Sarah Palin's missed opportunity

By Ezra Klein

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I'll stand with Jon Chait and, oddly enough, Sarah Palin on this one: Palin is right to feel aggrieved. As Chait says, many have blamed her for a killing rampage that she had nothing to do with. A lot of Palin's rhetoric is over the top, and her gun metaphors ("RELOAD!") and her target sights looked unsettling in light of subsequent events, but those subsequent events were not her fault. Too many were too quick to imply she had a significant role in them.

Moreover, I just don't care if Palin thought "blood libel" was a vivid way of saying "nasty smear" instead of a description of the once-common anti-Semitic trope that Jews murder Christian children because their blood is needed to bake matzoh. I'm Jewish, so I know the term well. But I imagine the history of it is more obscure to those who didn't attend Hebrew school. This is not worth the headlines it's been getting.

What is remarkable to me, however, is Palin's ability to never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Palin didn't ask to be part of this story. But she did choose how to respond to it. Imagine if Palin had come out and said, "My initial response was to defend the fact that I had never condoned such violence, and never would. But the fact is, if I in any way contributed to an unhealthy political climate, I have to be more careful and deliberate in my public language rather than merely sharpen my defenses." That would've been leadership: It would have made her critics look small, and it would've made her look big. Those who doubted whether Palin could rise to an occasion that called for more than sharp partisanship would've been silenced.

Of course, Palin didn't say that. Al Sharpton did (or at least he said something very close). Palin accused her opponents of propagating a "blood libel." Rather than admitting that we all sometimes go too far, and that we must constantly work to see the humanity in others and tamp down on the dangerous certainty we have in ourselves, she lashed out at her critics, mocked the idea that political rhetoric was ever "less heated" and noted that there was a time when politicians settled disputes through duels.

So that's Palin's substantive response: Politics has never been reliably civil, her critics are unfair to her and at least she's not shot anybody. All that is true. But you won't find "stop bothering me, this tragedy isn't my fault" in the chapter headings of any books on leadership. Palin could've taken this opportunity to look very big, and instead she now looks very small. And that's not the fault of her detractors or her map. It's her fault, and her fault alone.