UK: Palin: "an opportunist and a phoney"

The Age

Titillating northern exposure
By Alex Spillius

Author Joe McGinniss has taken a bit of the shine off Sarah Palin's wholesome image.

WHAT has happened to Sarah Palin? Only three years ago, at her electrifying introduction to the national political stage, she was being lauded as an American Margaret Thatcher destined to save the country's right.

The 2008 election may have been lost, but the Tea Party movement she adopted, and which claimed her as its own, then recaptured the House of Representatives for the Republicans with a thumping majority and changed Washington's agenda. While we all assumed she would then be among the first Republicans to join the battle for the 2012 nomination, Mrs Palin skulked in the background and morphed into a pundit, author and reality TV star.

And now come revelations in an unauthorised biography that will test the commitment of her most ardent followers and probably kill off what was left of her White House prospects.

Author Joe McGinniss claimed that, as a young television sports reporter, and while she was dating Todd, her husband-to-be, Mrs Palin had a one-night stand with Glen Rice, then a rising college basketball player and now a leading NBA pro.

According to reports (The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin isn't out until this week), McGinniss's book confirms an existing rumour that Mrs Palin had a six-month affair with Todd's business partner in 1996.

He also cites one or more witnesses who said they saw Sarah and Todd snorting cocaine off the top of a 55-gallon drum on a snowmobile outing with friends. It is claimed Todd was a regular cocaine user who was ''on the end of the straw plenty'', and that Mrs Palin smoked marijuana with a college professor in Alaska.

The New York Times has dismissed McGinniss, an old and sometimes controversial hand at bestsellers, as ''too busy being nasty to be lucid''. More damagingly, it trashed his reporting as ''caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins, often from unnamed sources''.

It has mattered not. The story has lit up the internet and the allegations do have a certain ring of truth to them. Besides, people will want to believe them, such is the prurient interest in Mrs Palin. Sex appeal has always been part of her grip on the public imagination. She positively oozes it, as I discovered at a black-tie party in Washington a few months ago. Lighting up the room, she displayed the magnetic and, dare I say it, Clintonian laser beam that can stun and seduce all at once.

The idea of a conservative Christian woman with fashionable glasses, a lithe body and a twinkle in her eye who turns out to have (had) a wicked side (and, if McGinniss's sources are to be believed, a brief ''fetish'' for black men) titillates on so many levels that it hardly bears thinking about.

Many of Mrs Palin's supporters, of course, will simply refuse to believe the book's revelations, or forgive them, especially the sexual ones. Liberals, for their part, will point to the hypocrisy of her support for the promotion of teenage sexual abstinence over sex education.

More troubling to her small-town, heartland audience will be the claim of cocaine use. It will cause some of the faithful to conclude that Mrs Palin is nothing but an opportunist and a phoney.

The rest of the world has suspected as much for a while. As we have seen, she rails against federal power but as governor of Alaska lapped up Washington's largesse. A champion of fiscal sanity, the former mayor of Wasilla left the town of 7000 with a $US22 million deficit.

But perhaps the most damaging elements of McGinniss's book are the caustic observations of former staff that Mrs Palin was not a serious politician. Her former security chief says she was obsessed with shopping and read only People magazine as she travelled the country.

Sarah Palin is the Republican Barack Obama. The only difference is that the President confessed to his drug use, and restricts his basketball dalliances to the court.

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