Is Sarah Palin an Alien?

I think Sarah Palin may be a repeat. The first time she appeared on the platform, announced as the next Republican vice-president of the United States I was seized with the conviction that I’d seen her before, on one of those late night American drama series that you watch half-dozing on the sofa and whose combination of the cute and the kookie only adds to your sleepy disorientation.

Perhaps it was Northern Exposure or Twin Peaks, which seemed entirely populated by eccentric characters like Agent Dale Cooper who solved crimes by interpreting his own dreams. Most of those who appeared on screen, under a patina of small-town respectability, had some unnerving double-life lurking. Or maybe she was in The X-Files, playing a smouldering spectacled librarian who could become the gruesomely murdered victim or who might turn out to have sinister paranormal powers. Or perhaps she was one of The Stepford Wives who appear to be docile conformist hockey mums but who end up wielding massive kitchen knives to the accompaniment of loud shrieking music.

These hints of the dark side to hicksville innocence may only be in the eye of the beholder. But Ms Palin gives off the unmistakable scent of paradox. She thrusts the commonplace out of kilter because she jumbles up so many cultural categories. Take the distaff politics. She is a mother of five who was in the PTA. She is a working mum but she owes her current exalted position to the patronage of an older wiser man. She is a feminist but not, one wag observed, in the Yale gender studies sense but a “how do I reaload this thang?” way. She is a social conservative with a single mom daughter. She gave birth to a child with special needs but then returned to work three days later.

Then there is the ambiguity of her politics which brings to mind Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys song about Huey “Kingfish” Long, the 1930s Democrat noted for his radical populist policies during the poverty and crime of the Great Depression:

Who built the highway to Baton Rouge?
Who put up the hospital and built you schools?
Who looks after shit-kickers like you?
The Kingfish do.

Ain’t no Standard Oil men gonna run this state
Gonna be run by little folks like me and you”

When people feel screwed, the appeal of anti-corporatism transcends left and right. The charismatic and flamboyant Long, incidentally, was assassinated at the height of his popularity – a fate more likely these days to befall Obama than Palin – and died at the age of 42 with the last words: “God, don’t let me die. I have so much left to do.”

Though Palin may look scary to liberals there is something about the Cinderalla story of the sassy Alaskan hillbilly mom triumphing over the old-guy Washington politics that chimes in with the mainstream American Dream. Her ballsy debut speech aimed straight at Obama – “the man who’d written two memoirs before he’d written a piece of Senate legislation” – played straight into that. Marge Simpson for vice-president.

Then there is her religion. The religious right have been cool about McCain ever he denounced Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance” eight years ago. But Palin is sound on God, guns and gays. Within 48 hours of her joining his ticket the Christian right had piled $7m into his campaign funds.  “I didn’t even vote for Bush,” one donor wrote, “but Sarah makes me want to vote.”

On the night that George Bush beat John Kerry last time round Jim Wallis decided to write God’s Politics which he subtitled: “Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It”. Republicans are more comfortable with the language of faith and values, but they narrow it to a few totemic issues like abortion. Democrats are less comfortable with the language but almost every social reform movement in American history has been driven by their religion – from the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage to child labour law reform and civil rights.

This time round Barak Obama seemed he might have cracked that old conundrum. I still reckoned that, when it came to the crunch, too many US voters would not be able to bring themselves to vote for a black, but some 40 million Americans watched his key speech in Denver last week, more than watched the opening of the Olympics.  Asked by pollsters what was the greatest moral crisis in America today a third said greed and materialism and a third said poverty and jobs. Abortion was just 16 per cent and gay marriage about 12 per cent. The danger about Palin is that she will return the debate onto this old polarised and ultimately unproductive turf. Obama, one of her supporters said, “wants to be the abortion president.”

What makes Sarah Palin difficult to read is the nature of her Christianity. McCain’s people have let it be known that she was baptised as a Catholic as a baby, was a member of a Christian athletes fellowship in high school and now attends a nondenominational evangelical church in Alasaka. They omitted mention of 20 years at the Assemblies of God, a penetcostal church characterised by speaking in tongues, modern-day prophesy and faith healing. It’s all too weird, sectarian and uncompromising for the average voter.

The truth is that Palin is part of the fastest-growing segment of modern Christianity which blends evangelical and pentecostal styles of faith and worship into what is dubbed “post-denominationalism”. Up to a third of US Protestants now fit this category of independents who call themselves just plain “Christian”. But they have their own shibboleths: Palin’s keynote speech spoke of governing “with a servant’s heart” – a code through which her fellow post-denominationalists recognised her at once as “one of us”. When the rest of us unpack what surrounds that we uncover the man who was till recently her pastor, the Rev. Ed Kalnins, preaching that critics of President Bush will be banished to hell, suggesting those who voted for  John Kerry would not get into heaven and describing the invasion of Iraq as a “holy war”. Sarah Palin – who insists that climate change is not man-made, abortion is wrong even in the case of rape and incest and wants creationism heard in classroom discussions – publicly prayed with him as recently as June.

All-American hockey mom or preternatural spook? We must hope we never get to find out. But, remember, America is not voting for a president; it is voting for a saviour.

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