Until now, Sarah Palin has been operating from the safe remove of her laptop and gotten some things done, if you count suggesting that her son Trig would be left to die by Democratic health-care proposals.
Now she’s rolling out Going Rogue: An American Life, five chapters in five months selling perhaps 5 million copies. As a political manifesto, it mainly offers bromides tested by Republicans past, especially Ronald Reagan, rather than any solutions to 10.2 per cent unemployment, deficits as far as the eye can see, or Afghanistan.
It’s much more a crackling read of grudges recalled, and settled, in her favour, a rewriting of the 2008 campaign that makes Palin the heroine of every encounter. If only Sarah could have been Sarah, the course of history might have been different.
With the book, Palin emerges from her lair to a nationwide tour — with stops at the altars of Oprah, Barbara Walters and Iowa — that mixes rock-star glamour with political strategy. She’s travelling on a bus that could be the successor to John McCain’s ’Straight Talk Express’, if only she hadn’t trashed everyone on it in a running jeremiad against “the jaded political caste” that smothered her.
Rogue is so rough on staffers that McCain held a conference call with former aides, according to ABC News, in which he apologised for people having to go through this and said, “You are all my dear friends. This will pass. It'll pass faster if everyone will just stay out of it.”
HEART OF GRIEF
Fat chance. They won’t stay out of it, which will only help sell more books.
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At the heart of Palin’s grief sits Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign strategist built like a fireplug with a head like a bowling ball. Like all those she encountered after her nomination, he was a calculating insider out to do her in. Worried about her weight loss — something unheard-of on the carbo- and sugar-laden campaign trail — Schmidt approached her with the idea of getting a nutritionist on board.
As Palin recounts it, she saw the rotund Schmidt, who would later blame post-partum depression for Palin's erratic behaviour, as going one bridge too far: “You’ve told me how to dress, what to say, who to talk to, a lot of people not to talk to, who my heroes are supposed to be, and we’re still losing.”
Schmidt wasn’t alone in foiling her greatness. That whole wardrobe malfunction? Blame it on communications aide Nicole Wallace, who went into her closet while ABC was setting up for Charlie Gibson’s interview in Wasilla and said “No, no, no” to what she found hanging there. Thus did $150,000 come to be spent on designer suits.
COURIC TRICK
Wallace is also to blame for the September 2008 interview with CBS’s Katie Couric. It’s not that Palin didn’t know what, if any, newspapers she read, or couldn't name any Supreme Court decision ever, but that Wallace, who once worked at CBS, tricked her into thinking that an insecure, low-rated Couric would go soft on her.
Palin calls any dispute of the facts in her book “opposition research.” The Associated Press pointed out some doozies.
Among them: While claiming to be a frugal traveller, Palin charged Alaska $20,000 for her children’s travel. Contrary to what she says, most of her gubernatorial campaign donations weren’t from the little people she so lionises. Reagan didn’t face a recession worse than the most recent one, nor did he show us the way out by ending the estate tax.
CHILDREN AS PROPS
On matters pertaining to Schmidt, he has the entire Team McCain backing him up; Palin has her daughter, Piper.
She liberally uses her children as crutches. Piper, she frets, was bombarded with curse words that even conservative Republicans are prone to utter on campaigns.
In the middle of a rant against an Obama administration bailout that was actually a Bush administration bailout supported by McCain, Palin recalls musing to daughter Bristol that a real leader must be “brave enough to fail.”
No one should underestimate the attention Palin can command. Look what she's done since her rambling resignation speech.
She’s got seniors riled up against health-care legislation by bringing “death panels” into the discussion. Almost single-handedly, she drummed out a Republican candidate in New York’s 23rd congressional district who didn’t pass her test for purity.
Her accusation that “someone” diminished the words “In God We Trust” on the dollar coin travelled round the world before the truth emerged that George W. Bush, not some heathen liberal, was president during that redesign.
New York Times columnist David Brooks calls Palin “a joke.” Rush Limbaugh praises Rogue as “the most substantive book on policy” he’s ever read. I wonder which of those comments will sell more books.
What Palin writes or says isn’t going to hurt her with those who so ardently love her. We’ve had populists before, but they were usually well-educated, experienced elites pretending. Palin will be the first genuine article.
And a bestselling author, to boot.