It’s a common thing, now, to point out the “revolving door” that filters staffers of presidential administrations to other industries, and vice versa. The revolving door with Wall Street. With Silicon Valley. With lobbying firms. With the “private sector” in general. But there’s also the door that gets less angst-ed about, not because it’s any less problematic than its counterparts, but because it’s so deeply embedded in the logic of an election system that takes so many of its cues from American Idol: the revolving door between politics and television.
Palin, having lost the election but won some hearts, became a commentator on Fox News. So did Mike Huckabee. Van Jones, President Obama’s former Special Adviser for Green Jobs, is a regular on CNN. So is Donna Brazile, a political strategist and the former interim Chair for the Democratic National Committee. And on and on. And, certainly, it makes sense: Who better to offer expert commentary on the daily doings of American politics than the people who have been in the trenches?
But. Now we have Palin, moving not just from politics to talking-about-politics, but from politics to something-that-has-nothing-at-all-to-do-with-politics. Here she is, channeling Reagan and Schwarzenegger and Fred Thompson and Sonny Bono, in a door that filters people not just between campaigns and TV news, but between campaigns and pure entertainment. Palin Judge Judy-ing herself is, of course, only the latest example of candidates, and former candidates, feeding—and feeding from—the reality TV-industrial complex. Tom DeLay on Dancing With the Stars. Donald Trump on The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice.
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