Sarah Palin's missed opportunity.

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 the subsequent events were not her fault.
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.
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 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, and at least she's not
shot anybody. Both things are 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.


Source: Http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/sarah_palins_missed_opportunit.html