TIME: Where Is Sarah Palin Going Next? (To the bank)

[question everything]

Thursday, Jul. 09, 2009
The Outsider: Where Is Sarah Palin Going Next?
By David Von Drehle and Jay Newton-Small / Dillingham, Alaska




(snip)


The campaign ended but not the barrage. Since the election in November, Palin has been hit with at least 10 ethics complaints for such alleged offenses as allowing her picture to be used to promote Alaskan fisheries and wearing a logo on her snowmobile gear. One complaint was filed under a pseudonym borrowed from a British soap opera. Most were quickly dismissed. And yet, Palin says, she arrived at the conclusion that there would always be more and that the complaints would consume her remaining time as governor.

(snip)


For Palin, however, these aren't isolated incidents. She believes they grow from the same root, which is too big and too formidable to ignore. "A lot of this comes from Washington, D.C. The trail is pretty direct and pretty obvious to us," says Meg Stapleton, a close Palin adviser in Alaska. Awaiting a flight back to Anchorage from distant Dillingham, Stapleton adds that the anti-Palin offensive seems lifted straight from The Thumpin', which describes the political strategies of Rahm Emanuel, who is now the White House chief of staff. "It's the Sarah Palin playbook. It's how they operate," Stapleton says.

(snip)

Something else might have been eating at Palin too. Call it boredom or impatience: Juneau must seem awfully small compared with the national stage. A state representative from Anchorage, Democrat Mike Doogan, recalls the traditional opening of the legislature on a January day — the same day Obama was sworn in as President. Doogan was chosen to pay a ceremonial visit to the governor to announce that the session had begun. Dressed in his best suit, with a plastic iris in his lapel, he waited in Palin's office as she finished a meeting. "She wasn't particularly happy to see us or interested in anything other than getting the ceremony over as quickly as possible," he says. "And this from a woman who had served cupcakes for my birthday at the mansion just six months earlier." That was the last he saw of the governor in Juneau.

(snip)

Where does Sarah Palin go next? To the bank. She has already announced plans to write a book; her advance is reportedly in the millions. A celebrity of her wattage commands huge money on the lecture circuit, and at as much as $100,000 per speech, she can exceed her official salary in a couple of days. Attractive and garrulous, Palin seems born to host a cable-TV show... A recent Gallup survey asked American adults whether they have become more conservative or more liberal in recent years, and the answer might suggest a bumpier road ahead for the Administration. Despite the Democratic sweep in 2008, "more conservative" prevailed 2 to 1. Being strong with the right is not a bad place for a woman of ambition to get started.

(snip)


So, bye, Alaska! She made her declaration on Independence Day weekend as a symbol, she says, of her new and exhilarating freedom. She's headed to a bookstore, a television set, a convention hall near you, armed with an anti-résumé. Cut loose from her obligations to her huge and awesome homeland, her message remains quintessentially Alaskan. Where she comes from — the last American frontier — the past is irrelevant, the rules are suspended, and limitations are for losers.


http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1909442,00.html

[Double T]

1. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if 'WE' don't start getting this mess of a country put back together.

[Raine1967]

2. "A lot of this comes from Washington, D.C."

Please Sarah -- stop with your victimhood bullshit.

She and what she says is a load of total Mooseshit.