Why Sarah Palin isn’t ready to be president

Conor Friederdorf offers his own theory after watching Palin’s interview on Oprah:

Even were she to repeat her likable Oprah performance on The Daily Show, The View, and the History Channel Retrospective on William Jennings Bryan, she’d still suffer from a flaw that America’s national security requires us to acknowledge: an unprecedented lack of foreign policy qualifications.

Well there is that. But she’s got three years until 2012: She can presumably bone up on this stuff and be much better prepared — politically and substantively — if she wants to run for president. But there’s another reason that Sarah Palin isn’t ready to be president: Her narrative — and the basis for a large part of her popularity among part of the Republican base — is almost entirely one of victimology.

The McCain campaign didn’t handle her well. The media is never fair to her. Katie Couric was rude. David Letterman makes mean jokes. The most prominent features of Sarah Palin’s story — as told by Sarah Palin — is how everybody is mean to her.

She might be a little bit right. It also doesn’t matter. Because who — aside from Palin’s fellow conservatives a;sp laboring under a persecution complex — really wants to see a whiner and a victim as the commander-in-chief? The first woman president is, probably unfairly, going to have to seem to have twice the balls of a man to get elected. Hillary Clinton came awfully close by being as tough as every other candidate out there, revealing human emotions just often enough to give her personality more than one or two (public) dimensions. If Sarah Palin wants to be president, she’ll try to drop this narrative pretty quickly. Nobody likes a whiner.