Branding the Right: The Affective Economy of Sarah Palin

In April 2010, Saturday Night Live announced the launch of the Sarah Palin Network. Impersonating the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, comedian Tina Fey pitched the new television channel as the logical extension of her commentator gig with Fox News and her TLC reality program, Sarah Palin's Alaska. Poking fun at Palin's hokey right-wing populism and media saturation strategies, Fey promised TV viewers propagandistic made-for-television movies, game shows like Tea Party Wheel of Fortune and Are You Smarter Than a Half-Term Governor?; reality competitions like Dancing with the Real Stars: America's Small Business Owners; a renegade cops-and-robbers drama featuring Todd Palin on a snowmobile; and a public affairs program geared to ordinary people called Elites, in which C-SPAN-like footage of "smarty pants experts" is redubbed with the teacher's monotonous voice from the Charlie Brown cartoons. The hilarity of the skit hinged on the uncanny possibility of an actual Sarah Palin Network. Given the extent to which Palin's overnight celebrity was channeled into a lucrative brand across print, television, film, and digital media platforms, the prospect of an entire network devoted to perpetuating—and profiting from—the unlikely politician from Wasilla is not so far fetched.

Since entering the national spotlight as John McCain's running mate, Palin has built a pop culture franchise around her campaign image of an average hockey mom whose approach to how the nation should be governed combines kitchen-table economics and the rugged self-reliance ascribed to the Alaskan frontier. From the outset, her self-billing as a Washington outsider has been fashioned against the malfeasance of the "media elite." Upon accepting the vice presidential nomination at the 2008 Republican National Convention, Palin dismissed journalists who questioned her qualifications as "snobs who look down their noses at ordinary Americans and are out of touch with their major concerns."¹ In subsequent speeches, interviews, and tweets, she pitched herself as an authentic representation of "real" America against the "lamestream" media and pretentious, big-city elites, who favor big government and other evils. To be sure, the media also perpetuated this spin on Palin, playing up her folksiness and articulating her deficiencies as a professional ruler in class-coded cultural and geographical terms. Venues from SNL to the New York Review of Books have delighted in reiterating Palin's nasal working-class accent, grammatical mishaps, chain-store tastes, carnivorous appetites (she's fond of moose and caribou), and penchant for "faux-genteel cuss words like dang, heck, darn, geez, bullcrap, and bass-ackwards."²

Palin ups the ante by channeling the mockery into the purported authenticity of her homegrown political brand. In fact, while she defines her political persona in opposition to the media elite, Palin's enduring visibility since the 2008 election evidences a strategic mastery of both old and new media forms. Well before Palin disappointed her fans by declining to run in the 2012 presidential primary, a long exposé in New York magazine called "The Revolution Will Be Commercialized" suggested that her motivation for branching into popular media was largely financial. Accompanied by graphics that render Palin in the image of Ford, Pepsi, Chevron, and other brand-name logos, the article explains that Palin turned to memoir writing because she was earning $125,000 per year and was plagued by debt; she eventually landed a $7 million deal with HarperCollins.

Her best-selling book, Going Rogue: An American Life (2009), was followed by America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag (2010), and former campaign aides were hired to plan book tours with "all the trappings of a national political campaign."³ When the demands of her new cash stream clashed with her day job as governor (and with Alaska's public-sector ethical regulations), she resigned. When Palin subsequently signed a three-year contributor contract with Fox News worth an alleged $1 million per year, she set up a television studio in her home in Wasilla, Alaska. Shortly thereafter she coproduced Sarah Palin's Alaska with Mark Burnett of Survivor...