Rachel Maddow's Quiet War [View all]

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"So just who is Sarah Palin?"

This is Keith Olbermann talking, back in the summer of 2008, when the Alaska governor is brand-new to the national scene and Olbermann himself is still in the position he pioneered, as the first great contemporary liberal television pundit, the face of MSNBC. Olbermann, in his smart-aleck way, is introducing Palin to the national in-crowd: "A former beauty queen and runner-up in the Miss Alaska contest, a star point guard who earned the nickname Sarah Barracuda," he says. "A sometimes sports reporter who wanted to work for ESPN until she realized" – and here Olbermann starts to laugh, the condescension becoming open – "that she would have to move from Alaska to Bristol, Connecticut."

Television news, in 2008, is still more or less a jock's medium, and this is the way that jocks bait transfer students, mocking them as clueless hicks. In the final years of the Bush administration, Olbermann has transformed liberal anger into a smirk, a feeling of superiority over the dorks and freaks and clown who run Washington. But what makes Olbermann's introduction of Palin arresting, in retrospect, is not his patronizing tone, but the woman who is waiting to speak, on a splitscreen: Rachel Maddow, a 35-year-old radio host who is about to debut her own show on MSNBC, and who will eventually take over for Olbermann as the face of the network.

From the start, Maddow's brand is not so much out lesbian or angry liberal, but full-on nerd: the chunky black glasses, the flailing limbs. She doesn't seem to care much about the question that Olbermann has fixed on: So just who is Sarah Palin? "We don't know very much about Governor Palin," Maddow says, when Olbermann finally gives her a chance to speak. "She's basically been a human-interest story in terms of the political press in this country thus far." Then she moves on to what really interests her: not politics as personality but politics as mechanism, not who is winning power but what is being done with it.

Palin is being sold as a small-government conservative, the opponent of the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, but Maddow can tell the sales job is a fraud. "I went and looked it up in the Anchorage Daily News from 2006," she says, her nerd cred on full display. "Palin was asked point-blank about funding for that bridge, and she said, 'Yes... the window is now.'" Others in the media had noticed the flip-flop, but Maddow has zeroed in on something else: Palin had said "the window is now" because Alaska's congressional delegation was senior enough to push the project by using earmarks, the backdoor maneuver that congressmen use to enrich their districts with budget-busting boondoggles. Palin wasn't just for the bridge, Maddow points out, she was actually for earmarks, the very thing she is supposed to be against. If you view politics as Olbermann does, as a kind of absurdist theater, then this is a gaffe, a sign of Palin's naiveté and unreadiness. If you view things as Maddow does, then it indicates something deeper, a fissure in the base of Republican ideology, a contradiction cracking open behind the presumption of power.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rachel-maddows-quiet-war-20120627#ixzz20JaKnoVh