UPDATE: White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday that he was not surprised by Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes quotes about President Obama to The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz. “I think if you watch most of the programming on the channel, I don’t think you would find many of those comments surprising,” Gibbs said. Ailes told Kurtz that Obama has a “different belief system than most Americans.” Read part I of the Ailes interview below, in which he also defends Murdoch’s GOP donations and admits Beck sometimes goes too far.
In the media world, as in politics, having a high-profile target can be a very good thing.
The age of Obama has provided a ratings boost for Fox News as its loudest personalities have relished the opportunity to play offense. Critics, of course, view Fox as an unabashed cheerleader for the Republican Party, an evil media empire spewing propaganda and misinformation at a gullible audience.
But Roger Ailes says his network is just reflecting reality when it comes to the White House.
“The president has not been very successful,” the Fox News chairman says in a lengthy interview. “He just got kicked from Mumbai to South Korea, and he came home and attacked _WalmartAd_Republicans for it. He had to be told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with.”
The 70-year-old Ailes, dressed in a lavender shirt and tie, goes on in this vein, saying the network isn’t singling out Obama for criticism but that its style “tends to be more direct” in challenging presidents. Then he offers this observation about Obama:
“He just has a different belief system than most Americans.”
That seems a rather loaded phrase—different belief system—even if you strongly disagree with most of Obama’s policies. It fits the view of those who are trying to paint the president as being outside the mainstream. But from the big second-floor office at Fox’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, it’s the rest of the media that are using a distorted lens.
“He’s had 3,000 press secretaries since he got into office,” Ailes says of Obama, but these days, “he’s making it harder for the press to make him look good… When the press falls in love, they fall in love hard. They’re like teenagers in love. It’s like the old Frankie Lymon song, ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love?’”
Roger Ailes insists that his channel lives up to the logo in its treatment of the administration. (Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images)
Ailes brushes aside suggestions that journalists have been much harder on the president as his sliding popularity has led to a Republican takeover of the House. He is far more sympathetic to Obama’s predecessor:
“This poor guy, sitting down on his ranch clearing brush, gained a lot of respect for keeping his mouth shut. I literally never heard an Obama speech that didn’t blame Bush.”
Obama “had to be told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with.”
• Vicious Infighting at NBC News None of this is personal, you understand. Ailes says he likes Obama, who was gracious to him during last year’s Christmas party, and David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett. He recently had breakfast with Axelrod to discuss Fox’s coverage. But Ailes took an unprovoked swipe at Robert Gibbs, saying the press secretary “is a little big for his britches” and “will end up like that little shithead who worked for Bush”—meaning Scott McClellan, the onetime loyalist who wrote a book criticizing his former boss. Gibbs and the White House declined to respond.
Fox was the favorite network of the Bush White House, the default channel on its television sets and the go-to guys for big interviews. The Obama White House, by contrast, declared rhetorical war on the network last year and rarely provides top officials as guests.
The steady barrage of criticism from the opinion folks, led by Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, has lifted Fox’s ratings, although Ailes says he sees no connection. Fox is averaging 1.1 million viewers this year, an 8 percent jump in Nielsen numbers over 2008, while CNN has dropped 37 percent and MSNBC 15 percent. Unlike two years ago, Fox is averaging more viewers than its two cable rivals combined.
Sipping coffee from a “Fair & Balanced” mug, Ailes insists that his channel lives up to the logo in its treatment of the administration. “We are not interested in savaging them. We are interested _WalmartAd_in the truth. We’re interested in two points of view; most networks aren’t.” Fox has beaten the drums on some stories that the mainstream media have wound up following, such as allegations that led to the resignation of environmental aide Van Jones, and others—such as a voter-intimidation case involving two New Black Panther Party members—that are widely viewed as overblown.
Ailes may dismiss the constant carping about Fox, but he understands the importance of public perception. He says he was “totally surprised” when his parent company, News Corp., donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association and another $1 million to the Chamber of Commerce—and realized that “lefties would use it to immediately try to damage Fox News.”
But Ailes registered no protest. “Rupert Murdoch’s worked for 60 years,” he says. “He’s the biggest media mogul in the world. I don’t think anyone can tell him what to do with his money. That’s sort of his right.”
In a conversation about the donations, Ailes recalls, Murdoch told him: “I hope that didn’t cause you any problems.”
“Nothing we can’t handle,” Ailes replied.
It’s no accident that Fox, which delights in skewering MSNBC, barely mentioned Keith Olbermann’s recent suspension for donating to three Democratic candidates. Ailes had sent word to the troops that it wasn’t much of a story.
“If they went to get the guy, they were going about it fairly stupidly,” Ailes says. “It isn’t like we don’t know the guy supports left-wingers.”
Ailes says he bars his hard-news journalists from making political contributions, but merely discourages the practice for commentators and talk-show hosts. It can “disrupt the appearance of integrity. You have a responsibility not to make your colleagues look like a horse’s ass.”
He draws the line at donating to a candidate while also putting that person on the air, as Olbermann did in the case of Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva. But Hannity did the same thing in giving $5,000 to Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and also interviewing her on his program.
Ailes doesn’t defend the move, saying only: “I don’t think there’s any doubt about what Sean Hannity is.” Last April, an obviously annoyed Ailes ordered Hannity to cancel a show at a Cincinnati Tea Party event for which the organizers were charging admission.
The Fox chief offers a more spirited defense of Beck, who has come under sharp criticism for an attack last week on liberal activist and philanthropist George Soros.
Beck said that Soros, at age 14, accompanied a Hungarian to help him “deliver papers to the Jews, and confiscate their property, and then ship them off… Here’s a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps.” Beck added that Soros had no choice but that he didn’t understand why Soros had done no “soul searching” about his past.
Why go there? Why bring up what an 80-year-old man had to do as a teenager? Ailes says Beck relied on Soros’ own account and that “his point wasn’t really about Nazis or the Holocaust, more about the character of George Soros.” There are some “left-wing rabbis who basically don’t think that anybody can ever use the word, Holocaust, on the air.”
As for Soros, “if he has a problem with Glenn Beck, he ought to man up, come on [the air] and talk to him about it,” Ailes declares. He is still fuming about Soros giving $1 million to the liberal advocacy group Media Matters to help “hold Fox News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast.”
The Anti-Defamation League assailed Beck’s remarks as “completely inappropriate and offensive.” But after Ailes spoke to its national director, Abe Foxman, the ADL executive softened his criticism in a statement calling Beck “a strong supporter of Israel and the Jewish people.”
What about Beck’s other inflammatory outbursts, such as calling Obama a racist? Ailes says that everyone who ad libs for a living makes mistakes. But admits to asking Beck to watch his tone: “He and I have had conversations and lunches where I say, ‘What the hell are you doing, man?’…Beck trashes Republicans every night. I’ve said to him, ‘Where the hell are you going to _WalmartAd_get your audience if you keep this up? You’re trashing everyone.’”
Beck takes such criticism well, Ailes explains, “because he’s so intelligent and basically sensitive.”
There’s one criticism that Ailes doesn’t want to hear. He admonished the staff after unnamed Fox journalists told me they are worried that the divisive Beck is becoming the face of the network.
“Yeah, shut up,” says Ailes. “You’re getting a paycheck. Go on the team or get off the team. Don’t run around here badmouthing a colleague.”
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Tiger Woods writes first-person essay in NEWSWEEK
Tiger Woods, in a first-person essay published Wednesday, said he's "regaining the balance that I'd lost" before his car accident a year ago sent his life into a tailspin.
In a first-person op-ed piece posted by Newsweek, titled "How I've Redefined Victory," Woods wrote about how much his life was out of balance and his priorities were out of order a year ago, when he acknowledged extramarital affairs that cost him three major endorsements and eventually led to his divorce from Elin Nordegren.
"Golf is a self-centered game, in ways good and bad. So much depends on one's own abilities.
But for me, that self-reliance made me think I could tackle the world by myself," Woods wrote. "It made me think that if I was successful in golf, then I was invincible. Now I know that, no matter how tough or strong we are, we all need to rely on others."
" At first, I didn't want to look inward. Frankly, I was scared of what I would find -- what I had become ” -- Tiger Woods
As things fell apart, Woods wrote in the Newsweek piece, he was hesitant to examine how he had "been conducting my personal life in an artificial way," drifting away from the values with which he had been raised.
"At first, I didn't want to look inward," Woods writes. "Frankly, I was scared of what I would find -- what I had become. But I'm grateful that I did examine my life because it has made me more grounded than I've ever been; I hope that with reflection will come wisdom."
Woods said he spends some evenings alone with his two children, and it's helping him appreciate what he had overlooked.
"Giving my son, Charlie, a bath, for example, beats chipping another bucket of balls. Making mac and cheese for him and his sister, Sam, is better than dining in any restaurant," he wrote.
He ends the op-ed piece by writing, "I'm not the same man I was a year ago. And that's a good thing."
Woods, who lost his No. 1 ranking two weeks ago to Lee Westwood, recently returned from two weeks of tournaments in Asia and Australia, where he posted consecutive top 10s for the first time this season, but didn't come close to winning either one. By failing to defend his title in the Australian Masters, it marked the first time in his career he went a calendar year without a win.
How I’ve Redefined Victory
Last November, everything I thought I knew about myself changed abruptly, and what others perceived about me shifted, too. I had been conducting my personal life in an artificial way—as if detached from the values my upbringing had taught, and that I should have embraced.
The physical pain from that car accident has long healed. But the pain in my soul is more complex and unsettling; it has been far more difficult to ease—and to understand. But this much is obvious now: my life was out of balance, and my priorities were out of order. I made terrible choices and repeated mistakes. I hurt the people whom I loved the most. And even beyond accepting the consequences and responsibility, there is the ongoing struggle to learn from my failings.
At first, I didn’t want to look inward. Frankly, I was scared of what I would find—what I had become. But I’m grateful that I did examine my life because it has made me more grounded than I’ve ever been; I hope that with reflection will come wisdom.
Golf is a self-centered game, in ways good and bad. So much depends on one’s own abilities. But for me, that self-reliance made me think I could tackle the world by myself. It made me think that if I was successful in golf, then I was invincible. Now I know that, no matter how tough or strong we are, we all need to rely on others.
Slowly, I’m regaining the balance that I’d lost. My healing process is far from complete, but I am beginning to appreciate things I had overlooked before. I’m learning that some victories can mean smiles, not trophies, and that life’s most ordinary events can bring joy. Giving my son, Charlie, a bath, for example, beats chipping another bucket of balls. Making mac and cheese for him and his sister, Sam, is better than dining in any restaurant. Sharing a laugh watching cartoons or reading a book beats channel-surfing alone. Some nights now, it’s just me and the kids, an experience that’s both trying and rewarding. Probably like the experience a lot of families have every evening around the world.
When I first came back to golf this spring, after taking a necessary break, I was worried about how fans would treat me. But they’ve been kinder and more supportive than I ever imagined possible.
That’s true away from the golf course, too. When I go to the store, or to work out, or to grab lunch, I’ve been amazed by the considerate, encouraging words I hear. I’ve realized that those sentiments are not merely courtesies but generous expressions of compassion for which I’ll always be thankful.
I have a lasting gratitude to those who stood by me in ways large and small. Unfortunately, opportunists are trying still to cash in on my troubles, no matter how irresponsible or ridiculous their claims may be. In many cases, I’ve never even met these people. But there’s no way I can dispute each lie without provoking more. Besides, everyone has probably heard more than they ever wanted to about my private life.
I can never truly repair the damage I’ve done, especially to my family. But I can keep trying. What endures in the record books are the achievements won through competition. What endures in our actual lives is the love of our family and the respect of others. I know now that some things can and must change with time and effort. I’m not the same man I was a year ago. And that’s a good thing.
Woods, one of the winningest golfers of all time, is founder of the Tiger Woods Foundation, which has helped educate more than 10 million kids.
In a first-person op-ed piece posted by Newsweek, titled "How I've Redefined Victory," Woods wrote about how much his life was out of balance and his priorities were out of order a year ago, when he acknowledged extramarital affairs that cost him three major endorsements and eventually led to his divorce from Elin Nordegren.
"Golf is a self-centered game, in ways good and bad. So much depends on one's own abilities.
But for me, that self-reliance made me think I could tackle the world by myself," Woods wrote. "It made me think that if I was successful in golf, then I was invincible. Now I know that, no matter how tough or strong we are, we all need to rely on others."
" At first, I didn't want to look inward. Frankly, I was scared of what I would find -- what I had become ” -- Tiger Woods
As things fell apart, Woods wrote in the Newsweek piece, he was hesitant to examine how he had "been conducting my personal life in an artificial way," drifting away from the values with which he had been raised.
"At first, I didn't want to look inward," Woods writes. "Frankly, I was scared of what I would find -- what I had become. But I'm grateful that I did examine my life because it has made me more grounded than I've ever been; I hope that with reflection will come wisdom."
Woods said he spends some evenings alone with his two children, and it's helping him appreciate what he had overlooked.
"Giving my son, Charlie, a bath, for example, beats chipping another bucket of balls. Making mac and cheese for him and his sister, Sam, is better than dining in any restaurant," he wrote.
He ends the op-ed piece by writing, "I'm not the same man I was a year ago. And that's a good thing."
Woods, who lost his No. 1 ranking two weeks ago to Lee Westwood, recently returned from two weeks of tournaments in Asia and Australia, where he posted consecutive top 10s for the first time this season, but didn't come close to winning either one. By failing to defend his title in the Australian Masters, it marked the first time in his career he went a calendar year without a win.
How I’ve Redefined Victory
Last November, everything I thought I knew about myself changed abruptly, and what others perceived about me shifted, too. I had been conducting my personal life in an artificial way—as if detached from the values my upbringing had taught, and that I should have embraced.
The physical pain from that car accident has long healed. But the pain in my soul is more complex and unsettling; it has been far more difficult to ease—and to understand. But this much is obvious now: my life was out of balance, and my priorities were out of order. I made terrible choices and repeated mistakes. I hurt the people whom I loved the most. And even beyond accepting the consequences and responsibility, there is the ongoing struggle to learn from my failings.
At first, I didn’t want to look inward. Frankly, I was scared of what I would find—what I had become. But I’m grateful that I did examine my life because it has made me more grounded than I’ve ever been; I hope that with reflection will come wisdom.
Golf is a self-centered game, in ways good and bad. So much depends on one’s own abilities. But for me, that self-reliance made me think I could tackle the world by myself. It made me think that if I was successful in golf, then I was invincible. Now I know that, no matter how tough or strong we are, we all need to rely on others.
Slowly, I’m regaining the balance that I’d lost. My healing process is far from complete, but I am beginning to appreciate things I had overlooked before. I’m learning that some victories can mean smiles, not trophies, and that life’s most ordinary events can bring joy. Giving my son, Charlie, a bath, for example, beats chipping another bucket of balls. Making mac and cheese for him and his sister, Sam, is better than dining in any restaurant. Sharing a laugh watching cartoons or reading a book beats channel-surfing alone. Some nights now, it’s just me and the kids, an experience that’s both trying and rewarding. Probably like the experience a lot of families have every evening around the world.
When I first came back to golf this spring, after taking a necessary break, I was worried about how fans would treat me. But they’ve been kinder and more supportive than I ever imagined possible.
That’s true away from the golf course, too. When I go to the store, or to work out, or to grab lunch, I’ve been amazed by the considerate, encouraging words I hear. I’ve realized that those sentiments are not merely courtesies but generous expressions of compassion for which I’ll always be thankful.
I have a lasting gratitude to those who stood by me in ways large and small. Unfortunately, opportunists are trying still to cash in on my troubles, no matter how irresponsible or ridiculous their claims may be. In many cases, I’ve never even met these people. But there’s no way I can dispute each lie without provoking more. Besides, everyone has probably heard more than they ever wanted to about my private life.
I can never truly repair the damage I’ve done, especially to my family. But I can keep trying. What endures in the record books are the achievements won through competition. What endures in our actual lives is the love of our family and the respect of others. I know now that some things can and must change with time and effort. I’m not the same man I was a year ago. And that’s a good thing.
Woods, one of the winningest golfers of all time, is founder of the Tiger Woods Foundation, which has helped educate more than 10 million kids.
SARAH PALIN in your face in your own state!! I LOVE LISA!
Alaska Senate Race for Lisa Murkowski over Joe Miller
The Associated Press is calling the Alaska Senate race for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the incumbent Republican who ran a long shot, write-in re-election campaign.
With just about 700 ballots left to tally, Murkowski has emerged with a large lead over her Republican challenger Joe Miller and is poised to make history by becoming the first victorious write-in candidate in more than 50 years. Murkowski now has 92,715 undisputed votes, according to the Anchorage Daily News, while Miller has 90,468. The state has awarded Murkowski many of the votes challenged by the Miller campaign, giving her a total of 100,868 votes.
However, the race may not be over yet. Miller is asking the Division of Elections to recount the entire Senate race by hand, the Daily News reports. He also has multiple lawsuits pending over the race.
Miller also filed a legal challenge against the state's methodology for counting write-in ballots, asking that all ballots filled out improperly to be filled out. Yet even if the state were to throw out all of the Murkowski votes challenged by the Miller campaign, the incumbent would still have about a 2,000-vote lead over Miller.
The Republican also filed suit to get access to voter rolls from several precincts, according to the Daily News, in order to compare the number of ballots cast to the number of people who signed in to vote in those precincts.
Miller could also potentially file suit over his request for a hand recount, since the Alaska Division of Elections Director said the state does not conduct recounts by hand. If there were a recount, Miller would be responsible for paying for it.
Murkowski is headed back to Alaska today, after traveling to Washington this week, where she was congratulated yesterday on her apparent victory by her colleagues in the Senate. A spokesman for Murkowski said she will declare victory tonight, CNN reports.
A number of high-profile conservatives such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin have supported Miller's legal challenges. As late as Tuesday night, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was urging his supporters to make a donation towards Miller's efforts. By contrast, former GOP presidential contender Fred Thompson said on his radio show today that it's time for Miller to bow out.
"Joe Miller ought to give it up and live to fight another day," he said. "Show a little class. All those people around you who had big plans based upon your success are going to have to back off now. Don't let them take you through this court system forever, trying to hang on by your fingernails."
The Associated Press is calling the Alaska Senate race for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the incumbent Republican who ran a long shot, write-in re-election campaign.
With just about 700 ballots left to tally, Murkowski has emerged with a large lead over her Republican challenger Joe Miller and is poised to make history by becoming the first victorious write-in candidate in more than 50 years. Murkowski now has 92,715 undisputed votes, according to the Anchorage Daily News, while Miller has 90,468. The state has awarded Murkowski many of the votes challenged by the Miller campaign, giving her a total of 100,868 votes.
However, the race may not be over yet. Miller is asking the Division of Elections to recount the entire Senate race by hand, the Daily News reports. He also has multiple lawsuits pending over the race.
Miller also filed a legal challenge against the state's methodology for counting write-in ballots, asking that all ballots filled out improperly to be filled out. Yet even if the state were to throw out all of the Murkowski votes challenged by the Miller campaign, the incumbent would still have about a 2,000-vote lead over Miller.
The Republican also filed suit to get access to voter rolls from several precincts, according to the Daily News, in order to compare the number of ballots cast to the number of people who signed in to vote in those precincts.
Miller could also potentially file suit over his request for a hand recount, since the Alaska Division of Elections Director said the state does not conduct recounts by hand. If there were a recount, Miller would be responsible for paying for it.
Murkowski is headed back to Alaska today, after traveling to Washington this week, where she was congratulated yesterday on her apparent victory by her colleagues in the Senate. A spokesman for Murkowski said she will declare victory tonight, CNN reports.
A number of high-profile conservatives such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin have supported Miller's legal challenges. As late as Tuesday night, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was urging his supporters to make a donation towards Miller's efforts. By contrast, former GOP presidential contender Fred Thompson said on his radio show today that it's time for Miller to bow out.
"Joe Miller ought to give it up and live to fight another day," he said. "Show a little class. All those people around you who had big plans based upon your success are going to have to back off now. Don't let them take you through this court system forever, trying to hang on by your fingernails."
YOUNG MC 'Bust A Move' I just heard it on the radio and I like this rappper. So there!!
This here's a jam for all the fellas
Tryin to do what those ladies tell us
Get shot down cause ya over-zealous
Play hard to get females get jealous
Okay smarty go to a party
Girls are scantily clad and showin body
A chich walks by you wish you could sex her
But you're standing on the wall like you was Poindexter
Next days function high class luncheon
Food they're serving, you're stone-cold munchin
Music comes on people start to dance
But then you ate so much you nearly split your pants
A girl starts walking guys start gawking
Sits down next to you and starts talking
Says she wants to dance cause she likes to groove
So come on fatso and just bust a move
Verse Two:
You're on a mission and your wishin
Someone could cure your lonely condition
Lookin for love in all the wrongplaces
No fine girls just ugly faces
Some frustration first inclination
Is to become a monk and leave the situation
But every dark tunnel has a light of hope
So don't hang yourself, with a celibate rope
Your movie's showin, so you're goin
Could care less about the five you're blowin
Theater gets dark just to start the show
Then ya spot a fine woman sittin in your row
She's dressed in yellow, she says "Hello,
come sit next to me you fine fellow."
You run over there without a second to lose
And what comes next hey bust a move
Verse Three:
In this city ladies look pretty
Guys tell jokes so they can seem witty
Tell a funny joke just to get some play
Then you try to make a move and she says, "No way"
Girls are fakin goodness sakin
They want the man who brings home the bacon
Got no money and you got no car
Then you got no women and there you are
Some girls are sadistic, materialistic
Lookin for a man makes them opportunistic
They're lyin on a beach perpetrating a tan
So a brother with the money can be their man
So on the beach you're strollin real high rollin
Everything you have is yours and not stolen
A girl runs up with somethin to prove
So don't just stand there bust a move
Verse Four:
Your best friend Harry has a brother Larry
In five days from now he's gonna marry
He's hopin you can make it there if you can
Cause in the ceremony you'll be the best man
You say neat-o, check your libido
And roll to the church in your new tuxedo
The bride walks down just to start the wedding
And there's one more girl you won't be getting
So you start thinkin then you start blinking
The bridesmaid looks and thinks that you're winking
She thinks your kinda cute so she winks back
And now your feelin really firm cause the girl is stacked
Reception's jumpin faces pumpin
You look at the girl and your heart starts thumpin
Says she wants to dance to a different groove
Now you know what to do just bust a move
Tryin to do what those ladies tell us
Get shot down cause ya over-zealous
Play hard to get females get jealous
Okay smarty go to a party
Girls are scantily clad and showin body
A chich walks by you wish you could sex her
But you're standing on the wall like you was Poindexter
Next days function high class luncheon
Food they're serving, you're stone-cold munchin
Music comes on people start to dance
But then you ate so much you nearly split your pants
A girl starts walking guys start gawking
Sits down next to you and starts talking
Says she wants to dance cause she likes to groove
So come on fatso and just bust a move
Verse Two:
You're on a mission and your wishin
Someone could cure your lonely condition
Lookin for love in all the wrongplaces
No fine girls just ugly faces
Some frustration first inclination
Is to become a monk and leave the situation
But every dark tunnel has a light of hope
So don't hang yourself, with a celibate rope
Your movie's showin, so you're goin
Could care less about the five you're blowin
Theater gets dark just to start the show
Then ya spot a fine woman sittin in your row
She's dressed in yellow, she says "Hello,
come sit next to me you fine fellow."
You run over there without a second to lose
And what comes next hey bust a move
Verse Three:
In this city ladies look pretty
Guys tell jokes so they can seem witty
Tell a funny joke just to get some play
Then you try to make a move and she says, "No way"
Girls are fakin goodness sakin
They want the man who brings home the bacon
Got no money and you got no car
Then you got no women and there you are
Some girls are sadistic, materialistic
Lookin for a man makes them opportunistic
They're lyin on a beach perpetrating a tan
So a brother with the money can be their man
So on the beach you're strollin real high rollin
Everything you have is yours and not stolen
A girl runs up with somethin to prove
So don't just stand there bust a move
Verse Four:
Your best friend Harry has a brother Larry
In five days from now he's gonna marry
He's hopin you can make it there if you can
Cause in the ceremony you'll be the best man
You say neat-o, check your libido
And roll to the church in your new tuxedo
The bride walks down just to start the wedding
And there's one more girl you won't be getting
So you start thinkin then you start blinking
The bridesmaid looks and thinks that you're winking
She thinks your kinda cute so she winks back
And now your feelin really firm cause the girl is stacked
Reception's jumpin faces pumpin
You look at the girl and your heart starts thumpin
Says she wants to dance to a different groove
Now you know what to do just bust a move
GOP to jobless: Drop dead
More than a century ago, a former congressman from Nebraska electrified delegates gathered in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention with a stirring denunciation of Wall Street and the monied interests that would put an over-indebted country through a wrenching recession in order to maintain the gold standard.
"You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns," bellowed William Jennings Bryan as he brought the convention to its feet. "You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of gold."
The world has supposedly learned a thing or two about economics since Bryan's day, including the limits of clinging mindlessly to hard money during depressions and bouts of price deflation. But you'd never know it listening to the newly empowered and emboldened Republicans who have returned to Washington determined not just to reduce government's role in the economy, but to thoroughly emasculate it.
Their latest target is the Federal Reserve, whose sin seems to be that it has taken seriously its dual mandate to maintain price stability (that is, to prevent inflationary or deflationary spirals from taking hold) while encouraging full employment. Over the summer, when it became clear to Fed officials that their policy of zero interest rates might not be sufficient to stop prices from falling and unemployment from rising, they began laying out publicly the justification for injecting yet more money into the economy by buying $600 billion of longer-term Treasury bonds.
This policy of "quantitative easing," has its detractors, including this columnist, who warned that it would prove more effective at creating asset bubbles at home and abroad than at stimulating productive investment and job creation. There was even some skepticism within the Fed when the policy was finally approved two weeks ago. Now, however, those disagreements have been seized upon by Republican ideologues and partisan opportunists who are intent on punishing the Fed for its participation in the bank bailouts and discrediting all forms of Keynesian monetary and fiscal stimulus.
The first efforts to turn Ben Bernanke into a modern day William Jennings Bryan came from those giants of economic thinking, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. A few days later the mantle was taken up by a group of Republican economists and policy wonks who gathered at the University of Pennsylvania Club in Manhattan to craft a public letter criticizing the Fed.
Then last weekend at the Group of 20 meeting in Seoul, the Republican campaign for "hard money" received aid and comfort from foreign leaders concerned that quantitative easing might substitute American jobs for Chinese and German ones. Also jumping on the bandwagon was Robert Zoellick, the American president of the World Bank, who no doubt hoped to boost his prospects as the next Republican Treasury Secretary by floating the idea of a partial return to the gold standard.
Finally Tuesday, Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking Republican in the House, and Sen. Bob Corker, an influential Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, announced a proposal to strip the Fed of its "dual mandate" that would have the central bank focus solely on ensuring price stability without the distraction of also worrying that 15 million Americans are unemployed and underemployed. "The Fed's dual mandate policy has failed," Pence declared, citing the stubbornly high unemployment rate. It's not exactly clear how unemployed workers would benefit from the Fed's benign neglect.
If you want a serious discussion about changing the structure or mandate of the fire department, the time to have it is not when the entire squad is out fighting a three-alarm blaze. That's exactly the situation with the Federal Reserve and the debate over the dual mandate. Only two weeks after the midterm election, it seems clear that the 2012 campaign has begun. For too many Republicans, the aim is to politicize policy, trash the institutions of government and intimidate anyone who might disagree with their radical ideology.
There's no better proof of that than the so-called debate over extending the Bush tax cuts on incomes above $250,000. Unable to defend more tax cuts for the rich, Republicans like to pretend that their real concern is for job creation, citing the fact that about half of all business profits now flow through partnerships and small corporations that are taxed at personal rates.
But look more closely at the argument and it turns out to be "largely bogus," according to Eric Toder, a former Treasury and IRS official who now works at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Very few of those businesses earn more than $250,000 in profit, and those that do tend to be very successful hedge funds and law firms that are flush with cash and unlikely to be dissuaded from hiring extra employees or make new investments because of a 4 percentage-point change in the marginal tax. Because most hiring and investment can be done with pre-tax dollars, Toder said, the tax rate is largely irrelevant to those decisions.
That's the micro view. The macro view, from the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers of St. Louis, is that not extending tax cuts for high-income households would reduce gross domestic product growth by - drumroll here - two-tenths of one percent in each of the next two years. And the difference in the unemployment rate? A whopping one tenth of one percent!
These inconvenient truths, however, are simply ignored by Republicans, who would have us all believe that extending upper-income tax cuts is the most crucial economic issue we face - not just this year but for all time.
In fact, if Republicans were truly interested in reducing the deficit while stimulating private-sector job creation, they would have jumped to embrace the idea floated last week by Sen. Mark Warner, the centrist Democrat from Virginia: let high-end tax rates return to where they were during the Clinton years and use the $65 billion in additional income over the next two years for tax breaks for businesses that increase investments or hire new employees. After that, the extra revenue would go toward deficit reduction.
And how many of Warner's Republican colleagues have called to express interest in his idea? So far, not a one.
Steven Pearlstein
Washingto Post
"You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns," bellowed William Jennings Bryan as he brought the convention to its feet. "You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of gold."
The world has supposedly learned a thing or two about economics since Bryan's day, including the limits of clinging mindlessly to hard money during depressions and bouts of price deflation. But you'd never know it listening to the newly empowered and emboldened Republicans who have returned to Washington determined not just to reduce government's role in the economy, but to thoroughly emasculate it.
Their latest target is the Federal Reserve, whose sin seems to be that it has taken seriously its dual mandate to maintain price stability (that is, to prevent inflationary or deflationary spirals from taking hold) while encouraging full employment. Over the summer, when it became clear to Fed officials that their policy of zero interest rates might not be sufficient to stop prices from falling and unemployment from rising, they began laying out publicly the justification for injecting yet more money into the economy by buying $600 billion of longer-term Treasury bonds.
This policy of "quantitative easing," has its detractors, including this columnist, who warned that it would prove more effective at creating asset bubbles at home and abroad than at stimulating productive investment and job creation. There was even some skepticism within the Fed when the policy was finally approved two weeks ago. Now, however, those disagreements have been seized upon by Republican ideologues and partisan opportunists who are intent on punishing the Fed for its participation in the bank bailouts and discrediting all forms of Keynesian monetary and fiscal stimulus.
The first efforts to turn Ben Bernanke into a modern day William Jennings Bryan came from those giants of economic thinking, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. A few days later the mantle was taken up by a group of Republican economists and policy wonks who gathered at the University of Pennsylvania Club in Manhattan to craft a public letter criticizing the Fed.
Then last weekend at the Group of 20 meeting in Seoul, the Republican campaign for "hard money" received aid and comfort from foreign leaders concerned that quantitative easing might substitute American jobs for Chinese and German ones. Also jumping on the bandwagon was Robert Zoellick, the American president of the World Bank, who no doubt hoped to boost his prospects as the next Republican Treasury Secretary by floating the idea of a partial return to the gold standard.
Finally Tuesday, Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking Republican in the House, and Sen. Bob Corker, an influential Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, announced a proposal to strip the Fed of its "dual mandate" that would have the central bank focus solely on ensuring price stability without the distraction of also worrying that 15 million Americans are unemployed and underemployed. "The Fed's dual mandate policy has failed," Pence declared, citing the stubbornly high unemployment rate. It's not exactly clear how unemployed workers would benefit from the Fed's benign neglect.
If you want a serious discussion about changing the structure or mandate of the fire department, the time to have it is not when the entire squad is out fighting a three-alarm blaze. That's exactly the situation with the Federal Reserve and the debate over the dual mandate. Only two weeks after the midterm election, it seems clear that the 2012 campaign has begun. For too many Republicans, the aim is to politicize policy, trash the institutions of government and intimidate anyone who might disagree with their radical ideology.
There's no better proof of that than the so-called debate over extending the Bush tax cuts on incomes above $250,000. Unable to defend more tax cuts for the rich, Republicans like to pretend that their real concern is for job creation, citing the fact that about half of all business profits now flow through partnerships and small corporations that are taxed at personal rates.
But look more closely at the argument and it turns out to be "largely bogus," according to Eric Toder, a former Treasury and IRS official who now works at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Very few of those businesses earn more than $250,000 in profit, and those that do tend to be very successful hedge funds and law firms that are flush with cash and unlikely to be dissuaded from hiring extra employees or make new investments because of a 4 percentage-point change in the marginal tax. Because most hiring and investment can be done with pre-tax dollars, Toder said, the tax rate is largely irrelevant to those decisions.
That's the micro view. The macro view, from the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers of St. Louis, is that not extending tax cuts for high-income households would reduce gross domestic product growth by - drumroll here - two-tenths of one percent in each of the next two years. And the difference in the unemployment rate? A whopping one tenth of one percent!
These inconvenient truths, however, are simply ignored by Republicans, who would have us all believe that extending upper-income tax cuts is the most crucial economic issue we face - not just this year but for all time.
In fact, if Republicans were truly interested in reducing the deficit while stimulating private-sector job creation, they would have jumped to embrace the idea floated last week by Sen. Mark Warner, the centrist Democrat from Virginia: let high-end tax rates return to where they were during the Clinton years and use the $65 billion in additional income over the next two years for tax breaks for businesses that increase investments or hire new employees. After that, the extra revenue would go toward deficit reduction.
And how many of Warner's Republican colleagues have called to express interest in his idea? So far, not a one.
Steven Pearlstein
Washingto Post
This what baby P's really think! They are their MOM's little cubs and she is getting more weirder!
Palin's Kid Uses Homophobic Slurs
We hope no one showed her the reviews: Willow Palin, 16-year-old daughter of Sarah, attacked fellow students who made fun of her mom’s TLC television show on Facebook, telling one “you're so gay” and another “you're such a faggot.”
Bristol Palin also weighed in on the thread, saying “you’re running your mouth just to talk shit.” Later, Bristol apologized, saying “Willow and I shouldn't have reacted to negative comments about our family. We apologize.
On a nicer note, thank you for supporting the great competition in Dancing with the Stars!” Bristol was voted into the finals of Dancing with the Stars, despite consistently receiving the lowest scores from the judges.
Read it at TMZ
We hope no one showed her the reviews: Willow Palin, 16-year-old daughter of Sarah, attacked fellow students who made fun of her mom’s TLC television show on Facebook, telling one “you're so gay” and another “you're such a faggot.”
Bristol Palin also weighed in on the thread, saying “you’re running your mouth just to talk shit.” Later, Bristol apologized, saying “Willow and I shouldn't have reacted to negative comments about our family. We apologize.
On a nicer note, thank you for supporting the great competition in Dancing with the Stars!” Bristol was voted into the finals of Dancing with the Stars, despite consistently receiving the lowest scores from the judges.
Read it at TMZ
The Palin Network (OH NO AMERICA SHE's THINKS!!)
On the night of the midterm elections earlier this month, Sarah Palin stayed up until 3 in the morning. From her hotel bedroom in Manhattan, she and her husband, Todd, followed the returns while she wrote e-mails on her iPad — congratulating winners, consoling losers — while reading others from people who wanted her to know that they had cast their vote for her daughter Bristol on “Dancing With the Stars” the evening before.
Like much of her recent life, Palin’s day had been replete with reminders of the clout she had rapidly acquired. She had spent most of her time ensconced at the Fox television studios, though she managed to squeeze in a jog in Central Park — which she promptly chronicled on Twitter: “Beautiful!” Also at the studios was her fellow Fox News contributor Karl Rove, who had recently questioned in a British newspaper whether Palin’s new reality TV series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” made her appear Oval Office-worthy. The building was abuzz over what would ensue when the two would inevitably bump into each other. The moment came after Palin finished a segment with the anchor Bret Baier and saw Rove lingering stageside with Brit Hume, a Fox colleague, holding a well-marked copy of “Alaska for Dummies” — a prop clearly intended to mollify Palin. She laughed, used her phone’s camera to take a picture of Rove with the book, traded brief hellos and then left the studio without mentioning Rove’s earlier comment.
Of course, Palin’s purpose for being at Fox on Nov. 2 was to share her views on the midterm elections that she worked so vigorously to influence. It was indicative of the competing demands on her time that her participation in the campaign’s final days was weirdly anticlimactic. In the three weeks before the elections, Palin was bombarded with campaigning requests, many of them sent to her personal e-mail account. But her young son, Trig, was to have an operation — routine but still worrisome — on the Friday before Election Day, and so the mother was loath to commit to anything. Trig’s procedure went well. That evening, Palin’s political adviser, Andrew Davis, pulled an all-nighter arranging for her to make a Saturday drop-in on behalf of John Raese, the West Virginia senatorial candidate who was trailing the Democratic nominee, Joe Manchin, the popular governor. Raese’s wife, Elizabeth, had issued a personal plea to Palin to save the day.
After Palin arrived in Charleston, and exhorted the state’s “mountain mamas” to “keep Manchin in the mansion,” she and Todd flew to New York on Saturday afternoon. She was still mulling over several invitations to campaign along the Eastern Seaboard. One was a Tea Party Express event in Wilmington, Del., in support of the controversial senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell. Palin’s endorsement of O’Donnell over a more-moderate candidate had been catalytic to her primary victory. Later Palin authorized an adviser, Randy Scheunemann, and two others to go to Wilmington to help O’Donnell in her debate preparation. But this particular event for the woman who proclaimed “I’m not a witch” was on Sunday — Halloween — and Palin prudently elected not to attend. Instead, she spent the afternoon watching the New York Jets play from the luxury box of the team’s owner, Woody Johnson.
In Syracuse, meanwhile, the campaign staff for the Republican Congressional candidate Ann Marie Buerkle, who had erased her Democratic opponent’s double-digit lead, was begging for Palin to make an appearance. Despite significant logistical complications, Palin wanted to oblige them. But a story in Politico (“Next for G.O.P. Leaders: Stopping Sarah Palin”) that quoted unnamed party operatives fretting over Palin’s growing popularity had her juices flowing, and her schedule suddenly became cluttered with Fox segments, which allowed her a platform to fight back. (“Some within the establishment don’t like the fact that I won’t back down to a good-old-boys’ club,” she declared on Fox Business Network.) On the day before the elections, she could find time to record only one final robocall of more than 25 she made throughout the campaign cycle — this one for Tom Tancredo, a third-party candidate for governor of Colorado whose strident remarks about illegal immigration made him a “destructive” force according to the Tea Party leader Dick Armey.
As it developed, Tancredo would lose by 14 points and Raese by 10, while Buerkle’s race was so close that a recount was imminent. The fate of another endorsee, Joe Miller — who was running for a U.S. Senate seat in Alaska against a Palin nemesis, Lisa Murkowski — remained in doubt. Palin had thrown her early support to two candidates backed by the Tea Party who wound up losing, O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada, which helped the Democratic Party retain control of the Senate. Nonetheless, it was a good night in Palin’s estimation: a majority of her endorsees won, the Republicans took the House and Bristol survived another round of voting on “Dancing With the Stars.” After three or four hours of sleep, the Palins took a commercial flight (economy class) out of Kennedy Airport on the morning of Nov. 3, headed back to Wasilla, Alaska.
Andrew Davis, her adviser, saw the Palins off, and I met him for coffee later that morning in Midtown Manhattan. Davis is a personable and quick-witted 33-year-old Massachusetts native who was a deputy campaign manager for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2004 and later an opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee before working with Palin at the close of the 2008 campaign. He’s nonetheless low-profile in the extreme, like all of Palin’s senior associates. (The New York Times Magazine’s photo editors had been trying to find an image of Davis; he assured me that they would not succeed.) Davis and his colleagues recognize that the issue of trust informs Sarah Palin’s every dealing with the world beyond Wasilla since her circular-firing-squad experience at the close of the 2008 presidential campaign. Her inner circle shuns the media and would speak to me only after Palin authorized it, a process that took months. They are content to labor in a world without hierarchy or even job descriptions — “None of us has titles,” Davis said — and where the adhesive is a personal devotion to Palin rather than the furtherance of her political career.
Davis’s main task this year had been serving as Palin’s point man throughout the endorsement process. He was now tallying her midterm scorecard, which at the time was 50 wins and 32 losses (with 8 not yet decided), including victories by 14 so-called mama grizzly Republican candidates. Some of Palin’s picks were early, bold and pivotal, as in the case of Nikki Haley, who is now South Carolina’s governor-elect. Other picks — like those for Tim Scott (South Carolina’s first Republican African-American congressman in more than a century) and Marco Rubio (the incoming senator from Florida and a rising G.O.P. star on par with Palin) — came too late to be consequential except, perhaps, to her own ambitions. Palin also raised more than $10 million for Republican candidates and committees — including the Republican National Committee, which plastered her image on the center of its Web page at the close of the election cycle. Having crawled from the wreckage of the 2008 presidential campaign and her much-derided resignation as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin had emerged as arguably the most captivating and influential Republican in America — and therefore a viable contender for the presidential nomination in 2012.
So I asked her political adviser whether there would be a summoning of the troops in the coming days to discuss what the next moves will be. Davis laughed and replied, “That’s not going to happen.” Each of them, he said, would simply be doing the work that was in front of them that day, the way things always operated in Palin World. I brought up an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken three weeks before, which concluded that Palin’s favorability rating among registered voters stood at 39 percent, while 54 percent viewed her unfavorably and a whopping 67 percent saw her as unqualified to be president. “On a staff level, we all think about ways we can improve her numbers,” Davis said. “It’s politics — that’s our job.” But, I pressed, had he discussed the subject with her? “I’m not going to sit around and ask her, ‘What do you think of your approval rating?’ ” Davis said. “I’m just not.” Then he added, “Maybe the family’s talked about it.”
“I am,” Sarah Palin told me the next day when I asked her if she was already weighing a run for president. “I’m engaged in the internal deliberations candidly, and having that discussion with my family, because my family is the most important consideration here.” Palin went on to say that there weren’t meaningful differences in policy among the field of G.O.P. hopefuls “but that in fact there’s more to the presidency than that” and that her decision would involve evaluating whether she could bring unique qualities to the table.
“Yes, the organization would have to change,” Palin said during an hourlong phone conversation. “I’d have to bring in more people — more people who are trustworthy,” she clarified. Palin said that her experience as John McCain’s running mate was for the most part “amazing, wonderful, do it again in a heartbeat.” But she added, “What Todd and I learned was that the view inside the bus was much better than underneath it, and we knew we got thrown under it by certain aides who weren’t principled” and that “the experience taught us, yes, to be on guard and be very discerning about who we can and can’t trust in the political arena.”
She went on: “I know that a hurdle I would have to cross, that some other potential candidates wouldn’t have to cross right out of the chute, is proving my record. That’s the most frustrating thing for me — the warped and perverted description of my record and what I’ve accomplished over the last two decades. It’s been much more perplexing to me than where the lamestream media has wanted to go about my personal life. And other candidates haven’t faced these criticisms the way I have.”
I asked her if by avoiding the national press, she didn’t bear at least some responsibility for the way the public viewed her. “I’m on television nearly every single day with reporters,” she shot back. “Now granted, that’s mainly through my job at Fox News, and I’m very proud to be associated with them, but I’m not avoiding anything or anybody. I’m on Facebook and Twitter. I’m out there. I want to talk about my record, though.” Palin was referring to “getting in there and cleaning up corruption, taking on the oil companies and the good old boys in the party, things like the natural-gas pipeline” and “getting things out of the government’s hands, like the state-owned dairy creamery in Alaska.” Asked if she believed in 2008 that these accomplishments made her at least as qualified as Barack Obama to be president, her response was immediate: “Absolutely. If I had any doubt in my ability or administrative experience that would’ve been put to good use in a McCain administration, then I never would have accepted the nomination.”
Palin told me that because of the media’s unfairness toward her, “I fear for our democracy.” She cited a recent Anchorage Daily News article that commented on her casual manner of dress at a rally for Joe Miller, as well as a Politico headline that used the word “drama” for an item about Representative Michele Bachmann’s quest for a Republican leadership position. Palin viewed these references as sexist — but also, she said, as “distractions.”
Purposefully distracting, I asked, or just simplistic? “How can it be simplistic?” she scoffed. “They’re the elite,” she said sarcastically of news organizations. “They know much more than I know and other people like me! So, no. They know just what they’re doing.”
Sarah Palin’s withering regard for the media co-exists with the fact that Sarah Palin is a media sensation. Throughout this year’s midterm cycle, no one commanded as much free time on the air as Palin, who of course wasn’t running for office herself. Her mere presence or nonpresence at various campaign events — or the distance that wary Republican candidates kept from her — routinely eclipsed whatever else took place at the events themselves. Concurrently, Palin’s denunciations of the Obama White House via Twitter garnered substantial attention not because the opinions were especially novel but because they were expressed with the brashness of a wily headline-grabber. All of this in addition to the fact that Palin, a former journalism major and sportscaster, happens to be a member of the media herself: a salaried Fox News contributor, the star of her own television series and a best-selling author whose second book, “America by Heart,” will be released by HarperCollins this week with a first printing of 1 million copies and her pick of promotional slots offered up by her adversaries in the press.
Almost everything about Palin is fresh, including her wounds. “She gives as good as she gets,” says the admiring former Republican strategist Mary Matalin. “But I don’t know her well enough to know if she’s developed the thick skin you need to be endlessly resilient, the way Reagan could take things for decades and let them roll off his back.” Like many Republicans, Palin hails Reagan as her political guiding light. But she has yet to channel the Gipper’s soothing sunniness, instead she seems haloed in static electricity — “a walking wedge issue,” as one leading conservative commentator recently described her. The road to a presidential candidacy traditionally involves a carefully sequenced gathering of tribes and marking of territory. Palin has ignored this playbook. Her only-dead-fish-go-with-the-flow improvisatory ethic is certifiably anti-Beltway and confers on Palin an aura of authenticity. It is also erratic and short on self-discipline, reminding us that Sarah Palin’s ascendency is recent and she remains a work in progress — all the while casting a very long shadow over the Republican Party, shaped like a question mark.
One afternoon in June 2009, Gov. Sarah Palin was sitting in the Washington office of her friend Fred Malek, whom she met through McCain during the 2008 campaign. She was listening to the former White House aide to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford map out logical next steps to her political career. Focus on amassing a good record as governor, he advised her. Run for a second term. Develop some policy expertise. Do some extensive overseas travel. Generate some good will by campaigning for fellow Republicans.
Malek told me that he could tell that this wasn’t what Palin wanted to hear. Here’s the problem, she replied impatiently: I’ve got a long commute from my house to my office. I don’t have the funds to pay for my family to travel with me, and the state won’t pay for it, either. I can’t afford to have security at my home — anybody can come up to my door, and they do. Under the laws of Alaska, anybody can file suit or an ethics charge against me, and I have to defend it on my own. I’m going into debt.
Nothing in her former world as a small-town mayor and the governor of a sparsely populated state prepared Palin for the perverse celebrity that would engulf her after being selected as McCain’s vice-presidential candidate. For better and for worse, she was now a household name, beloved or ridiculed by strangers all across America. The caricature of Palin as a vapid, winking, press-averse clotheshorse proved irresistible to late-night entertainers. Less well known was the Palin who agitated for more access to the media (other than Katie Couric), who was seen more than once passed out on her hotel bed half-buried in briefing books and index cards and whose thriftiness when it came to her wardrobe was so obvious that one senior strategist clucked of the Palins, “These people shop at Dillards!”
The advisers who strenuously advocated for McCain to select Palin seemed as unprepared for her as they would later claim she was for the national stage. They had planned on deploying Palin like a conventional vice-presidential candidate — fund-raisers, secondary markets — but otherwise stowing her away for heavy debate prep. Instead, “because she was a much bigger draw at rallies than McCain himself,” a former adviser says, the budget for her side of the campaign “quadrupled from what they’d anticipated; the amount of personnel had to be ratcheted up, and dealing with the Palin phenomenon came to consume much of [senior strategist Steve] Schmidt’s time.” Adoring fans screamed “Sarah! Sarah!” and wept as she greeted them on rope lines, but away from the crowds she felt increasingly isolated from her Alaska clan and distrustful of the staff members who would soon be anonymously criticizing her in the media. During Palin’s debate prep sessions in Philadelphia, Senator Joe Lieberman was summoned to offer support to the overwhelmed and demoralized candidate. “Schmidt says to me, ‘You’ve got something in common with her that we don’t have: you’re both religious,’ ” Lieberman told me. “He actually said, ‘Why don’t you go in and pray with her? She was on the phone yesterday with [former Gov. Kay Orr of Nebraska], and they’d prayed at the end, and it seemed to make her feel better. ’ ”
Upon losing the election, Palin hoped to return to an Alaska where, as she put it to me, “people were thankful that I was in the governor’s office.” It therefore chagrined her when she learned that Democratic legislators like Hollis French and Beth Kerttula were no longer her allies. McCain’s staff, meanwhile, reneged on a promise to cover the costs for any legal inquiry that arose during the campaign, Palin told me.
A few friends from the Beltway rushed to her defense. In December 2008, John Coale, a lawyer and a Democrat whose wife is the Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, offered to set up a political action committee and a legal-defense fund for her. Fred Malek, meanwhile, began connecting Palin to his Beltway cohort. At Malek’s home in McLean, Va., the night before the clubby annual Washington gala known as the Alfalfa Club dinner, he introduced her to Alan Greenspan, Madeleine Albright, Dianne Feinstein, Andrea Mitchell, Mitch McConnell, Walter Isaacson and Dick and Liz Cheney, among others. (To Liz she exclaimed, “It’s so great to meet another mother of five!”) Later Malek hosted a foreign-policy lunch discussion with Palin; Frank Carlucci, a former secretary of defense under Reagan; Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution; and Gregory Newbold, a retired three-star general. Talbott received an appreciative grin from Palin when he told her that he himself had seen Russia from an island off the coast of Alaska — “I defended you on that.”
Three weeks after telling Malek that her life was difficult, Palin abruptly resigned as governor. Determined to reclaim her narrative and settle a few scores along the way, she enlisted the services of the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, who negotiated lucrative book deals for both Clintons as well as George W. Bush. Palin surprised him with a packet of more than 20,000 words that she had already written about her childhood in Alaska. Palin spent the summer of 2009 hunkered down in a Del Mar, Calif., condominium working on her memoir with her communications director, Meghan Stapleton, and a book collaborator named Lynn Vincent. During the day, Palin took her laptop out by the condo complex’s swimming pool and sat there writing in her sun visor and flip-flops, apparently unrecognized by the other residents. And she would stay up writing until 5 in the morning.
A few months later, while touring to promote her book, “Going Rogue,” Palin’s bus pulled into Roanoke, Va., one Sunday in November, the night before an appearance at a bookstore. The author was astonished to see more than 500 people encamped outside the store, many of them in sleeping bags. “Oh, my God, it’s so cold!” Palin exclaimed as she bounded out of the bus to greet her ecstatic fans. “I can’t believe you’re waiting for me!”
But they had waited, and now she had arrived.
His voice dripping with exasperation, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said to me one July afternoon in his office: “If I would have told you that I could open up a Facebook account or a Twitter account, simply post quotes, and have the White House asked about those, and to have the entire White House press corps focused on your quote of the day on Facebook — that’s Sarah Palin. She tweets one thing, and all of a sudden you’ve got a room full of people that want to know. . . .”
Gibbs shook his head and continued: “Now, I could say, ‘You know what? I’m not going to deal with that.’ And big headline: Palin Accuses Obama of X. The White House Had No Comment.”
“I just tweet; that’s just the way I roll,” Palin told me. “Just expressing my feelings via Twitter and Facebook. I choose them because they’re convenient for me, especially from Wasilla.” She continued: “The only thing I do consider is when I think of what’s going on in the East Coast, with the difference in time zones. I can tweet before going to bed at midnight or 1 and know that they’re up and at ’em, and they’re going to have to respond.” In this compressed, no-nuance cyberzone, Palin can land a hard punch without ever setting foot in the ring — calling the then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel “as shallow/narrowminded/political/irresponsible as they come” and saying the Politico writer Jonathan Martin is “full of crap.” In July, Palin’s BlackBerry spewed out a much-publicized volley of tweets calling on peaceful Muslims to “refudiate” the “ground zero mosque” and in the process suckering Obama into taking a position for which he was attacked by all sides. Palin wrote these without consulting anyone, her lawyer Thomas Van Flein told me: “I found out like everyone else did. This is her political instinct in action.”
Van Flein said this as we met for coffee one morning in Anchorage a week before the midterm elections. It’s a curious feature of Palin World that none of its charter members knew her before 2008. (Her two longtime Alaska aides, Kris Perry and Meghan Stapleton, left amicably but wearied by the demands involved with working for an overnight celebrity.) Van Flein met Palin in the summer of 2008, recruited by Todd Palin to give legal advice on the Troopergate controversy. He now divides his time between his Anchorage legal practice and his position as one of Palin’s four lieutenants. The others are Andrew Davis, the political director who resides in Sacramento; Tim Crawford, the group’s elder statesman at 58, whose political experience extends back to Goldwater and who in early 2009 was forced out as the R.N.C.’s interim finance director, by which time John Coale had already recruited him to be the treasurer of SarahPAC; and Palin’s 36-year-old Los Angeles-based cybermessenger, Rebecca Mansour. Palin’s broader circle also includes Jason Recher and Doug McMarlin, who handle her travel logistics from, respectively, New Orleans and Columbus, Ohio; Pam Pryor, who works with Crawford at SarahPAC as the liaison to the evangelical and Christian community; and Randy Scheunemann, a prominent neoconservative and former McCain foreign-policy adviser. Crawford, Pryor, Scheunemann and two occasional speechwriters, Chriss Winston and Lindsay Hayes, all live in or around Washington. Among the D.C. consultants, however, only Crawford interacts with Palin on a regular basis. More than once in our discussions, Van Flein referred to “those people who are of the Beltway and those who aren’t” — a binary worldview to which Palin obviously adheres. (Press reports variously name Fred Malek; Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard; and Kim Daniels, a conservative lawyer, as key advisers, when in fact Daniels has not worked for Palin for several months and Malek and Kristol are seldom in contact with her. “It’s nearly every single day we learn a lesson about a person who claims to speak for us or work for us,” Palin told me. “Seems 9 times out of 10, Todd and I look at each other and say, ‘Who is this speaking for us?’ ”)
Along with Recher, McMarlin, Pryor and Scheunemann, the four lieutenants engage in regular conference calls, sans Palin, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 2 p.m. Eastern time. (There’s no set agenda for these calls nor anyone leading them, and they can get “raucous at times,” Davis says.) Palin herself is never far from the loop, Van Flein told me: “Think of it as a tape recorder that’s on all the time. There’s a constant exchange of information between the governor and her team — who’s on top of this, lots of back and forth — and I think I’m not exaggerating to say it’s 24/7. Sometime she’s up e-mailing at 3 in the morning.”
Van Flein, a boyish-looking 46-year-old employment-law specialist who majored in political science at the University of Alaska, receives a $10,000 monthly retainer from SarahPAC. In return, he dispenses more than just legal advice. Van Flein contributes research to some of Palin’s Facebook posts and speeches and is a staunch political advocate. (“Regardless of whoever else does or doesn’t say it, I’m saying that Obamacare is now in jeopardy of repeal because of her,” Van Flein proclaimed to me.)
But it is Rebecca Mansour who especially personifies the amorphous yet fervid network of Palin World. Mansour said to me with undisguised relish, “I majored in English and history and minored in philosophy, but I’ve never been a Beltway person, so that does confuse people.” A graduate of the American Film Institute, Mansour was writing screenplays in L.A. when, following the 2008 election, her disgust over “what I perceived as unfair treatment” of Palin inspired her to start the blog Conservatives4Palin. Mansour’s knowledge of Palin became so encyclopedic that in the summer of 2009, Meghan Stapleton asked her if she would come to Del Mar to help with Palin’s biography. The blogger had never met her subject before. She showed up with binders full of research, and when she was introduced to Palin, “the first thing she did was hug me — I was like, ‘O.K.,’ ” Mansour said with a laugh. “She is the most ordinary person. She’s shorter than I am.” At the same time, Mansour was impressed with Palin’s nimble mind. “I remember sitting with her while she was working on the book; she would be typing furiously, and I’d ask her, ‘Governor, when was the year you did such and such,’ and she’d say, ‘That was the year we did the budget.’ And then she’d be reading the chyron at the bottom of the TV screen while typing and talking to me. And then would read to me what she just wrote, and it was brilliant.”
For her volunteer work on “Going Rogue,” Mansour would soon be rewarded with both a salary and a weighty portfolio. Mansour is Palin’s primary speechwriter, researcher, online communications coordinator and all-purpose adviser. Because Palin often works 20-hour days, so does Mansour, because “the governor reads, checks and approves everything that’s under her name.” Mansour regularly spars with the media on her private Twitter account for perceived inaccuracies about Palin. At the same time, she acknowledged, “I love it when they underestimate her.”
In truth, few are underestimating Sarah Palin anymore. In that endearing manner of the Beltway echo chamber, the prevailing narrative of Palin in 2009 was that that she was an incompetent ditz. This year’s story line is that she is a social-media visionary who purposefully circumnavigated the power-alley gasbags and thereby constructed a new campaigning template for the ages. The reality is that Palin’s direction is determined almost entirely by her instincts — or, as Fred Malek puts it, “There is no über-strategy.” She did not game out a path forward when agreeing to two book deals with HarperCollins and then signing on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, Fox and then her television series. That same mind-set explains the lack of cohesion to Palin’s virtual organization. As Crawford, Van Flein, Davis and Mansour concur, the inhabitants of Palin World have loosely defined duties and thus invariably play outside their lanes. “It’s kind of like if you reach out and for whatever reason someone’s not responding, then someone else jumps in,” Crawford says — adding of his own job as the PAC’s fund-raising guru, “I never thought it would be a full-time gig.” (One exception to the fuzzy lines of authority: Barnett, her lawyer, handles all of her business dealings but, being a Democrat, participates in none of her policy and political discussions.) There is no chief of staff — though “there’s been discussion,” Van Flein says, “because the logistics are overwhelming and the demand is phenomenal.” Nor, since Stapleton departed in February, does Palin have a press person — with the result that up to eight or nine of her functionaries will find themselves fielding (and usually pocket-vetoing) media requests at any one time. Just as Palin heavily edits or at times completely writes most of her own speeches and insists on reviewing any statement issued by SarahPAC, she also must approve all media contact by her subordinates, Van Flein told me. With epic understatement he added, “Because she may be busy, [an interview request] might languish for a few days.”
Palin’s guerrilla organization can be maddening for those on the outside who are trying to divine a way in. “I’ve never had so many phone calls in my life,” Davis says. “And the hard part is the answer’s not ‘No’; the answer’s ‘I don’t know.’ But it’s a pure process. These decisions are hers.” Though Palin has obviously done quite well for herself without Karl Rove’s strategic seal of approval, the inefficiency of her network has allowed numerous opportunities to slip through the cracks. Several influential Republican legislators reached out to her in late 2008 and early 2009 but never heard back. Among them, Roy Blunt and Orrin Hatch requested that she attend particular functions and were rebuffed. George W. Bush’s former media strategist, Mark McKinnon, offered to chat. The Beltway doyenne Juleanna Glover volunteered a “low-key media luncheon.” The National Review’s editorial board sent word that Palin should swing by for a get-together during one of her trips to New York. Which of these proposed encounters ever came to Palin’s attention is unclear. But for other possible 2012 Republican candidates — say, Senator John Thune of South Dakota or Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota — most of these opportunities would be worth planning an entire day around.
Then again, Palin confessed to me a tendency to avoid longtime political operatives — “these unprincipled people who are in it for power, money and job titles.” Her wariness extends even to her top lieutenants, who have thus far been excluded from her 2012 considerations. Instead, she relies on Todd — “the one person she trusts,” according to Rick Halford, a longtime friend and a former Alaska state senator. “Todd is somebody that I think really grew and took on the job of being her support system, way beyond his education and where he came from.”
There are few spouses in politics as hard-working as 46-year-old Todd Mitchell Palin — a native of Dillingham, Alaska, who married his Wasilla High School sweetheart and dropped out of college and eventually found work in the North Slope oil fields. He handles her travel. He is at times her sole accompaniment to events. He is — with apologies to the mama grizzly — the family’s chief protector, who has been known to nix interview requests from publications that have previously, in his view, made fun of his children. It has fallen to Todd to mollify alienated aides, interview potential speechwriters and help prep his wife for an interview by Googling subject matter on his BlackBerry. Referring to the ongoing communications in Palin World, Thomas Van Flein told me, “Todd is always part of the information chain.” In the external world it is widely understood that when sending Sarah Palin an e-mail “the best idea is to copy Todd on it,” according to Malek.
As one adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign told me: “It occurred to me on Day 1 that Todd was a very key adviser to her. I quite aggressively developed a relationship with Todd.” Stephen Broden, a Congressional candidate from Dallas, told me that his endorsement by Palin this summer arose after a perfunctory meet-and-greet with the couple. “I pulled Todd aside as the entourage was pulling her away,” Broden recalled, “and I said, ‘Hey, look, man, it’s gonna be hard to get ahold of her.’ And he gave me his number. I talked to him.”
Broden, a conservative African-American pastor and a three-time guest on Glenn Beck’s TV show, was running a quixotic campaign against the nine-term Dallas congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson. Palin became highly enamored of Broden, endorsed him and kept a close eye on the race all the way through election night. (Johnson won, 76 percent to 22.) Nearly all of her 90 or so endorsed candidates were selected in a manner that was vintage Sarah Palin. As her staff members explained it to me, all potential endorsees were vetted by Andrew Davis to ascertain whether they met certain base-line standards (like being anti-abortion, pro-A.N.W.R. drilling and anti-stimulus). Palin, however, would always make the final call, often after doing research herself, as in the case of Broden. As a result, some endorsements took months to be consummated. Besieged by requests to appear with candidates, Palin could accommodate only a few of them. Much of her summer was consumed by her television filming schedule in Alaska, and her contract with the Washington Speakers Bureau forbade her to do any free event at a locale where another paid event was scheduled. Her frenetic schedule meant that Palin could commit only to making an in-person appearance at the 11th hour — which, given the large crowds she tended to attract, would often prove impossible for a small campaign staff to throw together. “She loves the retail stuff — make some phone calls, go to a small event and shake hands,” Davis told me. “Retail is very difficult at this point.”
Idiosyncratic as her in-house endorsement operation may have been, Palin was not above wielding her influence in the manner of a seasoned politician. She rewarded allies (McCain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina), punished a foe (Lisa Murkowski) by endorsing Joe Miller and gave the nod to a family friend (Vaughan Ward of Idaho). And in the early presidential-primary states, some of Palin’s choices seemed conspicuously strategic. In June, for example, she endorsed Terry Branstad for governor of Iowa, who at that point had never met Palin, had not sought her imprimatur and didn’t particularly need it, being 15 points ahead of his primary opponent, Bob Vander Plaats. Vander Plaats was far more conservative than Branstad but also an ally of the likely 2012 candidate Mike Huckabee. In the New Hampshire Senate race, Palin threw her support behind the establishment candidate Kelly Ayotte rather than a Tea Party favorite who tried to endear himself to Palin by sending her a photograph of himself alongside the carcass of a deer he had just shot. When I asked Andy Smith, the University of New Hampshire Survey Center’s director and pollster, to explain why Palin had chosen Ayotte, he promptly answered: “I think she wanted to back a winner. Like Branstad in Iowa. I think she wanted people who would be in positions to help her out.”
These actions bespeak a calculating shrewdness on Palin’s part. But then what to make of her inactions? Three months after endorsing Branstad, Palin visited Iowa for the first time since 2008 to deliver a speech but then left without scheduling any other events. And since 2008, Palin has yet to travel to New Hampshire, having turned down a triumphalist Tea Party Express rally in Concord the evening before Election Day. In both cases, her aides told me, Palin was overscheduled. But since Sarah Palin is the keeper of her own itinerary, we are left to wonder whether these omissions suggest disorganization, lack of foresight, ambivalence, distrust of politicos or some combination of the above.
One evening in late October, I sat in the Anchorage apartment of Palin’s onetime communications director Bill McAllister, watching old TV footage of his ex-boss during her campaign for governor in 2006. McAllister, a former reporter with the Anchorage NBC affiliate who worked for Palin in 2008 and 2009, wanted me to see with my own eyes the Sarah Palin he knew — bright and easygoing, exceedingly popular with the local press — before the national media had grossly mischaracterized her in a way he found “frustrating and maddening.”
The Palin I watched on McAllister’s DVD lived up to his billing. She cut a competent, reasoned, disciplined figure, not taking the bait when one of her opponents dismissed her during a debate as “a bright smile.” There was another characteristic that McAllister hadn’t pointed out. In the footage, Palin declared, “We deserve leaders that aren’t just going to take a partisan approach.” Bemoaning the “gridlock down there in Juneau,” Palin reminded Alaskans, “I have good relationships with these legislators.” An undisputed social conservative who backed a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Palin nonetheless told an interviewer, “I don’t wear my faith on my sleeve.” And she promised not to let her religious beliefs “bleed into policy — that is my commitment.”
This Sarah Palin began to recede from view in 2008 as she was thrust into the traditional running mate’s role of partisan flamethrower. Nonetheless, while editing a speech she was about to give, the vice-presidential candidate crossed out a disparaging reference to liberals, telling an aide, “We want liberals to vote for us, too.”
I brought up her past efforts at bipartisanship to Palin. “I was so innocent and naïve to believe that I would be able to govern for four years and if I ever moved on beyond the governorship I could carry that with me nationally,” Palin said. “And it was proven when John McCain chose me for the nomination for vice president; what it showed me about the left: they go home. It doesn’t matter what you do. It was the left that came out attacking me. They showed me their hypocrisy; they showed me they weren’t willing to work in a bipartisan way. I learned my lesson. Once bitten, twice shy. I will never trust that they are not hypocrites until they show me they’re sincere.”
Since that time, Palin has gravitated to where the love is. On April 7 of this year, she spoke at a campaign rally in Minneapolis for Michele Bachmann. With a silver cross around her neck and a flag pin on her lapel, Palin spoke approvingly of those who are “proudly clinging to your guns and religion.” Condemning the recently passed health care legislation as “socialized medicine” that “breaks the bank and really violates the U.S. Constitution,” she applauded her party’s stout opposition, declaring, “What’s wrong with being the party of ‘No’?”
The cheering section directly behind Palin was packed with white conservative middle-aged women, a demographic that especially reveres her. Palin’s relationship to women generally is more complicated. On the one hand, her appreciation of pioneers like Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton is unambiguous. On the other, she tends to poll five or more points better among men, and feminists are loath to embrace her.
Palin is of course aware that her sex affords her an opportunity among a crowded, all-male Republican field for 2012. Her Minneapolis rally provided much of the content for her acclaimed “mama grizzly” call-to-arms Web ad released in June. In August, Palin posted a Facebook endorsement of seven women to coincide with the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Though several of her male endorsees also wound up defeating women, Palin has nonetheless emerged from the midterm cycle as America’s most visible advocate of female candidates not named Murkowski.
Whether Palin has what it takes to close the Republican Party’s longstanding gender gap is a question that has loomed since John McCain introduced her to the nation on Aug. 29, 2008. That same afternoon, McCain reached out to Geraldine Ferraro — the first female vice-presidential candidate and a Hillary Clinton supporter — and put her on the phone with his new running mate. The two traded brief, complimentary words. “Every time a woman runs, women win,” Ferraro told me a couple of days after Palin debated Joe Biden.
She felt reluctant to second-guess Palin’s performance against Biden. As Walter Mondale’s running mate, the three-term New York congresswoman possessed more experience with national issues than the Alaska governor — and because of the differing schedules, she was afforded nearly eight weeks more prep time than Palin received. It also helped, Ferraro pointed out, that the Mondale campaign paired her with a young Georgetown professor named Madeleine Albright, who “was attached to my hip from July 12 to the election.” Nevertheless, Ferraro concluded in a lamenting tone, “when you get down to the substance, it wasn’t there.”
“Look, everyone has an opinion about Sarah Palin,” her friend John Coale says. “But suppose when she starts doing the debates during the primaries, she knocks it out of the park. That would cause an entirely different view of things, wouldn’t it?”
Palin has taken steps to close the substance gap. As Davis put it to me, “She works very hard to get things right, because she understands the margin for error — and because it’s the right thing to do.” In Hong Kong 14 months ago, Palin delivered a dense world-affairs speech that she co-drafted with Randy Scheunemann and Rebecca Mansour. This past June in Norfolk, Va., Palin ripped Obama’s “enemy-centric” foreign policy in a spicy but detailed address. (In that speech and elsewhere, she has cited the wisdom of Joe Lieberman — though not on the matter of human-induced climate change, a concept she derides as a “snow job” and this “global warming Goregate stuff.” Lieberman told me, “Well of course I disagree with her and have been disappointed by it.” Lieberman also said: “My impression is that she and Todd are the kind of people I’d like to have as my next-door neighbors. That’s a separate question from whether she’s capable of being president.”) Earlier this month, Palin gave a speech on monetary policy, criticizing the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, which, according to Mansour, was written entirely by Palin and herself. Every morning, Palin reads a briefing consisting of a few bullet points prepared by Davis and Mansour. (“I wouldn’t make too much of it,” Davis cautioned me. “It’s like [Politico’s] Playbook, only without the birthdays. Sometimes I throw in a sports score.”) Her public remarks and Facebook posts have been increasingly littered with facts from biographies of Reagan, Thatcher and Lincoln that she has recently digested.
Palin became testy when I asked her about the books I heard she had been reading. “I’ve been reading since I was a little girl,” she snapped. “And my mom is standing 15 feet away from me, and I should put her on the phone with you right now so she can tell you. That’s what happens when you grow up in a house full of teachers — you read; and I always have. Just because — and,” she continued, though in a less blistering tone, “I don’t want to come across sounding caustic or annoyed by this issue: because of one roll-of-the-eye answer to a question I gave, I’m still dealing with this,” she said, referring to her interview with Katie Couric. “There’s nothing different today than there was in the last 43 years of my life since I first started reading. I continue to read all that I can get my hands on — and reading biographies of, yes, Thatcher for instance, and of course Reagan and the John Adams letters, and I’m just thinking of a couple that are on my bedside, I go back to C.S. Lewis for inspiration, there’s such a variety, because books have always been important in my life.” She went on: “I’m reading [the conservative radio host] Mark Levin’s book; I’ll get ahold of Glenn Beck’s new book — and now because I’m opening up,” she finished warily, “I’m afraid I’m going to get reporters saying, Oh, she only reads books by Glenn Beck.”
I explained to Palin that in my view, at least, this line of inquiry wasn’t gratuitous — that questions did in fact linger about her “gravitas gap.” Didn’t she think, for example, that the Republican kingmakers who were now supposedly scheming to kneecap her were mainly just concerned about how voters viewed her? “If that were the case, then they need to be courageous enough to put their names behind their criticisms,” she said, referring to anonymous quotations attacking her. “As I replied to Politico, these fellows want to be trusted to tend to our nation’s economic woes? They want to be trusted to take on the likes of Ahmadinejad, but they won’t take on a hockey mom from Wasilla? Until they do that, I dismiss them.”
But, I reiterated, didn’t she believe that the Republican establishment’s predominant worry was that she would lose to Obama? “Then perhaps they should vent some of their paranoia toward all of the potential G.O.P. candidates,” she said. “Because obviously there’s no guarantee that any one of us would win. But I do believe that much of this is a threat to their hierarchy, because I’ve never shied away from a battle and because I’ll put principle before politics.”
In a sense, Palin views Beltway Republicans as she does the Obama administration: aloof, self-interested and vulnerable to the populist power that she believes she wields. “They’re in an isolated bubble — Barack Obama mentioned that in his press conference, and I agree with him, he is isolated from what average Americans are talking about,” she said, referring to the president’s words after the midterm elections. “But what he was meaning, of course, was that he’s not in touch with average Americans. I am — because that’s who I am. That’s who surrounds me, common-sense Americans who just want government on their side, not riding their backs. And I tweet to reach out to them.”
At the end of our talk, she made note of my Southern accent and urged me, “Don’t lose that.” Then she went back to her world, somewhere in Alaska, where she was winding down the filming of her TV show — where apparently Internet reception was sufficient for her to send out three more Twitter posts that afternoon, joining herself to the rest of America and then leaving it at that, for the moment.
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush.”
Like much of her recent life, Palin’s day had been replete with reminders of the clout she had rapidly acquired. She had spent most of her time ensconced at the Fox television studios, though she managed to squeeze in a jog in Central Park — which she promptly chronicled on Twitter: “Beautiful!” Also at the studios was her fellow Fox News contributor Karl Rove, who had recently questioned in a British newspaper whether Palin’s new reality TV series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” made her appear Oval Office-worthy. The building was abuzz over what would ensue when the two would inevitably bump into each other. The moment came after Palin finished a segment with the anchor Bret Baier and saw Rove lingering stageside with Brit Hume, a Fox colleague, holding a well-marked copy of “Alaska for Dummies” — a prop clearly intended to mollify Palin. She laughed, used her phone’s camera to take a picture of Rove with the book, traded brief hellos and then left the studio without mentioning Rove’s earlier comment.
Of course, Palin’s purpose for being at Fox on Nov. 2 was to share her views on the midterm elections that she worked so vigorously to influence. It was indicative of the competing demands on her time that her participation in the campaign’s final days was weirdly anticlimactic. In the three weeks before the elections, Palin was bombarded with campaigning requests, many of them sent to her personal e-mail account. But her young son, Trig, was to have an operation — routine but still worrisome — on the Friday before Election Day, and so the mother was loath to commit to anything. Trig’s procedure went well. That evening, Palin’s political adviser, Andrew Davis, pulled an all-nighter arranging for her to make a Saturday drop-in on behalf of John Raese, the West Virginia senatorial candidate who was trailing the Democratic nominee, Joe Manchin, the popular governor. Raese’s wife, Elizabeth, had issued a personal plea to Palin to save the day.
After Palin arrived in Charleston, and exhorted the state’s “mountain mamas” to “keep Manchin in the mansion,” she and Todd flew to New York on Saturday afternoon. She was still mulling over several invitations to campaign along the Eastern Seaboard. One was a Tea Party Express event in Wilmington, Del., in support of the controversial senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell. Palin’s endorsement of O’Donnell over a more-moderate candidate had been catalytic to her primary victory. Later Palin authorized an adviser, Randy Scheunemann, and two others to go to Wilmington to help O’Donnell in her debate preparation. But this particular event for the woman who proclaimed “I’m not a witch” was on Sunday — Halloween — and Palin prudently elected not to attend. Instead, she spent the afternoon watching the New York Jets play from the luxury box of the team’s owner, Woody Johnson.
In Syracuse, meanwhile, the campaign staff for the Republican Congressional candidate Ann Marie Buerkle, who had erased her Democratic opponent’s double-digit lead, was begging for Palin to make an appearance. Despite significant logistical complications, Palin wanted to oblige them. But a story in Politico (“Next for G.O.P. Leaders: Stopping Sarah Palin”) that quoted unnamed party operatives fretting over Palin’s growing popularity had her juices flowing, and her schedule suddenly became cluttered with Fox segments, which allowed her a platform to fight back. (“Some within the establishment don’t like the fact that I won’t back down to a good-old-boys’ club,” she declared on Fox Business Network.) On the day before the elections, she could find time to record only one final robocall of more than 25 she made throughout the campaign cycle — this one for Tom Tancredo, a third-party candidate for governor of Colorado whose strident remarks about illegal immigration made him a “destructive” force according to the Tea Party leader Dick Armey.
As it developed, Tancredo would lose by 14 points and Raese by 10, while Buerkle’s race was so close that a recount was imminent. The fate of another endorsee, Joe Miller — who was running for a U.S. Senate seat in Alaska against a Palin nemesis, Lisa Murkowski — remained in doubt. Palin had thrown her early support to two candidates backed by the Tea Party who wound up losing, O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada, which helped the Democratic Party retain control of the Senate. Nonetheless, it was a good night in Palin’s estimation: a majority of her endorsees won, the Republicans took the House and Bristol survived another round of voting on “Dancing With the Stars.” After three or four hours of sleep, the Palins took a commercial flight (economy class) out of Kennedy Airport on the morning of Nov. 3, headed back to Wasilla, Alaska.
Andrew Davis, her adviser, saw the Palins off, and I met him for coffee later that morning in Midtown Manhattan. Davis is a personable and quick-witted 33-year-old Massachusetts native who was a deputy campaign manager for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2004 and later an opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee before working with Palin at the close of the 2008 campaign. He’s nonetheless low-profile in the extreme, like all of Palin’s senior associates. (The New York Times Magazine’s photo editors had been trying to find an image of Davis; he assured me that they would not succeed.) Davis and his colleagues recognize that the issue of trust informs Sarah Palin’s every dealing with the world beyond Wasilla since her circular-firing-squad experience at the close of the 2008 presidential campaign. Her inner circle shuns the media and would speak to me only after Palin authorized it, a process that took months. They are content to labor in a world without hierarchy or even job descriptions — “None of us has titles,” Davis said — and where the adhesive is a personal devotion to Palin rather than the furtherance of her political career.
Davis’s main task this year had been serving as Palin’s point man throughout the endorsement process. He was now tallying her midterm scorecard, which at the time was 50 wins and 32 losses (with 8 not yet decided), including victories by 14 so-called mama grizzly Republican candidates. Some of Palin’s picks were early, bold and pivotal, as in the case of Nikki Haley, who is now South Carolina’s governor-elect. Other picks — like those for Tim Scott (South Carolina’s first Republican African-American congressman in more than a century) and Marco Rubio (the incoming senator from Florida and a rising G.O.P. star on par with Palin) — came too late to be consequential except, perhaps, to her own ambitions. Palin also raised more than $10 million for Republican candidates and committees — including the Republican National Committee, which plastered her image on the center of its Web page at the close of the election cycle. Having crawled from the wreckage of the 2008 presidential campaign and her much-derided resignation as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin had emerged as arguably the most captivating and influential Republican in America — and therefore a viable contender for the presidential nomination in 2012.
So I asked her political adviser whether there would be a summoning of the troops in the coming days to discuss what the next moves will be. Davis laughed and replied, “That’s not going to happen.” Each of them, he said, would simply be doing the work that was in front of them that day, the way things always operated in Palin World. I brought up an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken three weeks before, which concluded that Palin’s favorability rating among registered voters stood at 39 percent, while 54 percent viewed her unfavorably and a whopping 67 percent saw her as unqualified to be president. “On a staff level, we all think about ways we can improve her numbers,” Davis said. “It’s politics — that’s our job.” But, I pressed, had he discussed the subject with her? “I’m not going to sit around and ask her, ‘What do you think of your approval rating?’ ” Davis said. “I’m just not.” Then he added, “Maybe the family’s talked about it.”
“I am,” Sarah Palin told me the next day when I asked her if she was already weighing a run for president. “I’m engaged in the internal deliberations candidly, and having that discussion with my family, because my family is the most important consideration here.” Palin went on to say that there weren’t meaningful differences in policy among the field of G.O.P. hopefuls “but that in fact there’s more to the presidency than that” and that her decision would involve evaluating whether she could bring unique qualities to the table.
“Yes, the organization would have to change,” Palin said during an hourlong phone conversation. “I’d have to bring in more people — more people who are trustworthy,” she clarified. Palin said that her experience as John McCain’s running mate was for the most part “amazing, wonderful, do it again in a heartbeat.” But she added, “What Todd and I learned was that the view inside the bus was much better than underneath it, and we knew we got thrown under it by certain aides who weren’t principled” and that “the experience taught us, yes, to be on guard and be very discerning about who we can and can’t trust in the political arena.”
She went on: “I know that a hurdle I would have to cross, that some other potential candidates wouldn’t have to cross right out of the chute, is proving my record. That’s the most frustrating thing for me — the warped and perverted description of my record and what I’ve accomplished over the last two decades. It’s been much more perplexing to me than where the lamestream media has wanted to go about my personal life. And other candidates haven’t faced these criticisms the way I have.”
I asked her if by avoiding the national press, she didn’t bear at least some responsibility for the way the public viewed her. “I’m on television nearly every single day with reporters,” she shot back. “Now granted, that’s mainly through my job at Fox News, and I’m very proud to be associated with them, but I’m not avoiding anything or anybody. I’m on Facebook and Twitter. I’m out there. I want to talk about my record, though.” Palin was referring to “getting in there and cleaning up corruption, taking on the oil companies and the good old boys in the party, things like the natural-gas pipeline” and “getting things out of the government’s hands, like the state-owned dairy creamery in Alaska.” Asked if she believed in 2008 that these accomplishments made her at least as qualified as Barack Obama to be president, her response was immediate: “Absolutely. If I had any doubt in my ability or administrative experience that would’ve been put to good use in a McCain administration, then I never would have accepted the nomination.”
Palin told me that because of the media’s unfairness toward her, “I fear for our democracy.” She cited a recent Anchorage Daily News article that commented on her casual manner of dress at a rally for Joe Miller, as well as a Politico headline that used the word “drama” for an item about Representative Michele Bachmann’s quest for a Republican leadership position. Palin viewed these references as sexist — but also, she said, as “distractions.”
Purposefully distracting, I asked, or just simplistic? “How can it be simplistic?” she scoffed. “They’re the elite,” she said sarcastically of news organizations. “They know much more than I know and other people like me! So, no. They know just what they’re doing.”
Sarah Palin’s withering regard for the media co-exists with the fact that Sarah Palin is a media sensation. Throughout this year’s midterm cycle, no one commanded as much free time on the air as Palin, who of course wasn’t running for office herself. Her mere presence or nonpresence at various campaign events — or the distance that wary Republican candidates kept from her — routinely eclipsed whatever else took place at the events themselves. Concurrently, Palin’s denunciations of the Obama White House via Twitter garnered substantial attention not because the opinions were especially novel but because they were expressed with the brashness of a wily headline-grabber. All of this in addition to the fact that Palin, a former journalism major and sportscaster, happens to be a member of the media herself: a salaried Fox News contributor, the star of her own television series and a best-selling author whose second book, “America by Heart,” will be released by HarperCollins this week with a first printing of 1 million copies and her pick of promotional slots offered up by her adversaries in the press.
Almost everything about Palin is fresh, including her wounds. “She gives as good as she gets,” says the admiring former Republican strategist Mary Matalin. “But I don’t know her well enough to know if she’s developed the thick skin you need to be endlessly resilient, the way Reagan could take things for decades and let them roll off his back.” Like many Republicans, Palin hails Reagan as her political guiding light. But she has yet to channel the Gipper’s soothing sunniness, instead she seems haloed in static electricity — “a walking wedge issue,” as one leading conservative commentator recently described her. The road to a presidential candidacy traditionally involves a carefully sequenced gathering of tribes and marking of territory. Palin has ignored this playbook. Her only-dead-fish-go-with-the-flow improvisatory ethic is certifiably anti-Beltway and confers on Palin an aura of authenticity. It is also erratic and short on self-discipline, reminding us that Sarah Palin’s ascendency is recent and she remains a work in progress — all the while casting a very long shadow over the Republican Party, shaped like a question mark.
One afternoon in June 2009, Gov. Sarah Palin was sitting in the Washington office of her friend Fred Malek, whom she met through McCain during the 2008 campaign. She was listening to the former White House aide to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford map out logical next steps to her political career. Focus on amassing a good record as governor, he advised her. Run for a second term. Develop some policy expertise. Do some extensive overseas travel. Generate some good will by campaigning for fellow Republicans.
Malek told me that he could tell that this wasn’t what Palin wanted to hear. Here’s the problem, she replied impatiently: I’ve got a long commute from my house to my office. I don’t have the funds to pay for my family to travel with me, and the state won’t pay for it, either. I can’t afford to have security at my home — anybody can come up to my door, and they do. Under the laws of Alaska, anybody can file suit or an ethics charge against me, and I have to defend it on my own. I’m going into debt.
Nothing in her former world as a small-town mayor and the governor of a sparsely populated state prepared Palin for the perverse celebrity that would engulf her after being selected as McCain’s vice-presidential candidate. For better and for worse, she was now a household name, beloved or ridiculed by strangers all across America. The caricature of Palin as a vapid, winking, press-averse clotheshorse proved irresistible to late-night entertainers. Less well known was the Palin who agitated for more access to the media (other than Katie Couric), who was seen more than once passed out on her hotel bed half-buried in briefing books and index cards and whose thriftiness when it came to her wardrobe was so obvious that one senior strategist clucked of the Palins, “These people shop at Dillards!”
The advisers who strenuously advocated for McCain to select Palin seemed as unprepared for her as they would later claim she was for the national stage. They had planned on deploying Palin like a conventional vice-presidential candidate — fund-raisers, secondary markets — but otherwise stowing her away for heavy debate prep. Instead, “because she was a much bigger draw at rallies than McCain himself,” a former adviser says, the budget for her side of the campaign “quadrupled from what they’d anticipated; the amount of personnel had to be ratcheted up, and dealing with the Palin phenomenon came to consume much of [senior strategist Steve] Schmidt’s time.” Adoring fans screamed “Sarah! Sarah!” and wept as she greeted them on rope lines, but away from the crowds she felt increasingly isolated from her Alaska clan and distrustful of the staff members who would soon be anonymously criticizing her in the media. During Palin’s debate prep sessions in Philadelphia, Senator Joe Lieberman was summoned to offer support to the overwhelmed and demoralized candidate. “Schmidt says to me, ‘You’ve got something in common with her that we don’t have: you’re both religious,’ ” Lieberman told me. “He actually said, ‘Why don’t you go in and pray with her? She was on the phone yesterday with [former Gov. Kay Orr of Nebraska], and they’d prayed at the end, and it seemed to make her feel better. ’ ”
Upon losing the election, Palin hoped to return to an Alaska where, as she put it to me, “people were thankful that I was in the governor’s office.” It therefore chagrined her when she learned that Democratic legislators like Hollis French and Beth Kerttula were no longer her allies. McCain’s staff, meanwhile, reneged on a promise to cover the costs for any legal inquiry that arose during the campaign, Palin told me.
A few friends from the Beltway rushed to her defense. In December 2008, John Coale, a lawyer and a Democrat whose wife is the Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, offered to set up a political action committee and a legal-defense fund for her. Fred Malek, meanwhile, began connecting Palin to his Beltway cohort. At Malek’s home in McLean, Va., the night before the clubby annual Washington gala known as the Alfalfa Club dinner, he introduced her to Alan Greenspan, Madeleine Albright, Dianne Feinstein, Andrea Mitchell, Mitch McConnell, Walter Isaacson and Dick and Liz Cheney, among others. (To Liz she exclaimed, “It’s so great to meet another mother of five!”) Later Malek hosted a foreign-policy lunch discussion with Palin; Frank Carlucci, a former secretary of defense under Reagan; Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution; and Gregory Newbold, a retired three-star general. Talbott received an appreciative grin from Palin when he told her that he himself had seen Russia from an island off the coast of Alaska — “I defended you on that.”
Three weeks after telling Malek that her life was difficult, Palin abruptly resigned as governor. Determined to reclaim her narrative and settle a few scores along the way, she enlisted the services of the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, who negotiated lucrative book deals for both Clintons as well as George W. Bush. Palin surprised him with a packet of more than 20,000 words that she had already written about her childhood in Alaska. Palin spent the summer of 2009 hunkered down in a Del Mar, Calif., condominium working on her memoir with her communications director, Meghan Stapleton, and a book collaborator named Lynn Vincent. During the day, Palin took her laptop out by the condo complex’s swimming pool and sat there writing in her sun visor and flip-flops, apparently unrecognized by the other residents. And she would stay up writing until 5 in the morning.
A few months later, while touring to promote her book, “Going Rogue,” Palin’s bus pulled into Roanoke, Va., one Sunday in November, the night before an appearance at a bookstore. The author was astonished to see more than 500 people encamped outside the store, many of them in sleeping bags. “Oh, my God, it’s so cold!” Palin exclaimed as she bounded out of the bus to greet her ecstatic fans. “I can’t believe you’re waiting for me!”
But they had waited, and now she had arrived.
His voice dripping with exasperation, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said to me one July afternoon in his office: “If I would have told you that I could open up a Facebook account or a Twitter account, simply post quotes, and have the White House asked about those, and to have the entire White House press corps focused on your quote of the day on Facebook — that’s Sarah Palin. She tweets one thing, and all of a sudden you’ve got a room full of people that want to know. . . .”
Gibbs shook his head and continued: “Now, I could say, ‘You know what? I’m not going to deal with that.’ And big headline: Palin Accuses Obama of X. The White House Had No Comment.”
“I just tweet; that’s just the way I roll,” Palin told me. “Just expressing my feelings via Twitter and Facebook. I choose them because they’re convenient for me, especially from Wasilla.” She continued: “The only thing I do consider is when I think of what’s going on in the East Coast, with the difference in time zones. I can tweet before going to bed at midnight or 1 and know that they’re up and at ’em, and they’re going to have to respond.” In this compressed, no-nuance cyberzone, Palin can land a hard punch without ever setting foot in the ring — calling the then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel “as shallow/narrowminded/political/irresponsible as they come” and saying the Politico writer Jonathan Martin is “full of crap.” In July, Palin’s BlackBerry spewed out a much-publicized volley of tweets calling on peaceful Muslims to “refudiate” the “ground zero mosque” and in the process suckering Obama into taking a position for which he was attacked by all sides. Palin wrote these without consulting anyone, her lawyer Thomas Van Flein told me: “I found out like everyone else did. This is her political instinct in action.”
Van Flein said this as we met for coffee one morning in Anchorage a week before the midterm elections. It’s a curious feature of Palin World that none of its charter members knew her before 2008. (Her two longtime Alaska aides, Kris Perry and Meghan Stapleton, left amicably but wearied by the demands involved with working for an overnight celebrity.) Van Flein met Palin in the summer of 2008, recruited by Todd Palin to give legal advice on the Troopergate controversy. He now divides his time between his Anchorage legal practice and his position as one of Palin’s four lieutenants. The others are Andrew Davis, the political director who resides in Sacramento; Tim Crawford, the group’s elder statesman at 58, whose political experience extends back to Goldwater and who in early 2009 was forced out as the R.N.C.’s interim finance director, by which time John Coale had already recruited him to be the treasurer of SarahPAC; and Palin’s 36-year-old Los Angeles-based cybermessenger, Rebecca Mansour. Palin’s broader circle also includes Jason Recher and Doug McMarlin, who handle her travel logistics from, respectively, New Orleans and Columbus, Ohio; Pam Pryor, who works with Crawford at SarahPAC as the liaison to the evangelical and Christian community; and Randy Scheunemann, a prominent neoconservative and former McCain foreign-policy adviser. Crawford, Pryor, Scheunemann and two occasional speechwriters, Chriss Winston and Lindsay Hayes, all live in or around Washington. Among the D.C. consultants, however, only Crawford interacts with Palin on a regular basis. More than once in our discussions, Van Flein referred to “those people who are of the Beltway and those who aren’t” — a binary worldview to which Palin obviously adheres. (Press reports variously name Fred Malek; Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard; and Kim Daniels, a conservative lawyer, as key advisers, when in fact Daniels has not worked for Palin for several months and Malek and Kristol are seldom in contact with her. “It’s nearly every single day we learn a lesson about a person who claims to speak for us or work for us,” Palin told me. “Seems 9 times out of 10, Todd and I look at each other and say, ‘Who is this speaking for us?’ ”)
Along with Recher, McMarlin, Pryor and Scheunemann, the four lieutenants engage in regular conference calls, sans Palin, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 2 p.m. Eastern time. (There’s no set agenda for these calls nor anyone leading them, and they can get “raucous at times,” Davis says.) Palin herself is never far from the loop, Van Flein told me: “Think of it as a tape recorder that’s on all the time. There’s a constant exchange of information between the governor and her team — who’s on top of this, lots of back and forth — and I think I’m not exaggerating to say it’s 24/7. Sometime she’s up e-mailing at 3 in the morning.”
Van Flein, a boyish-looking 46-year-old employment-law specialist who majored in political science at the University of Alaska, receives a $10,000 monthly retainer from SarahPAC. In return, he dispenses more than just legal advice. Van Flein contributes research to some of Palin’s Facebook posts and speeches and is a staunch political advocate. (“Regardless of whoever else does or doesn’t say it, I’m saying that Obamacare is now in jeopardy of repeal because of her,” Van Flein proclaimed to me.)
But it is Rebecca Mansour who especially personifies the amorphous yet fervid network of Palin World. Mansour said to me with undisguised relish, “I majored in English and history and minored in philosophy, but I’ve never been a Beltway person, so that does confuse people.” A graduate of the American Film Institute, Mansour was writing screenplays in L.A. when, following the 2008 election, her disgust over “what I perceived as unfair treatment” of Palin inspired her to start the blog Conservatives4Palin. Mansour’s knowledge of Palin became so encyclopedic that in the summer of 2009, Meghan Stapleton asked her if she would come to Del Mar to help with Palin’s biography. The blogger had never met her subject before. She showed up with binders full of research, and when she was introduced to Palin, “the first thing she did was hug me — I was like, ‘O.K.,’ ” Mansour said with a laugh. “She is the most ordinary person. She’s shorter than I am.” At the same time, Mansour was impressed with Palin’s nimble mind. “I remember sitting with her while she was working on the book; she would be typing furiously, and I’d ask her, ‘Governor, when was the year you did such and such,’ and she’d say, ‘That was the year we did the budget.’ And then she’d be reading the chyron at the bottom of the TV screen while typing and talking to me. And then would read to me what she just wrote, and it was brilliant.”
For her volunteer work on “Going Rogue,” Mansour would soon be rewarded with both a salary and a weighty portfolio. Mansour is Palin’s primary speechwriter, researcher, online communications coordinator and all-purpose adviser. Because Palin often works 20-hour days, so does Mansour, because “the governor reads, checks and approves everything that’s under her name.” Mansour regularly spars with the media on her private Twitter account for perceived inaccuracies about Palin. At the same time, she acknowledged, “I love it when they underestimate her.”
In truth, few are underestimating Sarah Palin anymore. In that endearing manner of the Beltway echo chamber, the prevailing narrative of Palin in 2009 was that that she was an incompetent ditz. This year’s story line is that she is a social-media visionary who purposefully circumnavigated the power-alley gasbags and thereby constructed a new campaigning template for the ages. The reality is that Palin’s direction is determined almost entirely by her instincts — or, as Fred Malek puts it, “There is no über-strategy.” She did not game out a path forward when agreeing to two book deals with HarperCollins and then signing on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, Fox and then her television series. That same mind-set explains the lack of cohesion to Palin’s virtual organization. As Crawford, Van Flein, Davis and Mansour concur, the inhabitants of Palin World have loosely defined duties and thus invariably play outside their lanes. “It’s kind of like if you reach out and for whatever reason someone’s not responding, then someone else jumps in,” Crawford says — adding of his own job as the PAC’s fund-raising guru, “I never thought it would be a full-time gig.” (One exception to the fuzzy lines of authority: Barnett, her lawyer, handles all of her business dealings but, being a Democrat, participates in none of her policy and political discussions.) There is no chief of staff — though “there’s been discussion,” Van Flein says, “because the logistics are overwhelming and the demand is phenomenal.” Nor, since Stapleton departed in February, does Palin have a press person — with the result that up to eight or nine of her functionaries will find themselves fielding (and usually pocket-vetoing) media requests at any one time. Just as Palin heavily edits or at times completely writes most of her own speeches and insists on reviewing any statement issued by SarahPAC, she also must approve all media contact by her subordinates, Van Flein told me. With epic understatement he added, “Because she may be busy, [an interview request] might languish for a few days.”
Palin’s guerrilla organization can be maddening for those on the outside who are trying to divine a way in. “I’ve never had so many phone calls in my life,” Davis says. “And the hard part is the answer’s not ‘No’; the answer’s ‘I don’t know.’ But it’s a pure process. These decisions are hers.” Though Palin has obviously done quite well for herself without Karl Rove’s strategic seal of approval, the inefficiency of her network has allowed numerous opportunities to slip through the cracks. Several influential Republican legislators reached out to her in late 2008 and early 2009 but never heard back. Among them, Roy Blunt and Orrin Hatch requested that she attend particular functions and were rebuffed. George W. Bush’s former media strategist, Mark McKinnon, offered to chat. The Beltway doyenne Juleanna Glover volunteered a “low-key media luncheon.” The National Review’s editorial board sent word that Palin should swing by for a get-together during one of her trips to New York. Which of these proposed encounters ever came to Palin’s attention is unclear. But for other possible 2012 Republican candidates — say, Senator John Thune of South Dakota or Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota — most of these opportunities would be worth planning an entire day around.
Then again, Palin confessed to me a tendency to avoid longtime political operatives — “these unprincipled people who are in it for power, money and job titles.” Her wariness extends even to her top lieutenants, who have thus far been excluded from her 2012 considerations. Instead, she relies on Todd — “the one person she trusts,” according to Rick Halford, a longtime friend and a former Alaska state senator. “Todd is somebody that I think really grew and took on the job of being her support system, way beyond his education and where he came from.”
There are few spouses in politics as hard-working as 46-year-old Todd Mitchell Palin — a native of Dillingham, Alaska, who married his Wasilla High School sweetheart and dropped out of college and eventually found work in the North Slope oil fields. He handles her travel. He is at times her sole accompaniment to events. He is — with apologies to the mama grizzly — the family’s chief protector, who has been known to nix interview requests from publications that have previously, in his view, made fun of his children. It has fallen to Todd to mollify alienated aides, interview potential speechwriters and help prep his wife for an interview by Googling subject matter on his BlackBerry. Referring to the ongoing communications in Palin World, Thomas Van Flein told me, “Todd is always part of the information chain.” In the external world it is widely understood that when sending Sarah Palin an e-mail “the best idea is to copy Todd on it,” according to Malek.
As one adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign told me: “It occurred to me on Day 1 that Todd was a very key adviser to her. I quite aggressively developed a relationship with Todd.” Stephen Broden, a Congressional candidate from Dallas, told me that his endorsement by Palin this summer arose after a perfunctory meet-and-greet with the couple. “I pulled Todd aside as the entourage was pulling her away,” Broden recalled, “and I said, ‘Hey, look, man, it’s gonna be hard to get ahold of her.’ And he gave me his number. I talked to him.”
Broden, a conservative African-American pastor and a three-time guest on Glenn Beck’s TV show, was running a quixotic campaign against the nine-term Dallas congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson. Palin became highly enamored of Broden, endorsed him and kept a close eye on the race all the way through election night. (Johnson won, 76 percent to 22.) Nearly all of her 90 or so endorsed candidates were selected in a manner that was vintage Sarah Palin. As her staff members explained it to me, all potential endorsees were vetted by Andrew Davis to ascertain whether they met certain base-line standards (like being anti-abortion, pro-A.N.W.R. drilling and anti-stimulus). Palin, however, would always make the final call, often after doing research herself, as in the case of Broden. As a result, some endorsements took months to be consummated. Besieged by requests to appear with candidates, Palin could accommodate only a few of them. Much of her summer was consumed by her television filming schedule in Alaska, and her contract with the Washington Speakers Bureau forbade her to do any free event at a locale where another paid event was scheduled. Her frenetic schedule meant that Palin could commit only to making an in-person appearance at the 11th hour — which, given the large crowds she tended to attract, would often prove impossible for a small campaign staff to throw together. “She loves the retail stuff — make some phone calls, go to a small event and shake hands,” Davis told me. “Retail is very difficult at this point.”
Idiosyncratic as her in-house endorsement operation may have been, Palin was not above wielding her influence in the manner of a seasoned politician. She rewarded allies (McCain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina), punished a foe (Lisa Murkowski) by endorsing Joe Miller and gave the nod to a family friend (Vaughan Ward of Idaho). And in the early presidential-primary states, some of Palin’s choices seemed conspicuously strategic. In June, for example, she endorsed Terry Branstad for governor of Iowa, who at that point had never met Palin, had not sought her imprimatur and didn’t particularly need it, being 15 points ahead of his primary opponent, Bob Vander Plaats. Vander Plaats was far more conservative than Branstad but also an ally of the likely 2012 candidate Mike Huckabee. In the New Hampshire Senate race, Palin threw her support behind the establishment candidate Kelly Ayotte rather than a Tea Party favorite who tried to endear himself to Palin by sending her a photograph of himself alongside the carcass of a deer he had just shot. When I asked Andy Smith, the University of New Hampshire Survey Center’s director and pollster, to explain why Palin had chosen Ayotte, he promptly answered: “I think she wanted to back a winner. Like Branstad in Iowa. I think she wanted people who would be in positions to help her out.”
These actions bespeak a calculating shrewdness on Palin’s part. But then what to make of her inactions? Three months after endorsing Branstad, Palin visited Iowa for the first time since 2008 to deliver a speech but then left without scheduling any other events. And since 2008, Palin has yet to travel to New Hampshire, having turned down a triumphalist Tea Party Express rally in Concord the evening before Election Day. In both cases, her aides told me, Palin was overscheduled. But since Sarah Palin is the keeper of her own itinerary, we are left to wonder whether these omissions suggest disorganization, lack of foresight, ambivalence, distrust of politicos or some combination of the above.
One evening in late October, I sat in the Anchorage apartment of Palin’s onetime communications director Bill McAllister, watching old TV footage of his ex-boss during her campaign for governor in 2006. McAllister, a former reporter with the Anchorage NBC affiliate who worked for Palin in 2008 and 2009, wanted me to see with my own eyes the Sarah Palin he knew — bright and easygoing, exceedingly popular with the local press — before the national media had grossly mischaracterized her in a way he found “frustrating and maddening.”
The Palin I watched on McAllister’s DVD lived up to his billing. She cut a competent, reasoned, disciplined figure, not taking the bait when one of her opponents dismissed her during a debate as “a bright smile.” There was another characteristic that McAllister hadn’t pointed out. In the footage, Palin declared, “We deserve leaders that aren’t just going to take a partisan approach.” Bemoaning the “gridlock down there in Juneau,” Palin reminded Alaskans, “I have good relationships with these legislators.” An undisputed social conservative who backed a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Palin nonetheless told an interviewer, “I don’t wear my faith on my sleeve.” And she promised not to let her religious beliefs “bleed into policy — that is my commitment.”
This Sarah Palin began to recede from view in 2008 as she was thrust into the traditional running mate’s role of partisan flamethrower. Nonetheless, while editing a speech she was about to give, the vice-presidential candidate crossed out a disparaging reference to liberals, telling an aide, “We want liberals to vote for us, too.”
I brought up her past efforts at bipartisanship to Palin. “I was so innocent and naïve to believe that I would be able to govern for four years and if I ever moved on beyond the governorship I could carry that with me nationally,” Palin said. “And it was proven when John McCain chose me for the nomination for vice president; what it showed me about the left: they go home. It doesn’t matter what you do. It was the left that came out attacking me. They showed me their hypocrisy; they showed me they weren’t willing to work in a bipartisan way. I learned my lesson. Once bitten, twice shy. I will never trust that they are not hypocrites until they show me they’re sincere.”
Since that time, Palin has gravitated to where the love is. On April 7 of this year, she spoke at a campaign rally in Minneapolis for Michele Bachmann. With a silver cross around her neck and a flag pin on her lapel, Palin spoke approvingly of those who are “proudly clinging to your guns and religion.” Condemning the recently passed health care legislation as “socialized medicine” that “breaks the bank and really violates the U.S. Constitution,” she applauded her party’s stout opposition, declaring, “What’s wrong with being the party of ‘No’?”
The cheering section directly behind Palin was packed with white conservative middle-aged women, a demographic that especially reveres her. Palin’s relationship to women generally is more complicated. On the one hand, her appreciation of pioneers like Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton is unambiguous. On the other, she tends to poll five or more points better among men, and feminists are loath to embrace her.
Palin is of course aware that her sex affords her an opportunity among a crowded, all-male Republican field for 2012. Her Minneapolis rally provided much of the content for her acclaimed “mama grizzly” call-to-arms Web ad released in June. In August, Palin posted a Facebook endorsement of seven women to coincide with the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Though several of her male endorsees also wound up defeating women, Palin has nonetheless emerged from the midterm cycle as America’s most visible advocate of female candidates not named Murkowski.
Whether Palin has what it takes to close the Republican Party’s longstanding gender gap is a question that has loomed since John McCain introduced her to the nation on Aug. 29, 2008. That same afternoon, McCain reached out to Geraldine Ferraro — the first female vice-presidential candidate and a Hillary Clinton supporter — and put her on the phone with his new running mate. The two traded brief, complimentary words. “Every time a woman runs, women win,” Ferraro told me a couple of days after Palin debated Joe Biden.
She felt reluctant to second-guess Palin’s performance against Biden. As Walter Mondale’s running mate, the three-term New York congresswoman possessed more experience with national issues than the Alaska governor — and because of the differing schedules, she was afforded nearly eight weeks more prep time than Palin received. It also helped, Ferraro pointed out, that the Mondale campaign paired her with a young Georgetown professor named Madeleine Albright, who “was attached to my hip from July 12 to the election.” Nevertheless, Ferraro concluded in a lamenting tone, “when you get down to the substance, it wasn’t there.”
“Look, everyone has an opinion about Sarah Palin,” her friend John Coale says. “But suppose when she starts doing the debates during the primaries, she knocks it out of the park. That would cause an entirely different view of things, wouldn’t it?”
Palin has taken steps to close the substance gap. As Davis put it to me, “She works very hard to get things right, because she understands the margin for error — and because it’s the right thing to do.” In Hong Kong 14 months ago, Palin delivered a dense world-affairs speech that she co-drafted with Randy Scheunemann and Rebecca Mansour. This past June in Norfolk, Va., Palin ripped Obama’s “enemy-centric” foreign policy in a spicy but detailed address. (In that speech and elsewhere, she has cited the wisdom of Joe Lieberman — though not on the matter of human-induced climate change, a concept she derides as a “snow job” and this “global warming Goregate stuff.” Lieberman told me, “Well of course I disagree with her and have been disappointed by it.” Lieberman also said: “My impression is that she and Todd are the kind of people I’d like to have as my next-door neighbors. That’s a separate question from whether she’s capable of being president.”) Earlier this month, Palin gave a speech on monetary policy, criticizing the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, which, according to Mansour, was written entirely by Palin and herself. Every morning, Palin reads a briefing consisting of a few bullet points prepared by Davis and Mansour. (“I wouldn’t make too much of it,” Davis cautioned me. “It’s like [Politico’s] Playbook, only without the birthdays. Sometimes I throw in a sports score.”) Her public remarks and Facebook posts have been increasingly littered with facts from biographies of Reagan, Thatcher and Lincoln that she has recently digested.
Palin became testy when I asked her about the books I heard she had been reading. “I’ve been reading since I was a little girl,” she snapped. “And my mom is standing 15 feet away from me, and I should put her on the phone with you right now so she can tell you. That’s what happens when you grow up in a house full of teachers — you read; and I always have. Just because — and,” she continued, though in a less blistering tone, “I don’t want to come across sounding caustic or annoyed by this issue: because of one roll-of-the-eye answer to a question I gave, I’m still dealing with this,” she said, referring to her interview with Katie Couric. “There’s nothing different today than there was in the last 43 years of my life since I first started reading. I continue to read all that I can get my hands on — and reading biographies of, yes, Thatcher for instance, and of course Reagan and the John Adams letters, and I’m just thinking of a couple that are on my bedside, I go back to C.S. Lewis for inspiration, there’s such a variety, because books have always been important in my life.” She went on: “I’m reading [the conservative radio host] Mark Levin’s book; I’ll get ahold of Glenn Beck’s new book — and now because I’m opening up,” she finished warily, “I’m afraid I’m going to get reporters saying, Oh, she only reads books by Glenn Beck.”
I explained to Palin that in my view, at least, this line of inquiry wasn’t gratuitous — that questions did in fact linger about her “gravitas gap.” Didn’t she think, for example, that the Republican kingmakers who were now supposedly scheming to kneecap her were mainly just concerned about how voters viewed her? “If that were the case, then they need to be courageous enough to put their names behind their criticisms,” she said, referring to anonymous quotations attacking her. “As I replied to Politico, these fellows want to be trusted to tend to our nation’s economic woes? They want to be trusted to take on the likes of Ahmadinejad, but they won’t take on a hockey mom from Wasilla? Until they do that, I dismiss them.”
But, I reiterated, didn’t she believe that the Republican establishment’s predominant worry was that she would lose to Obama? “Then perhaps they should vent some of their paranoia toward all of the potential G.O.P. candidates,” she said. “Because obviously there’s no guarantee that any one of us would win. But I do believe that much of this is a threat to their hierarchy, because I’ve never shied away from a battle and because I’ll put principle before politics.”
In a sense, Palin views Beltway Republicans as she does the Obama administration: aloof, self-interested and vulnerable to the populist power that she believes she wields. “They’re in an isolated bubble — Barack Obama mentioned that in his press conference, and I agree with him, he is isolated from what average Americans are talking about,” she said, referring to the president’s words after the midterm elections. “But what he was meaning, of course, was that he’s not in touch with average Americans. I am — because that’s who I am. That’s who surrounds me, common-sense Americans who just want government on their side, not riding their backs. And I tweet to reach out to them.”
At the end of our talk, she made note of my Southern accent and urged me, “Don’t lose that.” Then she went back to her world, somewhere in Alaska, where she was winding down the filming of her TV show — where apparently Internet reception was sufficient for her to send out three more Twitter posts that afternoon, joining herself to the rest of America and then leaving it at that, for the moment.
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush.”
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