Vanity Fair: Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury

[Fumesucker]

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/10/sarah-palin-201010?currentPage=all

Backstage in the arena, a little girl in Mary Janes pushes her brother in a baby carriage, stopping a few yards shy of a heavy, 100-foot-long black curtain. The curtain splits the arena in two, shielding the children from an audience of 4,000 people clapping their hands in time to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The music accompanies a video “Salute to Military Heroes” that plays above the stage where, in a few moments, the children’s mother will appear.

When the girl, Piper Palin, turns around, she sees her parents thronged by admirers, and the crowd rolling toward her and the baby, her brother Trig, born with Down syndrome in 2008. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, bend down and give a moment to the children; a woman, perhaps a nanny, whisks the boy away; and Todd hands Sarah her speech and walks her to the stage. He pokes the air with one finger. She mimes the gesture, whips around, strides on four-inch heels to stage center, and turns it on.

And how. Palin and the crowd might as well be one. She’s glad to be here with the people of Independence, Missouri, “where so many of you proudly cling to your guns and your religion”—the first laughline in a 40-minute stump speech that alludes to many of the perceived insults she and her audience have suffered together, and that transforms their resentments into badges of honor. Palin waves her scribbled-on palm to the crowd, proclaiming that she’s using “the poor man’s teleprompter.” Of the Obama administration, she says, “They talk down to us. Especially here in the heartland. Oh, man. They think that, if we were just smart enough, we’d be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell ’em, and I do tell ’em, Oh, we’re plenty smart, oh yeah—we know what’s goin’ on. And we don’t like what’s goin’ on. And we’re not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.”


The crowd’s ample applause at these lines swells to something vastly bigger when Palin vows defiantly that “come November, we’re taking our country back!” The phrase plays on the name of this event, “Winning America Back,” which has been billed as a Tea Party rally organized by a grassroots Missouri political-action committee that no one had heard of until a few months ago, when the event was announced.

More at the link...

[trumad]

1. Fuck Plain---she's not the danger---The MSM is the danger.

[Contrary1]

10. This sentence from the article sums it up nicely:

"Palin is the only politician whose tweets are regularly reported as news by TV networks."

[Erose999]

2. The opening of this article sounds like any other puff-piece usually written about her. But it gets

good after the first few paragraphs. I'm glad they are pulling fewer punches on her. She needs to be exposed for the fraud she is.

[Fumesucker]

3. Yeah, like the fifth paragraph..

Sarah Palin’s connection with her audience is complete. People who admire her believe she is just like them, and this conviction seems to satisfy their curiosity about the objective facts of her life. Those whose curiosity has not been satisfied have their work cut out for them. Palin has been a national figure for barely two years—John McCain selected her as his running mate in August 2008. Her on-the-record statements about herself amount to a litany of untruths and half-truths. With few exceptions—mostly Palin antagonists in journalism and politics whose beefs with her have long been out in the open—virtually no one who knows Palin well is willing to talk about her on the record, whether because they are loyal and want to protect her (a small and shrinking number), or because they expect her prominence to grow and intend to keep their options open, or because they fear she will exact revenge, as she has been known to do. It is an astonishing phenomenon. Colleagues and acquaintances by the hundreds went on the record to reveal what they knew, for good or ill, about prospective national candidates as diverse as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, and Barack Obama. When it comes to Palin, people button their lips and slink away.

[Spyderama]

4. It's Time to Tell the REAL Story!

This article is a big step in the right direction, but it is time to tell the real story of the media's complicity in this nightmare.

http://palinbabygate.blogspot.com/

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. She reminds me of Jim and Tammy Faye bakker.

Remember them?

Same audience adoration.
hell, same audience.

[opihimoimoi]

6. yup...zactly

[UTUSN]

7. K&R big #5 for, Thanks!1 Am halfway through it, finishing later

It is NOT gossip from Levi JOHNSTON, although nothing he said about her was a lie. It is the most in depth, "real journalism" thing I've seen on her yet. And she's going to be a blight on the country for a long time, so this article needs some serious attention. But it's also got some juicy details, like she and Todd throwing canned goods at each other---that could do some bodily damage some day!1 She sounds like she's bi-polar, abuses her employees, but abusing employees didn't hurt Kay Bailey HUTCHINSON.

[UTUSN]

9. The UnRec feature in action (back to 4). n/t

[UTUSN]

8. wrong place. n/t

[UTUSN]

11. It took ONE question from Roger MUDD to sink Ted KENNEDY's run. This artcile is CHOCK

full of questions if a serious reporter got the chance to ask with cameras rolling. Sigh.


Great article!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

[riderinthestorm]

12. She is frighteningly psycho! Assisted by some of the biggest names in the biz.

More from the article:

"Warm and effusive in public, indifferent or angry in private: this is the pattern of Palin’s behavior toward the people who make her life possible. A onetime gubernatorial aide to Palin says, “The people who have worked for her—they’re broken, used, stepped on, down in the dust.” On the 2008 campaign trail, one close aide recalls, it was practically impossible to persuade Palin to take a moment to thank the kitchen workers at fund-raising dinners. During the campaign, Palin lashed out at the slightest provocation, sometimes screaming at staff members and throwing objects. Witnessing such behavior, one aide asked Todd Palin if it was typical of his wife. He answered, “You just got to let her go through it… Half the stuff that comes out of her mouth she doesn’t even mean.” When a campaign aide gingerly asked Todd whether Sarah should consider taking psychiatric medication to control her moods, Todd responded that she “just needed to run and work out more.” Her anger kept boiling over, however, and eventually the fits of rage came every day. Then, just as suddenly, her temper would be gone. Palin would apologize and promise to be nicer. Within hours, she would be screaming again. At the end of one long day, when Palin was mid-tirade, a campaign aide remembers thinking, “You were an angel all night. Now you’re a devil. Where did this come from?”

"The intensity of Palin’s temper was first described to me in such extreme terms that I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be exaggerated, until I heard corroborating tales of outbursts dating back to her days as mayor of Wasilla and before. One friend of the Palins’ remembers an argument between Sarah and Todd: “They took all the canned goods out of the pantry, then proceeded to throw them at each other. By the time they got done, the stainless-steel fridge looked like it had got shot up with a shotgun. Todd said, ‘I don’t know why I even waste my time trying to get nice things for you if you’re just going to ruin them.’ ” This friend adds, “As soon as she enters her property and the door closes, even the insects in that house cringe. She has a horrible temper, but she has gotten away with it because she is a pretty woman.” (The friend elaborated on this last point: “Once, while Sarah was preparing for a city-council meeting, she said, ‘I’m gonna put on one of my push-up bras so I can get what I want tonight.’ That’s how she rolls.”) When Palin was mayor, she made life for one low-level municipal employee so miserable that the woman quit her job, sought psychiatric counseling, and then left the state altogether to escape Palin’s sphere of influence—this according to one person with firsthand knowledge of the situation. The woman did not want to be found. When I finally tracked her down, her husband, who answered the phone, at first pretended that I had dialed the wrong number and that the word “Wasilla” had no meaning to him. Palin’s former personal assistants all refused to comment on the record for this story, some citing a fear of reprisal. Others who have worked with Palin recall that, when she feels threatened, she does not hesitate to wield some version of a signature threat: “I have the power to ruin you.”

"Palin’s public voice is an instrument of great versatility. In a few moments, she can turn from kind to hateful, rational to unhinged. At her best Palin can be folksy and pungent. But she needs outside help to give her voice its national range. For messaging strategy, Palin relies on William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and Fred Malek, who was an aide to Presidents Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush. The lawyer Robert Barnett, the most successful literary agent in Washington—his clients range from Hillary Clinton to Dick Cheney to Tony Blair—negotiated Palin’s reported $7 million advance for Going Rogue, and he helps oversee her speaking schedule, which is arranged by the Washington Speakers Bureau. The small inner circle that shapes Palin’s voice day to day includes lobbyist Randy Scheunemann, a director of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, who advises Palin on foreign affairs, and Kim Daniels, a lawyer with the Thomas More Law Center, which has been called “the Christian answer to the A.C.L.U.,” who advises her on domestic issues. Palin’s speechwriter is Lindsay Hayes. Doug McMarlin and Jason Recher, both of whom did advance work for George W. Bush, serve as body men and confidants. Both Hayes and Recher were on Palin’s 2008-campaign road team, and both were known for indulging her whims, according to their colleagues. (When John McCain decided to pull out of Michigan, a decision Palin disagreed with, Recher and Palin hatched a plan one day to make an early-morning drive to Michigan anyway. The Secret Service, becoming aware of the plan, asked the McCain campaign what it should do. The answer came: “Shoot out the tires.”) Campaign e-mails indicate that Recher was disrespectful of field staff and support workers. “Our volunteers don’t want to do Palin trips because of the way they are treated by Recher,” wrote one of his supervisors. Of all those who have professional relationships with Palin, only Robert Barnett is generally considered to be at the top of his game, and he is basically just cutting deals, as he would for any client."