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Harry Truman gave them hell. Sarah Palin gives them agita.
The Associated Press unleashed eleven fact checkers on her new book, Going Rogue, for a thoroughly tendentious critical examination. Newsweek, the influential liberal magazine of opinion, published a cover piece damning her to the outer darkness, balanced by another piece damning her to the further-outer darkness. The conservative-leaning New York Times columnist David Brooks called her “a joke.”
It’s September 2008 all over again. All the same players are lining up to put a good hate on Sarah Palin. She’s like an isotope designed to course throughout our politics and culture, lighting up press bias, self-congratulatory liberalism, Christianity-hating secularism, and intellectual condescension wherever they are found.
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The contempt of her enemies only increases the ardor of her fans. Palin is the most divisive woman in America, supplanting a Hillary Clinton who is losing her electric political charge as Barack Obama’s mostly irrelevant secretary of state. First, Palin divided Democrats and Republicans. Then she divided the conservative commentariat. Finally, she divided the McCain campaign itself, which devolved into an ugly internal war over its vice-presidential nominee.
Palin takes her title from a McCain aide’s description of her refusal to abide by every tittle of the campaign script. The most entertaining parts of her breezy, readable book are when she takes up the long knives herself and plunges them into the McCain aides she believes mishandled her, or trashed her anonymously after the campaign.
Major political candidates don’t typically name and shame staff in their memoirs, but Palin is doing it under extreme provocation. The “was Sarah mishandled?” debate will endure as long as anyone cares about the 2008 campaign. Almost every particular is disputed by someone or other in the McCain camp. It’s fair to say this: Yes, the campaign had a hugely difficult task in taking Palin from 0 to 60 mph on the national stage, but it handled it badly — and, in the end, gracelessly.
Palin has lived to tell the tale because going rogue is now her operating principle. Her base of support is so intense, she doesn’t need supply lines into the political or media establishment. She transformed her Facebook page into a must-read organ of conservative opinion by lobbing “I can’t believe she said that” rhetorical bombshells. No political consultant would ever approve of her M.O.; for Palin’s purposes, no political consultant could possibly improve on it.
