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    Post-Palin America

    Posted Tuesday, November 04, 2008 1:47 PM | By Hanna Rosin
    I think we're talking about some quality of Palin's we haven't pinned down yet. I've talked to some women who thought her performance on the prank call, and then on SNL last night, made her seem small, and defeated. And that they felt sorry for her. I felt just the opposite. I thought she sounded almost regally bored on the phone call, and poised on the SNL clip in a way that suggested she has already figured out every part of the game - the irony, the self mockery, the great American path to fame. Under the normal rules, Palin's future is punching bag for the Republican Party, the McCain campaign has already started some of that finger-pointing. But you sense that she'll resist it and make her own rules. They wanted her to be a token and she stole the show. In that way, she is post-feminist, shoving hidebound politics past the PC, tokenist '90s and straight into 2008. Even if they do lose, she still feels larger than the prank call, larger than the wardrobe controversy, larger than the campaign. Yes, her wink-wink, ain't I pretty thing has been central, but I bet as an icon of the right, she'll transcend that without quite shedding it, in the way Nina describes. 
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