In the current TIME, my column is about a favorite topic at Tuned In these past couple weeks: Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin character, and its advantages and disadvantages for the real Palin.
Obviously, there have been scads of political impressions at SNL over the decades. What distinguishes this one is (1) the fact that Palin was almost entirely unknown, meaning that Fey (and others) were shaping her public image from scratch at the same time as her campaign was, and (2) the extent to which Fey’s sketches—especially the Couric interview—relied on Palin’s own words, blurring the distinction between quotation and fiction in them. The more you blur these lines, the more you blur the distinction between yourself and the person you are parodying in the public mind:
In an era glutted with satire–The Colbert Report, the Onion, JibJab–there is still a special power to an old-fashioned SNL impersonation. It’s shamanistic; it’s like owning a voodoo doll: capture your target’s soul, and you can make her dance just by waving your arms.
A Google search, for instance, turns up plenty of blog references to Palin’s claim that she could see Russia “from [her] house” as her way of saying that being governor of Alaska is a foreign policy credential. The only problem: Real Sarah Palin never said it. Fey did, spoofing Palin’s argument that one can see Russia from Alaskan territory. But who can remember those details? If Real You gets in an argument with Public You, Public You wins every time.
I doubt that Fey is directly driving votes to or from McCain-Palin, and as I say, Sarah Palin the actual person has had a little something to do with it as well. But to the extent that the quick-sketch image of a politician matters—and how can it not?—Fey’s had a bigger effect than usual.