On Feb. 16, Sarah Palin and Madeleine Albright spent an evening in Arkansas.
Palin was in Little Rock to speak at a fundraiser for the Republican Party of Arkansas. Albright appeared as part of the Frank and Kula Kumpuris Distinguished Lecture Series at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center.
Both are superstars in their respective political parties. They traveled very different paths to get to this point in history.
Albright’s family fled Czechoslovakia for England in 1938 only to return and be forced to flee again, in 1948, after the Communist Party took over the government. Her father, a diplomat, sought political asylum in the United States, accepting a teaching a position at the University of Denver and eventually becoming chairman of the School of International Studies that now bears his name.
Palin, on the other hand, was raised in Alaska, played the flute in junior high school and ran the point for her high school basketball team that won a state championship. In 1984, she was crowned Miss Wasilla. She later finished third in the Miss Alaska pageant.
Albright attended Columbia University where she received her undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees.
Palin attended four different colleges, eventually graduating from the University of Idaho in 1986.
Upon completing her doctoral work, Albright entered politics. She began as a staffer to Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine. After the election of Jimmy Carter in 1978, she was recruited to serve as the congressional liaison to the National Security Council by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who taught her at Columbia. She left government after Carter’s defeat in 1980, and she eventually became a professor at Georgetown University specializing in Eastern European studies.
After college, Palin worked as a sportscaster for local television and as a sports reporter for a community newspaper.
Albright advised both the Mondale-Ferraro and Dukakis-Bentsen Democratic tickets before formally re-entering political life in 1992 when President Bill Clinton named her as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. She remained in government and became the first female in history to hold the position of Secretary of State.
Around the same time Albright was being appointed to the U.N., Palin was beginning her own political career. In that same year, Palin won a seat on the Wasilla City Council. She won re-election in 1995 before launching an insurgent bid for mayor. She defeated the incumbent, John Stein, by 651 to 440 votes. During that race, she tested old Republican themes: wasteful spending, high taxes, gun rights, abortion and term limits. She was re-elected, by more than 600 votes, in 1999, just one year before John McCain would launch an bid for the Republican nomination for president.
After Clinton’s presidency ended and with a Republican administration in office, Albright founded a consulting company, joined the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, and returned to Georgetown, where she holds the Mortarara Distinguished Professorship of Diplomacy. In 2002, then-Czech President Vaclav Havel suggested she return and succeed him.
The Bush years were quite different for Palin. In 2002, she ran for lieutenant governor and lost. She served on the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission and as a director of Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service Inc. She meddled in state politics, too, positioning herself for another statewide bid — this one for the state’s highest office — which she launched in 2006.
In that year, Palin became the first female elected governor of Alaska, and, at 42, the youngest governor of that state. She championed modest issues such as transportation, infrastructure development and public health. Her approval ratings exceeded 80 percent in her first year.
And then a strange thing happened. Sen. John McCain, who himself had managed to resurrect his presidential campaign, had achieved enough delegates to win the Republican Party nomination. He asked Palin to be his running mate.
Upon reflection, that decision now appears both courageous and foolish.
Early on it catapulted McCain back into the race. Thousands of people attended campaign rallies, where before there only hundreds. Before the public knew much about her, the polls tightened.
But then it became something else. A disastrous interview with Katie Couric demonstrated Palin’s ineptitude on many levels — the most memorable being her suggestion that Alaska’s proximity to Russia was a substantial foreign policy credential. A treasure-trove of strange quotes (and lots of Tina Fey) followed.
Albright continues to teach at Georgetown, has taken up the cause of genocide with former Defense Secretary William Cohen, and recently published another book, her fourth. Her role as a stateswoman seems magnified only when a friend runs for president, as Hillary Clinton did in 2008. Otherwise, it is soft, to invoke Theodore Roosevelt’s proverb of 1903, and elegant.
In that same time Palin became her antonym. Since 2008 she has barnstormed the country promoting a controversial memoir (McCain campaign senior advisor Steve Schmidt described the book as “total fiction”) and appearing at GOP fundraisers. She inked a deal with Fox News and has continued as a strident Democratic critic.
As if it was possible, she has become even more inarticulate on foreign affairs, suggesting recently that it would be wise for President Obama to declare war on Iran, even as she assumes a more visible role in the Republican Party. She may very well run for president.
Reading this, I am reminded of the value of a careful, measured, diplomatic approach to American foreign policy. And I am reminded of the importance of qualified leadership.
Blake Rutherford is an Arkansas political analyst and public relations executive. He is the publisher of Blake’s Think Tank, a public affairs blog, and the host of Arkansas Sunday Edition on 103.7FM The Buzz. You can e-mail him at
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or follow him on Twitter: @blakerutherford. His column appears in the Courier on Fridays.
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