When Sarah Palin comes to your house for dinner, do not invite John McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt; his top aide, Nicole Wallace; or CBS anchor Katie Couric. They come in for a real beating as America’s most interesting politician settles scores that still rankle from the 2008 presidential campaign in “Going Rogue: An American Life.”
Palin may not be America’s most popular politician — a new poll says 53 percent would definitely not vote for her, while only 9 percent definitely would — but she commands enough fascination that her 413-page, score-settling political memoir was an online best-seller even before its official publication.
Her revelations about the inner workings of the McCain campaign are hardly flattering — Schmidt, her chief target, calls them “total fiction” — and that, if not the title of her book alone, means that if she has further political ambitions, they will have to be for the top of the ticket. While Palin is a huge draw and fundraiser in Republican circles, any serious GOP candidate would have serious reservations about giving her a second shot as running mate.
Her fans are urging her to run for president in 2012, a decision she does not have to make — and would be wise to put off — for a while. But her book tour looks remarkably like a campaign, with a bus and stops in battleground states, including Iowa, the 2012 curtain raiser. Politically, she is trying to position herself as a “common-sense conservative,” an heir to Ronald Reagan and as the tribune of America’s Joe Six-Packs, in studied contrast to the cool, aloof Barack Obama.
Her book tour promises to be as dishy as her memoir itself. On a kickoff interview on Oprah Winfrey’s show, Palin was asked about Levi Johnston, whose inexplicable celebrity is rooted in the fact that he was once her son-in-law-to-be. She described his decision to pose nude for Playgirl as “aspiring porn.” You just don’t get that kind of material in the average politician’s memoirs.
Whatever she decides to do, we hope she’s taking notes.
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