UK: Oy Veh, another Palin tell all article

The Telegraph

Sarah Palin 'image obsessed and paranoid'
A manuscript written by a disgruntled former aide to Sarah Palin accuses her of being a paranoid woman
By Toby Harnden.


Frank Bailey's leaked memoir, which had not been published, contains quotations from a number of purported private emails in which she fixates on her political opponents and the "bad guys" in the mainstream media.

The emails, said to number 60,000, date back to when Mrs Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee and a potential 2012 presidential candidate, was Mayor of Wasilla and contemplating a run for Alaska governor.

Mr Bailey blames Mrs Palin for inflaming rumours rather than ignoring them and refusing to appear on any television network other than Fox News.

An ally of Mrs Palin told Politico that Mr Bailey had access to Mrs Palin's email passwords and account. The ally stated that Mr Bailey was embittered because he had been denied promotion and excluded from the 2008 vice-presidential campaign.

The 456-page manuscript, titled "In Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: A Memoir of our Tumultuous Years", has apparently been hawked around the publishing world by Mr Bailey for about 18 months.

It was co-written with Jeanne Devon, publisher of the anti-Palin website Mudfalts, and Ken Morris, a former Wall Street executive and frequent Palin critic.

Mr Bailey is a former Alaska Airlines manager who worked on her 2006 gubernatorial campaign. Much of the manuscript concentrates on how Mrs Palin supposedly sought to boost her public image, became obsessed with rumours about her family and railed against the media, which she branded "the bad guys".

"We set our sights and went after opponents in coordinated attacks, utilising what we called 'Fox News surrogates', friendly blogs, ghost-written op eds, media opinion polls (that we often rigged), letters to editors, and carefully edited speeches," Mr Bailey wrote.

By the spring of 2009, months after she and Senator John McCain had lost the 2008 presidential race to Barack Obama, she is portrayed as being tired of being criticism and preoccupied with her national image. "I hate this damn job," she allegedly wrote in an April 28 email, before resigning the governorship in July 2009.

In one alleged email, Mrs Palin expresses her frustration that she cannot prove that Mr Obama's White House is deliberately undermining her.

"We have no smoking gun that proves we're being targeted by the bad guys, so it probably sounds to many like I'm a whining b£*(h who stubbornly refuses to govern in the public's best interest."

In another, she mocks Katie Couric, the CBS News anchor whose interviews of Mrs Palin during the 2008 campaign badly damaged the candidate's credibility.

"She SUCKED in ratings before she stumbled upon her little gig mocking me. She did almost lose her job before that VP interview".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/sarah-palin/8341558/Sarah-Palin-image-obsessed-and-paranoid.html