This morning’s column from the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman explains the appeal of Sarah Palin in TV terms:
As Neil Oxman, political consultant at The Campaign Group, put it to me: For half the country, “Sarah Palin is Roseanne from the ‘Roseanne’ show. ‘Roseanne’ was the No. 1 comedy five years in a row and seven out of nine in the top 10.” She is connecting at a gut level.
That half the country apparently does not include Roseanne herself:
As to the Roseanne Connor* Sarah Palin comparison: for starters, In nine years of The Roseanne Show, you didn’t hear much of anything about Religion per se, or Roseanne’s family’s faith. You just saw a very unglamorous mom doing her best to make ends meet and help her family deal with the ups and downs of life and to nag and joke and push and pull her kids into being decent human beings. She may have had a big mouth and a short fuse, but she was always there for her kids and her husband. Those were her Family values The Connors sure weren’t the most picture perfect family on the block. Unlike Sarah Palin, Roseanne Connor wasn’t anyone’s idea of a beauty queen, that’s for sure. She was an unrepentant fat woman in a calorie-counting, jazzercizing treadmill-pounding world. Now THAT’S a maverick.
*Sic. Roseanne does in fact spell Roseanne Conner’s surname as “Connor” for much of the post.
[Disclaimer again: I voted for Obama, etc. etc. And thus in the spirit of fairness I should note that Roseanne also blogs that Obama should have picked Hillary as veep and that he “marshaled all the forces of sexism to his side against her.” So there.]