Good riddance

A few weeks ago, while strolling on a sunny Sunday afternoon through New York City's Central Park and feeling as if the world was all right, the song of a balladeer drifted on the breeze and drew me in. Bare-chested in the heat and accompanying himself on a guitar, the singer had attracted a nice crowd as he stood on the shore of a small lake. Skiffs lazed by. Picnickers lunched.

Any out-of-towner would have been charmed by so benign a cityscape, but none more so than an Alaskan on holiday and a blissful 3,500 miles from the sideshow our state has become since Aug. 29, 2008. That was The Day - goodness, only a year ago? - when we woke to news that then-presidential candidate John McCain had reached from the heights of the GOP to the depths of Wasilla to raise up Sarah Palin. In the space of a few weeks, McCain handed an unknown, one-term governor a microphone and then stood by helplessly as Palin talked, shopped and winked his White House dreams into dust.

After a year of Troopergate, dueling ethics complaints, Bristol 'n' Levi, an FBI sting that temporarily netted our senior senator, and Palin's surprise, quasi-coherent resignation from office, any Alaskan would have been grateful for the relative backwater of Manhattan. But no. The busker on the shore cheerfully strummed away, summing up what thinking Alaskans concluded years ago: "Sarah Palin scares me," was the refrain. I checked the crowd for rumpled brows that might accompany that line in, say, Evansville, Indiana, site of a Right to Life dinner in April where Palin, the keynote speaker, drew a crowd of 2,200 in the banquet hall and another 800 people watched a live video feed.

But none of the New Yorkers gathered in the sunshine seemed offended at all. As the verses wore on, pot shots at Palin prompted none of the polarized pouts we Alaskans know so well whenever the discussion turns to things Sarah. Love her or hate her, that's what we've come to believe is our ex-gov's political fortune. But this crowd - thankfully, redemptively - proved conventional thinking wrong. Far from inheriting the mantle of galvanizing firebrand, capable of stirring conservative passions and a big voting bloc, Palin had receded into a harmless joke.

What a relief.

Since her departure from office July 26 amid promises to "progress" the nation unencumbered by the pesky job Alaskans hired her for, Palin's influence is as flat as an upsweep minus the Elnett hairspray. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that more than 50 percent of respondents view Palin unfavorably. Nearly 60 percent say she doesn't understand complex issues.

Proving them right, Palin, in a "pants on fire" Facebook posting in August, claimed the Obama administration's health care proposal would establish a "death panel" empowered to decide who is worthy of health care. Of course there never was any such provision, as some Republican lawmakers have attested. And as able bloggers have noted, death panels already exist in the form of insurance companies with power to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions.

As for Palin's current unfavorable rating? Surely it didn't help when McCain managed to omit her name when asked to list GOP up-and-comers. Or when Palin turned down an invitation to address a crowd of 900 gathered at the Reagan library Aug. 8 for a GOP bash. Or when her grandson's father, 18-year-old Levi Johnston, told the CBS "Early Show" that after losing the November election, Palin's motherly affection for Johnston dried up. "When she had got back," Johnston confided, "I think it's when it went downhill."

Well, maybe for Levi. But lots of Alaskans are gladdened if losing big time in the national arena merely whetted Palin's appetite for prominence beyond the Last Frontier. We've seen this former Wasilla High point guard up close and personal; we know that being a team leader, bringing the ball up court and making assists - every guard's bread-and-butter tasks - are in Palin's repertoire only when they serve Term Sarah.

We're fine with the realization that Palin has become the left-wing's antipode, a passport-less visionary with a one-way ticket from the shore of Lake Lucille to Anywhere But Here. Since July 26, Alaskans no longer find Sarah Palin scary; America, she's your lipsticked barracuda now.

Rosanne Pagano is an Anchorage writer and teaches at Alaska Pacific University.