An open letter to ex-Gov. Palin, special needs parent to parent

Dear Gov. Palin:

So you have resigned. Is it time for hard-right Republicans to fantasize about your hanging Velvet Elvis paintings in the White House in 2012? Or Tina Fey to break out her dead-on imitation of you as practice for the campaign stump?

This much we know: One pop culture figure supplants another, and you would figure that only a person of your magnitude as a political celebrity–and it’s all about celebrity in America–could knock Michael Jackson out of the headlines. Somewhere, the perfectly coiffed Anderson Cooper is losing sleep, trying to figure out if he can stop canonizing Wacko Jacko long enough to ponder the deep theological implications of Gov. Palin’s brave, selfless…

Oh, give me a break. Before the pundits and pampered psuedo-newsies jump in, let’s end the argument right now: The best legitimate reason for you to quit as Alaska governor (other than the fact that Fey and Katie Couric proved that the empress has no clothes) is that you’ve got a special needs kid, and you need to spend more time with that kid.

I speak from experience. My son has Sensory Integration Disorder, a neurological phenomenon that causes him to have all sorts of issues with how he perceives sound, pressure against his skin and his proximity to others. It makes for quite the struggle as a dad, to figure out how I need to be there for him, to teach him, to watch him. No matter how much time I spend with him, it doesn’t seem like enough. And I’ll be the first to say that every time I’m out late working on a deadline, I worry whether I’m cheating the kid out of the parenting he needs.

No one deserves to judge you as a parent, Gov. Palin. But it does stand to reason that you now have a chance to spend more time at home with Trig Paxson Van Palin, your 15-month old son who has Down syndrome. You’ve also got a teenage daughter with an infant–and again, without passing judgement, a golden opportunity to spend more time with a youngster who’s likely scared out of her wits to be a mom.

You might think I have about as much right to suggest how you run your personal affairs as I do to run the state of Alaska. And readers might think I should spend this space speculating why you’ve resigned. I’ll let the Fox News hunks and babes babble endlessly about that, even as they say exactly nothing. I would rather concentrate on what you can do now that you’ve said goodbye, for now, to the political arena.

Ms. Palin, if the voters are watching, your kids are, too. And kids, so to speak, don’t usually get a vote–especially when they’re infants and toddlers. If you want to make voters forget about Fey’s impressions and the Couric interview where you couldn’t seem to tell the difference between foreign policy and an insurance policy, then take my advice: Spend the next few years being a kickass parent. That will speak volumes about you and your values … and say much more than any speech read off a TelePrompter at a political convention.