She remains brilliantly uncouth, however. Told that she was going to be taking
part in the programme’s regular feature ‘Today’s Professionals’, and asked
whether she had seen it before and knew what it entailed, Mrs Palin
shrugged. “I watch Fox,” she said.
When the segment on weight gain in pregnancy finally arrived, Mrs Palin was
asked by Matt Lauer, the programme’s $17 million-a-year superhost, how she
would have responded to a critic of her own figure while she was expecting.
“I woulda wanted to punch ’em in the neck,” she said.
And once she shook off her evident nervousness, Mrs Palin – dressed in a sober
black trousers-and-top outfit decorated with a multicoloured scarf and huge
stars-and-stripes brooch – did a pretty passable job of chewing over the
show’s fluffy staples.
“There’s a fine line between wanting to be your child’s friend, the cool
Mom or Dad, and being a good parent,” she said in a chat about raising
teenagers. A new Facebook app allowing users to highlight their enemies was
only “adding more darkness to our world”.
But her discussion of the Republican presidential race that is proceeding
without her was a sharp reminder of the (relatively) serious political world
from which she has apparently departed.
“Anyone but Obama,” she said when asked if she backed Mitt Romney,
the presumptive Republican nominee. “America is at a crossroads right
now,” she said. “If not Romney”, she said, the party “will
coalesce around” whomever it chooses.
“National experience or not,” her successor as vice-presidential
nominee is “going to get clobbered by the lamestream media”, she
said, clearly still sore from her own day in the sun.
Instead, Mrs Palin had to be satisfied filling slots between pop singer Carnie
Wilson telling viewers: “I’m morbidly obese – I’m so obese that I could
die”, and washed-up Beverly Hills 90210 star Tori Spelling wandering,
heavily pregnant, around a range of her favourite party foods.
By the end, both Mr Lauer and Ann Curry, his co-host, felt compelled to tell
Mrs Palin: “You did a great job!”. Then again, Mr Lauer pointed
out, she had been a newscaster back in Alaska before entering politics. “Back
in the Stone Age,” Mrs Palin joked. It appeared yesterday that her
career may have taken an unwelcome trip back in time.
Related posts:
Views: 0