[Vision2020] Europe mocks 'half-baked Alaskan' Palin

[Saundra Lund]

Europe mocks 'half-baked Alaskan' Palin
October 16, 2008 -- Updated 1342 GMT (2142 HKT
By CNN European Political Editor Robin Oakley

LONDON, England (CNN) -- There's no doubt about it. The European media has
given Sarah Palin a hard time.

Things started quite well, with the curiosity factor. To many Europeans
there is something exotic about snowy Alaska. Viewers and readers were
intrigued by the shots of the outdoorswoman with her eyes squinting fixed
along a gun barrel, the thought of a vice president who had once been a
beauty queen.

Columnists were approving that here, for once, was a politician in the
higher reaches who probably actually knew the price of a loaf and a pint of
milk. Women writers in particular responded warmly to her joke about the
difference between a pitbull and a hockey mom --"Lipstick."

But soon the carping began, and it was not confined to what U.S. rightists
like to dismiss as the "liberal media elite."

We were, the Irish Times warned, "just a heartbeat away from the biggest
half-baked Alaskan nightmare." Britain's Financial Times said his selection
of vice president raised serious questions about John McCain's judgment and
added: "The Palin appointment is yet more proof of the way that abortion
still dominates American politics."

Prominence was given to an onslaught on Palin's environmental and animal
rights record by veteran ex-film star Brigitte Bardot. Spain's left wing El
Pais described Palin as "a figure who comes from the America that is
farthest removed from and incomprehensible to the European spectator."

Since then the scorn has been constant, the jokes unrelenting, the YouTube
exposure devastating. But let us dispel one bit of nonsense from the start.
It is nothing to do with Sarah Palin being of the feminine gender.

Europeans have been astonished that America has never had a woman president.
After all we in Britain elected the redoubtable Margaret Thatcher three
times as prime minister. Norway did the same with Gro Harlem Brundtland.
Germany has a female chancellor, Angela Merkel, even if she does tend to
underline the remark I once heard from a British Ambassador: "A German joke
is no laughing matter."

Nicolas Sarkozy's socialist challenger for the French presidency was the
elegant Segolene Royal.

When Sarah Palin first became McCain's running mate there were even
headlines in some British media suggesting that America had found its own
Margaret Thatcher.

That certainly was overdoing it. So much so that after 20 years close up
reporting on the original I can't resist the temptation to paraphrase Lloyd
Bentsen's comment when Dan Quayle unwisely compared himself to John F.
Kennedy. "I've interviewed Margaret Thatcher, Governor Palin and I can tell
you that you are no Margaret Thatcher."

No, the problem for Sarah Palin in terms of her acceptance in Europe has
been the deep wave of Obamamania that had already swept through the European
media before her appointment, the self-inflicted wounds of her early media
appearances and the apparent box-ticking cynicism of her choice.

That was summed up for some by the appearance of those women at McCain
rallies wearing T-shirts emblazoned "Small Town Gun-Totin Christians for
McCain."

For Europeans, who were alienated during George W. Bush's first four years
by a president who showed little interest in their continent and patently
cared nothing for the opinions of its leaders, the turning point probably
came with the appearance on the Katie Couric show when Palin confessed to
not having had a passport until 2006.

Europeans are appalled at the thought that someone who wants to be vice
president of the most powerful nation on earth had so little interest in the
rest of a world which is so vitally affected by the decisions of the man, or
woman, in the White House.

And they are not much impressed by explanations that her parents did not
have the money to send her on a fact-finding tour of the world as a student.
Anybody with the money to own an SUV, hunt moose and drive a snowmobile has
the money to travel.

It was the American Mark Twain who reminded us all that "travel is fatal to
prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." If Sarah Palin wanted to be loved
in Europe she should have got about a bit.