Palin's Mind: Microcosm of America?

If Sarah Palin is a microcosm of America, we are so screwed. In her recent interview with Sarah Palin, Katie Couric asked Palin what news sources she read that helped shape her world view. Palin could not or would not give a specific answer. If someone asked me this question, I could respond with how I began reading The New Republic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the New York Review of Books in the early 1990s; these two publications influenced my world view, which tends to be fairly liberal socially, though I read with interest the conservative voices that were sometimes represented in TNR at the time. Over the years I have subscribed off and on to The Atlantic and The New Yorker and for some time to Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion. My husband has subscribed for years to Foreign Affairs, and I would often read articles in that journal. What I read indicates my personal interests, my hobbies: for years I subcribed to The Herbal Companion, to Granta, to The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas , to Doubletake, to The Oxford American, to The Threepenny Review, as well as other literary and art magazines as I could afford them.

I would tell Katie Couric that I've bookmarked on my computer The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Salon, the Austin-American Statesman, The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Editor and Publisher, Mother Jones, The Root, among other news sources that I consult regularly.

I could tell Katie Couric how these publications continue to shape my world view. And I'm not running as VP, sidekick to what at least is purported to be the most powerful position in the world. Sarah Palin's response is very bizarre to me. Was Palin unable to remember what news sources she tends to read most of the time? Did she not want to tell us? Was she trying to hide something? Was this question unexpected, and thus Palin didn't want to misspeak, reveal something about herself she wasn't sure the campaign would be happy with? I don't know--but her response brings up all these questions to my mind.

Then Palin seemed to deliberately (or not, groan...) misunderstand the question. She turned the question around as if Couric were impugning Alaska and Alaskans, as if Couric were suggesting that newspapers aren't available in the Far North. But Couric's question was not at all about geography; it was about the mind, Sarah Palin's mind, the forming of that mind, the ideas it holds and the sources of those ideas. Just watch the video.