Though she has almost disappeared from coverage of the 2012 presidential election, Sarah Palin is poised to come roaring back with what could be one of the summer's hottest blockbusters, RealClearPolitics reports. It's "a two-hour-long, sweeping epic" about Palin's rise, with a particular emphasis on her time as governor, and it'll be premiering in a certain Midwest state with an early presidential caucus. Called The Undefeated, the film features readings from the audiobook version of Palin's "Going Rogue," along with interviews with loyal aides and conservative media figures. "This film is a call to action for a campaign like 1976: Reagan vs. the establishment," says the director. But this part caught my eye:
Rife with religious metaphor and unmistakable allusions to Palin as a Joan of Arc-like figure, "The Undefeated" echoes Palin's "Going Rogue" in its tidy division of the world between the heroes who are on her side and the villains who seek to thwart her at every turn.To convey Bannon's view of the pathology behind Palin-hatred, the film begins with a fast-paced sequence of clips showing some of the prominent celebrities who have used sexist, derogatory and generally vicious language to describe her.
Palin seems to exist in a swirling vortex of resentment that sucks in everyone around her. A mild-mannered reporter for the Weekly Standard goes to write a book about her, and he comes out with The Persecution of Sarah Palin. A filmmaker sets out to produce a hagiography about her, and he can't help himself from making it all about her oppressors. You'd think that after the debacle of the "blood libel" video, she would begin to get the picture that her constant whining about people being mean to her is doing her nothing but harm, but apparently not.
Politics can be an extremely rough business, but the way you handle that roughness says a lot about you. Barack Obama has been the target of as many vicious attacks and bizarre rumors as any political figure in memory, but he handles them with grace. He may fight back against the substance of the attack, but he never sounds like he's whining the way Palin does. Yes, Palin has been the target of some ugly stuff, and it isn't that it's not worth discussing. But if it is, it's because of what those attacks say about the challenges facing women candidates or the nature of opposition to her -- not because she's Joan of Arc. Let's not forget that this is a woman who, just a few years ago, was the mayor of a wee little Alaska town, and today she's incredibly famous and fabulously rich. Yet she seems consumed by resentment and self-pity. And that, as much as anything, is why she'll never be president.
