“She manages to be at once a closed book and a constant noisemaker,” he concludes after traveling with her during the spring and summer, “warm and effusive in public, indifferent or angry in private,” her relationship to her audience sealed by mutual resentments.
Palin and the crowd might as well be one. She’s glad to be here with the people of Independence, Missouri, “where so many of you proudly cling to your guns and your religion”—the first laughline in a 40-minute stump speech that alludes to many of the perceived insults she and her audience have suffered together, and that transforms their resentments into badges of honor. Palin waves her scribbled-on palm to the crowd, proclaiming that she’s using “the poor man’s teleprompter.” Of the Obama administration, she says, “They talk down to us. Especially here in the heartland. Oh, man. They think that, if we were just smart enough, we’d be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell ’em, and I do tell ’em, Oh, we’re plenty smart, oh yeah—we know what’s goin’ on. And we don’t like what’s goin’ on. And we’re not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.”
As for Palin’s storytelling, “falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship. Palin owes her power to identity politics, pitched with moralistic topspin. She exploits the same populist impulse that fueled the career of William Jennings Bryan—an impulse described by one Bryan biographer as ‘the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.’”
Read the whole thing — along with the sidebar on her clothes-buying habits during campaign 2008: “Sarah Palin’s Shopping Spree: Yes, There’s More…”
Not everyone is taking the story at face value. Politico’s Ben Smith says the story proves “you can really write anything about Palin.” As evidence he cites one anecdote in it — about Palin talking about a campaign wedding between her pregnant daughter Bristol and Levi Johnston — that he says was “embellished almost beyond recognition,” having involved a conversation between campaign aides, not the principal.
Based on anonymous sources and Palin “friends,” the article also reports that Palin has a vicious temper, snapping at aides and even throwing things at them and at her husband Todd, as well as sleeping apart from him at home. And that she fails to tip staff at hotels or tips them a pittance, despite having earned $13 million since the 2008 presidential race.
More damaging in the long run than titillating anecdotes about Palin’s campaign-era Spanx purchases might be the tangle of financial arrangements described in the article for paying Palin for her speeches since she left the governor’s mansion. The story reports that Timothy Crawford, the treasurer of Palin’s political action committee Sarah-PAC and former interim finance director of the Republican National Committee “is currently being investigated by the Ohio secretary of state for his role in Let Ohio Vote, a state-referendum campaign bankrolled in its entirety by New Models, a Virginia organization Crawford owns, which calls itself a nonprofit.”
“Earlier this year, he refused to respond to a subpoena—issued under state laws that prohibit concealment of campaign money—that sought to discover where New Models had gotten the $1.6 million to fund Let Ohio Vote,” Gross reports.
The story also sheds welcome light on the rest of Palin’s team of advisers:
The small inner circle that shapes Palin’s voice day to day includes lobbyist Randy Scheunemann, a director of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, who advises Palin on foreign affairs, and Kim Daniels, a lawyer with the Thomas More Law Center, which has been called “the Christian answer to the A.C.L.U.,” who advises her on domestic issues. Palin’s speechwriter is Lindsay Hayes. Doug McMarlin and Jason Recher, both of whom did advance work for George W. Bush, serve as body men and confidants. Both Hayes and Recher were on Palin’s 2008-campaign road team, and both were known for indulging her whims, according to their colleagues. (When John McCain decided to pull out of Michigan, a decision Palin disagreed with, Recher and Palin hatched a plan one day to make an early-morning drive to Michigan anyway. The Secret Service, becoming aware of the plan, asked the McCain campaign what it should do. The answer came: “Shoot out the tires.”) Campaign e-mails indicate that Recher was disrespectful of field staff and support workers. “Our volunteers don’t want to do Palin trips because of the way they are treated by Recher,” wrote one of his supervisors. Of all those who have professional relationships with Palin, only Robert Barnett is generally considered to be at the top of his game, and he is basically just cutting deals, as he would for any client.
Palin’s most unconventional hire is a novice media consultant, Rebecca Mansour, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident who has been identified in news stories as a screenwriter.
Mansour, formerly of the spirited and tough-talking blog Conservatives for Palin or C4P, now helps Palin with her Facebook posts and is paid through company called Aries Petra Consulting.
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