I LIKE SARAH PALIN. There is something refreshingly genuine and un-smarmy about her. But, after watching Oprah’s interview this afternoon with the former candidate, I have not altered my fundamental opposition to her as a future president.

I oppose her possible candidacy for two reasons. One, she is not smart and steely enough. Two, she is a feminist.

Granted, she is not an extreme feminist and she differs with the mainstream movement in her opposition to abortion. But Palin wholeheartedly embraces feminist egalitarianism and the radical transformation of society that it entails.

Palin made a number of interesting revelations in this interview. She said she did not tell her husband that the child she was carrying had Down’s Syndrome until three weeks after she learned of it from doctors. It was three weeks before the couple was alone and she could share this important information.

This amount of estrangement due to busy schedules did not, judging from this interview, seem to bother Palin in the least. She also said that when she learned she was pregnant with Trig, even before she knew he had Down’s, she felt understanding for women who choose abortion.

Palin said her daughter Bristol was  “devastated” and embarrassed when she learned the national press had picked up the news that she was pregnant. Palin was unapologetic that she chose to put her daughter in the limelight at a difficult time and instead blamed the media for its excessive interest in her children.

When asked by Oprah how a woman could possibly handle five children and the vice presidency, Palin offered feminist boilerplate. “Things have changed,” she said. “There is so much equality.”

Yes, but children haven’t changed, have they? Of them, Palin said, “The children are my strength. They keep me grounded.” But does she keep them grounded?

As for Palin’s intellectual stature, as displayed in this interview, I stand by my previous assertions that she is not articulate enough to be president. I repeat a statement I made at View from the Right last year about another Palin interview. At that time, I wrote:

Palin appears quite close to Bush in this interview in her fundamental limitations. George Bush is a woefully inarticulate man who was unable to publicly reason with his opponents or defend even the good decisions he made. These limitations fueled the hatred of the left and allowed unchallenged lunacies to spread. His inarticulateness was a void, a vast windswept emptiness, at the center of our national life. This interview, in which Palin comes across as quite pleased with her shallow inanities and displays no gravitas at a time of national crisis, shows that Palin falls into the same category. Even if the Republican Party makes wise moves, she will be unable adequately to explain and defend them.

In today’s Oprah interview, Palin justified her decision to leave her gubernatorial position by saying she would have been hounded by accusations of ethical violations for the remainder of her term by Democrats bent on ruining her presidential prospects. This was a poor excuse and she was bumble-tongued as she spoke. If there are no ethical violations, these accusations are mere inconveniences. An elected official has the duty to fulfill his term unless he is incapacitated or elected to higher office.

The interview included a visit to Palin’s family home in Wasilla and naturally took in the obligatory scenes of her and her husband, Todd, with Trig and their youngest daughter, Piper. It also showed Palin visiting her gym and working out in shorts and grungy T-shirt. This scene was unbefitting of a candidate for higher office. But then perhaps Palin is not running. She told Oprah she is not thinking about 2012 yet and that even if she were she would not admit it. She did, however, make a point of mentioning that Trig would be entering kindergarten in 2012, as if to suggest she would be relatively free of family responsibilities at that time.

Oprah was in peak form in this interview: serious, hard-hitting and respectful. She showed none of the snide bitterness of Katie Couric in her famous Palin interview. Oprah grilled Palin about that interview at length. In response, Palin went too far in apologizing for her lame performance with Couric and made things worse by coming up with no good reason for why she didn’t spare the nation some regrets about her candidacy by simply telling Katie what she liked to read.

At the end of the interview, Palin told Oprah that she used to love to watch her show when she was at home with her young children. Palin said she identified with the talk show star because she was another “normal American woman with a lot on your plate.” To the cheers of Oprah Nation, she told the woman who truly leads America, “You have been an inspiration.”

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