SARAH

Posted at 8:19 a.m. ET

Sarah Palin will continue to be the story in coming days.  She's doing another "exclusive" interview, this time with Sean Hannity of Fox.  That will be written off in advance because Hannity is clearly a Palin partisan. 

Palin is entering a period of extreme danger.  The press is determined to destroy her.  It must destroy her.  She's being asked questions that Barack Obama has never been asked, that no reporter seeking advancement in his profession would dare ask.  I winced when Charlie Gibson, professorial glasses down over his nose, asked Palin if she'd ever met a foreign leader.  Did Lincoln ever meet a foreign leader?  How many foreign leaders did Bill Clinton meet before he became president?  What a childish question.

It's frustrating because Barack Obama was made chairman of a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  The subcommittee dealt with Europe.  He never held one meeting.  Nor did he make a single trip to the area under his authority.  The only foreign leaders he could have met were the ones floating through Washington.  In reality, Obama is a minor-league U.S. senator with a weak record, never thought of as a leader, who presumes to be president.  No one in the mainstream media challenges his credentials.

And can you name a single mainstream journalist who has gone back over Joe Biden's record and challenged his judgments?  Joe Biden isn't even there.

The extreme danger for Sarah Palin is that the novelty will wear off and the press will bear in.  There is an investigation of her underway in Alaska that has suddenly been put on the fast track.  You may be sure it will be treated as a major story, even though it is minor.  She'll be portrayed as corrupt, there will be suggestions that she broke the law.  To cite a line used by Republicans when Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur, "Impeachment was discussed."  The word will come up.  Destroy, destroy.

What should she do?  Well, the first thing she should do is limit these sit-downs.  They can do her no good.  I'd rate her first performance, with Gibson, a B-.  Sarah should do a Reagan - limit press availability and speak over the heads of the media to the American people.  That works for her, it's her brilliance.  The press will whine, but no one will really care.

Noel Coward, the British wit, songwriter and playwright, once said that there must be an invisible barrier between performer and audience.  You may look, but you may not touch.  The same is true in politics.  Americans don't want their major figures to be household objects.  They want them to be familiar and distant at the same time.  The disgraceful Jimmy Carter carried his own bags when president.  Americans hated it.  Ronald Reagan wouldn't enter the Oval Office without wearing a jacket.  Americans loved it.  It is a balance.  Reagan understood.  FDR understood.  Kennedy understood.  The danger for Sarah is that the mystique can wear off if she becomes too familiar.

When I worked on The Tonight Show, some famous performers turned down invitations to appear, citing that same factor - the fear that they would become too familiar, too close, that the aura would be destroyed.  They were right.

Let Sarah be Sarah.  No, I don't want to see her on Oprah.  I want to see her on the campaign trail, next to John McCain, and giving us the same magic we saw at the convention.  And if journalists complain, I hope they complain as loudly as possible.  The public will drown them out.

September 13, 2008.