A little over two years ago, one of Sarah Palin’s first interviews after being tapped as John McCain’s running mate was a multipart chat with CBS’s Katie Couric. And it was a disaster. To this day, Palin still has a chip on her shoulder about one question she was asked in particular: What does she read?
Since then, Palin has been asked the question repeatedly, and has come up with something approaching a stock answer. In a recent profile, she told The New York Times Magazine’s Robert Draper:
And in her “10 Most Fascinating People of 2010” interview with Barbara Walters set to air tonight, Palin provides a somewhat similar answer.
In the same Walters interview, Palin, as she’s done so many times before, then goes on to gripe about Couric’s reading question from over two years ago.
Palin has said that she was offended by Couric’s question and is still irked by the media’s portrayal of her.
Why is there that perception? It originally arose from her inability to name a single example of a newspaper or magazine that she reads, despite being asked by Couric three times.
It wasn’t an unfair question — Palin was a complete mystery to most of America, and knowing where she goes for news would have been, as Couric said at the time, an interesting insight into her worldview. Palin’s nonanswer — she reads “all of ‘em, any of ‘em that have been in front of me over all these years” — was an insight all its own. That Palin immediately became so offended by such an innocuous question was another — her reaction revealed more about her own sensitivity to being seen as an unenlightened Alaskan frontierswoman, and her preoccupation with the condescension of “elites,” than any bias of Couric’s. But convincing herself that it was all Couric’s fault is probably a good coping mechanism.
Sarah Palin’s Reading List: C.S. Lewis, Dean Karnazes, Newsmax, Wall Street Journal [ABC News]
