What’s Sarah Up to Now?

I’ll betcha Sarah Palin’s mother had to ask that question often when she was a child: What’s Sarah up to now?

I’ll be talking about that along with Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn Monday early morning on “Canada AM”, which is CTV’s equivalent of the “Today Show”, so I’ve had to think about the answer to the question more than I might have liked.

Palin has officially stepped down from her post as governor of Alaska as of today. And we’re all abuzz asking why and what is she going to do next: Were some of those ethics charges about to bring her down so she struck a deal? Was she unable to deal with the stress, as her daughter’s baby-daddy Levi Johnston speculated? Is she just after the money she can make with her book and speaking engagements? Was she angry about her treatment by the media?  Did she calculate that if she wants to run for president in 2012, she’d be better off not racking up more of a record since her political juice with her state legislature seemed to have been heading south?

Any and all of those are possible. And perhaps she simply had the audacity of nope. As in “Nope, I won’t finish my term because who wants to be a lame duck?” By that logic, if my child is going to reach majority at 18, should I stop being a mother when he’s 16 1/2 so that I’m not a lame duck? If the PTA president is elected to a two-year term, should she step down after a year-and-a-half so as not be a lame duck? Or wouldn’t we call all of those examples blatant abnegation of responsibility?

So far, public reaction has been bad for Sarah, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll:

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Overall, the new poll found that 53 percent of Americans view Palin negatively and 40 percent see her in positive terms, her lowest level in Post-ABC polling since she first appeared on the national stage last summer as Sen. John McCain’s running mate…57 percent of Americans say she does not understand complex issues, while 37 percent think she does, a nine-percentage-point drop from a poll conducted in September just before her debate with now-Vice President Biden. The biggest decline on the question came among Republicans, nearly four in 10 of whom now say she does not understand complex issues. That figure is 70 percent among Democrats and 58 percent among independents.

Her speech announcing her impending departure was practically unintelligible. She had her lines down a little better by the time she held her farewell picnic this afternoon in Fairbanks and turned things over to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, also a Republican.

As I said previously, Palin is out but not down. While I have no inside track on why she resigned before her term was to end, I am inclined to think her erratic behavior has something to do with the way she learned to control her environment by being unpredictable.

Whatever the reason, we’ll find out soon enough what Sarah will be up to next. And whatever it is, I’ll betcha it will drive the Republican party establishment stark raving mad.

Gloria Feldt

GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”

As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.