Palin and the Web: Christmas is over

It was blogs for everyone...

LisaNova's latest (and last?) Sarah Palin video brilliantly captures the instant irrelevance to which Alaska governor woke up on Wednesday morning. Cruel, cruel fate.  And I'm not talking about for her. We here in the elite media have been robbed of one of our most beloved darlings. This woman was like the Mrs. Claus of news --  where every day was Christmas and her heaping gift bag never ran out of articles, blogs, photos or video.  But now Christmas has ended a month early, and the nation is once again inundated with the humdrum secular talk of chiefs of staff and transitions to power. 

The Palin universe, presaging the fate of our own, has collapsed to an icy singularity. Vanished is the pulsing, nationwide fascination with her various ethics scandals, her husband's ties to the Alaskan Independence Party, $150,000 wardrobe, her family, her e-mail problems, her issues with guns and animals, and a dozen other micro issues made macro by mass attention. Among Palin's major cultural accomplishments is her single-handed reinvention of "Saturday Night Live," whose producers no doubt flouted their own political orientations to vote for Palin-McCain. The "SNL" skits -- as had "Lazy Sunday" before them -- blazed a trail in the evolving relationship between TV and online video -- where for the first time, more people watched the online version than the one that played on air.

But that was just one part of a much larger Palin-geist. It's hard to overestimate the part that Palin's glamorous mystique played in the hype that swirled around this election. To take just one measure:  a check of The Times article database reveals that over the last four years, Vice President-elect Joe Biden has appeared in 52 of the paper's headlines. Sarah Palin has been in 172, nearly three times as many as Biden -- and all of them since September. 

Google provides another rough measure of Palin's viral spread through the cultural consciousness.  Google results for Biden, who has been a U.S. senator for 30 years and is a two-time presidential candidate: 14,000,000. 

For Palin: 52,500,000.

And on YouTube, a search for Palin returns 167,000 results, nearly 100,000 more than Biden gets, and just about 50% of what McCain gets. Again, Palin made her national debut less than three months ago, while McCain and Biden -- in addition to having been in the presidential race for two years -- were on the national political scene long before YouTube and Google were invented, let alone the personal computer.

To put it plainly, Palin captured the nation's imagination, perhaps faster and more completely than any figure this century . But the election is over now, and the nation's imagination has moved forward, while Palin has gone back to Alaska.

Which is not to say we won't be hearing from her again, just that not nearly as many people will be listening.

Comments

[Liz Gannes]

You know what's crazy -- if you used the "search Google in 2001" thing that they recently put up (looks like it's down now), there were zero results for Sarah Palin.