As expected, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has decided to capitalize on the media attention she is getting for the shot that David Letterman took at her daughter. She was being interviewed by Matt Lauer Friday morning on The Today Show. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, she is doing everything possible to bring sympathy to David Letterman while turning herself into the political opportunist. Is Sarah Palin exploiting this opportunity to score political points? It is beginning to seem that way. How bad or traumatic could this experience truly have been if the governor of Alaska is so willing to keep going out in the media to discuss it and her daughters?
PALIN: Matt, I would say that you and anybody else are extremely naive to believe that very convenient excuse of David Letterman’s the other day. He took a couple of days for him to think of that excuse that, oh, no, he wasn’t talking about my daughter who was there with me at the (Yankees) game, the 14-year-old. Well, I think it’s a weak excuse.
To score political points, it certainly is advantageous to Palin to make Letterman’s comments be about her 14-year-old daughter rather than her 18-year-old daughter. Instead of just issuing a reasonable statement to condemn Letterman’s joke, she has instead fanned the flames to create an inferno (all, I believe, designed to keep herself in the public eye leading up to the 2012 presidential campaign).
PALIN: I would hope that people really start — really rising up and deciding it’s not acceptable. No wonder young girls, especially, have such low self-esteem in America (Palin said that she could) connect the dots to a degrading statement made about young women, and that does contribute to some acceptance of abuse of young women.
That is a reasonable statement. We saw this throughout the presidential campaign with the negative stereortypes about black people coming in as attacks on the Obamas.
Huffington Post then has this excerpt that I found interesting:
Later, Lauer pressed Palin to explain a line in a statement from her spokesperson that “it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman.” Lauer asked, “Are you suggesting that David Letterman can’t be trusted around a 14-year-old girl?”
“Hey, take it however you want to take it,” she said. “It is a comment that came from the heart that Willow, no doubt, would want to stay away from David Letterman after he made such a comment. And you can interpret that however you want to interpret it.”
“Well is that not perhaps in bad taste also, governor?” Lauer asked.
“No, it’s not in bad taste,” she said. “Hey, maybe he couldn’t be trusted because Willow’s had enough of this type of comments and maybe Willow would want to react to him in a way that maybe would catch him off guard. That’s one way to interpret such a comment.”
In this case, she and this spokesperson appear to be exploiting the 14-year-old daughter to score political points. After saying Letterman tried to excuse himself as speaking about the 18-year-old rather than the 14-year-old, she seems to do the same thing to cover up what is a horrible statement from one of her spokespeople. The implication was that Letterman would be a danger to the 14-year-old daughter after using his age and her age in a previous statement to imply some sort of pedophilia. So, she is allowed to interpret the comment to put her team in a positive light, but others are “extremely naive” to take him at his word that he was talking to the 18-year-old daughter.
That’s tough logic to follow.
Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/11/sarah-palin-today-show-in_n_214587.html
