To beef up her credentials for her inevitable appointment to the Supreme Court by President Donald J. Trump, Sarah Palin announced she was developing a “Judge Judy”-style reality show.
Palin inked the deal in February, not long after she became one of the first prominent Republicans to endorse The Donald’s whirlwind White House run.
Unfortunately, the ex-governor of
Alaska’s show is not expected to launch until 2017, which means she won’t have any vital televised jurisprudence experience under her judicial robes in time for Trump to appoint her in his
first 90 days to fill the Supreme’s seat vacated by the late Antonin Scalia. Actuarial charts tell me that Trump is likely to have the opportunity to nominate Palin to the highest court in the
land during the last year of his first term. By then Palin should have two seasons’ tenure on the daytime syndicated court circuit.
Of course, I am assuming a lot here—including
the nagging vicissitudes of TV ratings and annoying unpredictability of Supreme Court Justice deaths. But in a campaign year, where a reality TV star and real estate mogul has a virtual lock on the
GOP nomination and is expected to give the Democrat’s likely nominee Hillary Clinton a tough fight in the fall, is Sarah Palin on the high court such an outlandish scenario? You already know the
answer.
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Yes, I’m waiting to wake up from the media addiction to the click, ratings and revenue smack that is Drumpf’s White House run. Unfortunately, that’s wishful dreaming;
decades spent watching the “one who plays the media best” win forces me to offer up the once-unthinkable.
When People magazine broke the news that Palin had a deal to become
“Judge Sarah,” it was noted that the independent production house Warm Springs that tapped her for the bench used the same producer credited with developing “Judge Judy” and
“Judge Joe Brown.”
It was also noted that unlike Judge Judy and Judge Joe, the failed 2008 vice presidential candidate is not a lawyer and has no experience presiding over an
actual courtroom. Also noted was that Palin has been let go twice as a commentator by Fox News and that her “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” reality show on Discovery was deep-sixed after a
single season. Plus, no major studio, as of yet, is backing the still-unnamed Judge Sarah show, which means she will have to sell it station by station. And that’s no easy task.
Yet,
despite the obvious hurdles and Palin’s failed reality TV career thus far, a spokesman for the project noted that she’s “sold millions of books, one of which sold over 2 million
copies, she’s a proven ratings draw, she has close to 6 million followers on social media, she has a huge audience and you can say that audience corresponds well with a daytime
audience.”
Sadly for the future of our country, all that is true. As we’ve seen with The Donald, a strong social media brand and savvy use of it, and a keen exploitation of
multimedia offered by a revenue-hungry media universe, means actual, substantive experience in government counts for painfully little.
Remember, Palin was almost a heartbeat away from the
highest office in the land. In this strange alternate universe we now live in, doesn’t that somehow qualify her—in a Drumpf White House—to be chosen to serve in the highest court in
the land? I can answer that question in two words: You betcha!