I hate to bring up Sarah Palin again, but I think it’s kind of interesting that she’s so mad at Katie Couric (as are so many of Palin’s supporters) for asking what newspapers she reads. Let me stipulate up front that no one would have asked such a question of Joe Biden or Evan Bayh or Mitt Romney. I don’t say that because they are men. No one would ask Olympia Snowe or Kay Bailey Hutchison or Barbara Mikulski that question either. I think the reason Couric asked Palin that question was because she was so inexperienced, so remote from Washington DC, and that she’d come across as badly underinformed in the prior Charlie Gibson interview. She left the impression that she just wasn’t conversant with the national political dialogue, so Couric wanted to test her out to see if she kept up with the news out of the capital.
It turned out that Couric was onto something. Palin didn’t read newspapers or political journals or blogs or anything else that covers national politics, and her inability to even name such an outlet came out in her preposterous lie that she reads ‘all of them.’
But why does this incident irritate Palin and her throng so much? Why do they see the question as so condescending? Because, here’s the key…I get that it’s insulting to suggest that you don’t know anything if you don’t read the New York Times. But Palin lied and said she did read it. Shouldn’t she be mad at herself for not being truthful and saying that in her realm of ‘Real America’ no one reads that elitist pap?
It seems like her feelings were hurt when she was called out for being an unsophisticated rube from the sticks. Where’s the pride in being an authentic everywoman who doesn’t buy into all that Beltway status bullshit?
