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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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The Revolution Will Be Commercialized
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| Parent(s) |
Candidate
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| Contributor | Penguin |
| Last Edited | Penguin Apr 26, 2010 12:00am |
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| Category | Analysis |
| Author | Gabriel Sherman |
| News Date | Monday, April 26, 2010 05:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | On the morning of July 3, 2009, a national holiday, Sarah Palin placed a call to her communications director and told her that she wanted to hold a press conference at her Wasilla, Alaska, home. She wouldn’t disclose the topic. For Palin, the months since Election Day had been a letdown even bigger than the loss to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Being governor was drudgery. “Her life was terrible,” one adviser says. “She was never home, her [Juneau] office was four hours from her house. You gotta drive an hour from Wasilla to Anchorage. And she was going broke.” Her sky-high approval ratings in Alaska—which had topped 80 percent before John McCain picked her—had withered to the low fifties. She faced a hostile legislature, a barrage of ethics complaints, and frothing local bloggers who reveled in her misfortune. All this for a salary of only $125,000? The worst was that she had racked up $500,000 in legal bills to fend off the trooper scandal and other investigations. She needed money and worried about it constantly. “You have to keep in mind,” Bill McAllister, her then–press secretary, told me, “she and Todd were middle class. They’re rich now, but not then.”
And, whatever one thinks of her intelligence, she was more than shrewd enough to see that there was money to be made on her newfound national profile, and she hadn’t been the one making it—this was her particular American resentment. The tabloid-media culture began cashing in on the Palin-family drama ever since her pregnant 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, and boyfriend Levi Johnston stepped on the Xcel Energy Center stage at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. On multiple occasions, Palin complained to campaign aides about Kaylene Johnson, an Alaska journalist, who had just published a book about her. “I can’t believe that woman is making so much money off my name,” Palin said. |
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