A toxic mixture of elitism, class bias, sexism and the liberal slant of the media has made Sarah Palin the most unfairly treated public figure in memory. Even when the double standards were obvious–Palin  derided as “unqualified” to lead, when the Democratic presidential choice had even less relevant experience; non-stop portrayals during the 2008 campaign as a loose-cannon flake, while the Democratic vice-presidential candidate was largely ignored despite a long and hilarious career as…a loose-cannon flake; David Letterman’s long refusal to apologize for his joke about Palin’s young daughter being sexually assaulted, despite the taboo against using the young children of public figures as joke fodder—the attacks have never abated or retreated to any reasonable standard of fairness. The most recent example is a blatantly sexist and disrespectful Newsweek cover, using a photo of Palin in biking shorts taken for a “Runner’s World” interview. The undignified photo succeeds in making Palin look like a bimbo in hot pants. If Michigan’s Governor Jennifer Granholm or Michelle Obama were portrayed in such a manner on a news magazine cover, media watchdogs, women’s groups and Democrats would howl, and rightly so. But Palin is a conservative, and editors and reporters feel that this makes it to ethical to demean her using her gender, regional accent, and family members.

It would be refreshing to see the media focus on what is really wrong with Sarah Palin, which is not her qualifications, speaking style, conservative beliefs or native intelligence. Her problem is that she appears to employ no ethical analysis at all in making her decisions, choosing instead to “go with her gut.”  For a leader of anything more complicated than a house-painting crew, instinctive determinations of right and wrong are bound to lead to bad choices, no matter how solid the values of the leader might be. Again and again, Palin makes reckless, emotional and just plain bad choices because she lacks the discipline and prudence to think through principles, values, and consequences.

It is a pattern. The situation that led to most of the ethics complaints against Palin in Alaska, for example, was a classic case of an individual stubbornly insisting on gut ethics when organizational ethics and professional ethics principles were required. Her ex-brother-in-law, unquestionably a low-life, had a position in the Alaska government when she was elected. Based on her personal knowledge and genuine belief that he possessed bad character, she applied pressure on his supervisor to fire him. At a gut level, Palin saw this as doing the best thing for the state. It was, however, a classic ethics mistake, one that rudimentary analysis would have prevented. She had an obvious conflict of interest, based on her involvement in a family matter involving the employee, and thus could not take any negative action against him without appearing to use her office for personal objectives:  an abuse of power , a violation of Alaska’s ethics regulations, an appearance of impropriety, and conduct that called into question her trustworthiness and fairness. Still, even after being told all of this, Palin charged ahead, sparking the flood of ethics complaints against her that robbed her of time, money, and credibility. She claimed to be a victim of political character assassination, but she was mainly a victim of her own sloppy ethical reasoning.

This isn’t a case being a maverick or an iconoclast. This is a case of being ethically irresponsible.

Palin has never acknowledged that Ethics 101 error, either. Instead, she’s made an unbroken chain of them:

• Quitting her high elected office as Alaska governor was nothing more or less than a breach of duty to Alaska voters. Even if she believed it to be a bold statement of political independence and a refusal to bow to critics, as she claimed, it was still a self-centered act that reneged on her commitment when she ran for office.
• Warping the important debate on health care reform by using the inflammatory and hyperbolic term “death panels” to describe the important issue of end of life rationing of health care expenses was not “truth-telling.” It was irresponsible, self-serving attention-grabbing at the cost of misinforming the public and worse, allowing knee-jerk supporters of the House health care bill to avoid discussing the real issue by focusing debate on Palin’s careless “death panel” characterization.
• Injecting herself into New York’s 23^rd District Congressional race, characterized by Palin as standing up for conservative principles, was instead an outsider’s unethical intrusion in a local election where she had no expertise, no function, and no right to meddle in an already messy situation.
• Writing a “tell-all” book at this point in her career is not, as her gut would have it, a courageous exercise in “telling it like it is.” It is, again, a self-centered and irresponsible act. The book spends many pages criticizing the McCain campaign and specific campaign aides. Score-settling, a.k.a. revenge, is never ethical, but this is worse: it is disloyal and ungracious. The McCain campaign made Sarah Palin an important political force, a national figure, and a celebrity, and not without her consent. She would not have a book deal without the McCain campaign. However the McCain team may have offended or mistreated her in her eyes, she still owes them her gratitude, loyalty, and silence.

That she doesn’t recognize that, or any of her ethical mis-steps, tells all, or almost all, about Sarah Palin. Tell-all books are usually the work of venal and disloyal public figures at the ends of their careers. We have not seen tell-all books from Joe Lieberman, or John Kerry, or even the disgraced John Edwards, though one may be coming soon. Such books show political figures breaking duties of confidentiality and trust for royalties, speaking tours and cable talk shows. An individual who writes such a book is proclaiming their values and priorities, and being trustworthy does not make the cut.

Sarah Palin claims, and probably believes, that she is dedicated to doing the right thing, no matter how difficult or unpopular. She consistently demonstrates, however, that she lacks the analytical ability, basic ethical knowledge, self-discipline and objectivity to know what the right thing is.

And that, sadly, is the trouble with Sarah.

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UPDATE: Those who are excusing Newsweek’s use of the Palin biking-shorts photo by arguing that Palin posed for the photo and thus cannot now complain, please note: it was revealed today that the photographer who took the photograph was contractually obligated not to use it for any purpose other than “Runner’s World” until August 2010. He violated his agreement with Palin by selling the photo to Newsweek. No word yet on whether Newsweek knew about the embargo; if it did, the magazine was as unethical as the photographer.

Meanwhile, the obnoxious magazine cover has been rapidly equalled in anti-Palin bias by the Associated Press, which felt that debunking Sarah Palin’s book was so important that it assigned eleven reporters to do a “Fact Check” on its contents, an excercise that the AP somehow felt was unnecessary with the autobiographies of Ted Kennedy, Bill Clintom, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and, of course, Barack Obama.