have the snark wars between former BFF's Palin and Bachmann; Bachmann was more than happy to have Palin come help her with fund raising, when there was money in it.  Now....not so much; rival Bachmann is criticizing Palin for the same things the rest of us who are not right wing bobble-heads knew all along.  Bachmann's political advisor, GOP strategist Ed Rollins, very publicly said of Palin:

"Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years," Rollins said on Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade's radio show. "She got the vice presidential thing handed to her. She didn’t go to work in the sense of trying gain more substance. She gave up her governorship."

While Palin has had fluctuations in generally high approval ratings among at least a segment of the right, mostly the further right, her approval ratings to be president have never been all that high among the larger electorate outside that base.  But even that limited approval has declined rather steeply, while her disapproval ratings are climbing.  From my former editor/boss over at PoliticusUSA last month, following yet another debacle illustrating her ignorance of history, (one that rivals her ignorance of geography):

The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll has some bad news for Sarah Palin. Thanks to Paul Revere, her orchestrated publicity tour over Memorial Day weekend managed to lower her approval rating to 24%.

Sarah Palin overall favorable rating is 24%. Her unfavorable rating is 54%. When the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll was last conducted in April, 9% of those surveyed had a very positive view of Palin. After Paul Revere that number is 7%. Her publicity blitz did cause people that have a very unfavorable view of her to drop from 41% to 38%, but this was offset by an increase in those who had a somewhat unfavorable view of her from 12% to 16%.

In a January 2011 CNN poll, Sarah Palin had a 38% approval rating. By March, a Bloomberg poll had her sinking to 28%. In an April Washington Post poll, Palin’s approval with tea partiers fell to 60%, and her disapproval rating overall shot up to 55%. Later that same month, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll measured her approval rating at 25%.

To summarize, Sarah Palin’s approval rating when we began 2011 was 38%. It is now 24%. If the point of the bus tour was to make Palin more popular, then it was a gigantic fail on wheels.

Palin still can generate a lot of interest; her non-campaign campaign (similar to a non-denial denial) was a media circus.  But increasingly, that circus is not about taking Palin seriously; it is much more about waiting for her yet again to shoot herself in the foot, while that foot is in her mouth......and the to do the same with the other foot as she tries to spin a recovery from her initial gaffe.

Palin claimed to have ended her bus tour because she had jury duty.  Most media seems to have accepted that explanation, and moved on to cover more serious news.  But I became curious, when the movie debut was announced, to see how that convenient jury duty escape was working out for Palin. 

"The coming weeks are tight because civic duty calls (like most everyone else, even former governors get called up for jury duty) and I look forward to doing my part just like every other Alaskan," her message said.

Palin's Facebook post did not say when her jury service might start or when she had been summoned to serve.

I was left with the largely unanswered question, "WHAT jury duty?"  Apparently Palin only sort of, maybe, might at some future time, have jury duty.  Palin does not appear to have been called for jury duty at all, so one wonders what hypothetical civic duty Palin has that explains her abrupt ending of her bus tour:

The first day of the Sarah Palin jury watch passed with this simple recorded message to those called for jury duty: "Your services will not be needed on Friday, June 24.''

Those in the Palmer jury pool, which Palin has indicated include her, are to call back Friday night to find out about "possible service on Monday, June 27.

The former governor lives just up the road from Palmer in the small town of Wasilla, where she was once mayor. Local legal cases, however, are tried at the courthouse in Palmer.

The jury procedure in Alaska is to send jury duty notices to a small army of people. They are given a pool number. If their pool number is called, they are to report to the court house to await possible selection to a jury.

and the Alaska Dispatch subsequently went on to note that Palin did not appear even to be waiting around to be summoned to jury duty:

There appear to have been no jury calls for Palin's jury district from the time she posted the June 22 message until Tuesday. The Palmer court, however, on Monday summoned service numbers 201 through 400 to the court house at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday to await possible jury selection.

The pro-Palin website Conservities4Palin on Monday, however, posted that "Governor Palin looks forward to spending time tomorrow (Tuesday) with the people of Pella, Iowa, and enjoying the premiere of Stephen K. Bannon’s new film, “The Undefeated.” After that, she heads to Minnesota to join her daughter Bristol at a book signing for Bristol's new book "Not Afraid of Life" at the Mall of America. Then back to Alaska for jury duty."

So, how long can Sara Palin try to get mileage out claiming she is doing the civic duty that she isn't doing?
According to one conservative blog:

How long must I serve?

The time period during which you must be available to serve (called your "term of service") depends on the size of the court location where you serve. During your term of service you may have to call in or report to court periodically. You may not have to call in every day, but you must call on the days you are directed to do so.

In Anchorage, where the population is large and many trials are held each day, the term of service is either 5 consecutive days or, if you are selected to serve on a jury, the length of the trial.

In other courts, your term of service is either 30 days, 90 days or 1 year depending on the population of the area. In these courts, you may have to call in several days each month, and you may be selected to serve on more than one trial. The most days you might actually have to be present in court is 30 per year. However, you must complete any trial for which you are selected to serve as a juror regardless of how long the trial lasts.

We are four days away from when that 30 days of possible jury duty would appear to run.  Most of that time not only has Palin not been at the court house for jury duty, and not even physically in the state of Alaska, there doesn't appear, that I can find, any indication that Palin actually was ever called for jury duty.  But the queen of quit and twit needed a good excuse to bail after her blunders; given her track record, she needed an excuse that made her look civic minded, one that specifically USED the words civic minded.

Last week, when she was conspicuously NOT doing jury duty:

Sarah Palin, if you can't get people to pay attention to you on television, and you can't get people to buy your book, and you can't get people to attend your bid movie debut - in selected red states, where the deck should be stacked in your favor, and if polls indicate you are increasingly unpopular, who are you trying to fool?  You peaked, and you peaked way too soon for any future successful political run, certainly in the near future of say the next 18 months.  Because as hard as you try to get attention, people are increasingly bored with you, because you have no substance.  If you are not 'over', Sarah Palin, you seem at least to be headed in that direction; by 2012, at this rate, she'll be lucky if anyone is paying attention to her at all, much less voting for her.