Word: palin
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...hard to tell where Tina Fey ends and Sarah Palin begins. Even before Fey lampooned Palin on Saturday Night Live--the updo, the wink, the syntax--people noted the resemblance. And for a politician new to the national stage, being likened to the intelligent, witty, popular Fey was not exactly a bad thing...
Until now, anyway. The governor's comedian doppelgänger has essentially taken control of Public Sarah Palin: the composite of images, biography and attitudes that stands in for the actual person in voters' minds. Every politician creates a public self--with the assistance, wanted or not, of the media--and a good one is invaluable. If you make a gaffe on foreign policy but Public You is a foreign policy expert, the slip is not a story...
National politicians usually have years to build these homunculi of themselves. The race to sculpt Public Palin was instant, and Fey had the sharpest chisel. Where Palin's campaign projected a smart, tough, folksy reformer, Fey showed a posing, in-over-her-head maverick...
...this is not the Public Sarah Palin her campaign would have wanted, it may be useful to Real Sarah Palin...
First, the damage. The brilliance of Fey's Palin is how closely it matches Real Sarah Palin. Not physically or in her accent--glasses, wardrobe and a few viewings of Fargo could have taken care of those. It's the extent to which Fey uses Palin's words. Spoofing Palin's Katie Couric interview, she began an answer on the credit bailout with Palin's actual meandering phrases--vaguely connecting the crisis, health care and canned-sounding bits on "job creation"--before taking her own detour into the frozen tundra of incomprehensibility. But what was fact, and what was invention...