The Australian
Finally, Sarah Palin has to put up - or shut up
By Andrew Sullivan
THE next two weeks will determine the future of Sarah Palin. She has promised to make her mind up on whether she will run for the Republican nomination by the end of this month, and this week Joe McGinniss's devastating portrait, The Rogue, will be published.
That's quite a combination - and could lead to either the end of the Palin phenomenon or the beginning of its next and more lethal stage.
The initial reaction of Palin's husband, Todd, to nuggets of the book leaked to the National Enquirer suggests that, whatever happens, there will be fireworks.
Of McGinniss, he said: "This is a man who has been relentlessly stalking my family to the point of moving in right next door to us to harass us and spy on us to satisfy his creepy obsession with my wife. His book is full of disgusting lies, innuendo and smears."
Really? McGinniss wrote the book because he believed the mainstream media didn't get close to the true weirdness, extremism and instability of the former vice-presidential candidate. He knew Alaska well, having written a bestseller, Going to Extremes, about it, and was steeped in political reporting, from The Selling of the President in 1969 to his brutal take-down of Ted Kennedy, The Last Brother. McGinniss is an aggressive reporter who knows how to get people to tell him things and is fearless about publishing what he finds. And he smelt the story the Washington press just didn't want to touch.
By chance, while looking for a place to stay when he was researching the book in Palin's home town of Wasilla, he was offered the rental property next door. Hardly believing his luck, he said yes - and got a blast of pre-publicity, courtesy of the Palins. Sarah accused McGinniss of spying on her and her kids, while Todd built a high wooden fence to obscure any view.
But McGinniss was not there to spy on the Palins, even if his location got under their skin. There's no evidence he ever behaved anything but impeccably. But once the news spread, almost everyone he met in Wasilla offered him a gun for self-defence. He declined.
What McGinnis found was a climate of fear of the Palins in Alaska, especially in Wasilla. The people he met had grown up with or worked for the Palins or knew them closely, and they were prepared to tell the true story: a woman of no executive skills, bored with government, incapable of mothering, connected to the most extreme versions of evangelical Christianity, invariably in one mood swing or another, and vicious and vindictive towards anyone who got in her way.
The gossipy bits of the book - including claims Palin had a fling with a 204cm black basketball star she was covering as a sports journalist, had an affair with her husband's business partner and experimented with cocaine and cannabis - will lead the news stories. But the heart of the story is more revealing. Palin seems consumed with ambition, but strangely uninterested in the business of government or, indeed, any deep knowledge of any difficult subject. She never drops a grudge. She sees no distinction between public office and private gain. She has lived a lonely life as an adult teenager, coming straight from work to skulk in her room, taking trips to department stores rather than going to meetings, her children left to fend for themselves.
It is a pitiable profile of a lost soul, who combines white-knuckle delusions with the bizarre practices and doctrines of the "dominionist" movement, seeking to expand Christian control over secular society. And she believes in witches - she had herself protected from them by a minister in her old church.
And, yes, the story of her last pregnancy is so bizarre it deserves a full chapter. She declared it at seven months, to universal disbelief from everyone, including her own staff. It is rare that a governor's pregnancy is immediately dismissed as impossible on the record in the local paper by her political colleagues. Photos of her in this period are rare (a handful exist and in some she barely looks three months pregnant).
At eight months, she agreed to fly to Texas for a speech. At 4am in a Texas hotel her waters broke, she says. Nonetheless, she gave the speech at noon, full of jokes, writing in her book the unforgettable words: "Big laughs. More contractions."
She refused to go to the nearby children's hospital to deliver a child who was already diagnosed with Down's syndrome, but travelled all the way back to Alaska to her local hospital, on two long-distance flights. The crew are on record as having no idea she was close to giving birth. Two days later she was back at work. Months later she was holding up "this precious child", Trig, at the Republican convention like a scene from The Lion King.
I've never believed this story. What we do know is that refusing an abortion with a Down's syndrome child was critical to her gaining altitude with the Tea Party base. Maybe McGinniss's book will force Palin to produce records to prove her maternity. I first asked for them in September 2008. So far, nothing.
Does this mean she really is over, as the somewhat embarrassed Beltway has long insisted? It's possible, but she must know that if she doesn't run her 15 minutes of fame are up. And Palin tends to want every second of them. In my judgment, she could well use the McGinniss book as classic jujitsu: she'll claim she is being attacked by the liberal elites and turn it to her advantage by declaring she's running to defeat them. That's a message the base adores.
As the shine comes off Rick Perry, as Mitt Romney treads water and as Michele Bachmann appears to be fading fast, Palin has an opening. One reason I suspect she'll take it is that she joined the growing attacks on Perry, one of her closest political allies in the past, calling him a purveyor of "crony capitalism". If she were to pole-vault off the new book to run as candidate-as-victim, then Republican politics could be hopelessly scrambled.
Stay tuned. Turbulence ahead.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/finally-sarah-palin-has-to-put-up-or-shut-up/story-e6frg6ux-1226142078735
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