Vanity Fair Discovers Sarah Palin is Loud and Secretive

Excellent detailed piece on Sarah Palin by journalist Michael Joseph Gross in the October 2010 issue of Vanity Fair …

_______________________________________________________

Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury

Former Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin speaks at the "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on August 28, 2010.

Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder, she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her. Following the former Alaska governor’s road show, the author delves into the surreal new world Palin now inhabits—a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family—and the sadness she has left in her wake.

Sarah Palin Cuts Vacation Short in Wake of Visor Controversy

Sarah Palin with her husband Todd Palin and family on vacation in Hawaii.

Sarah Palin announced Thursday evening that she has cut short her vacation in Hawaii after paparazzi snapped a picture of her wearing a marked-out McCain campaign visor, Politico reports. Palin reiterated her insistence that the visor was not, as TMZ had asserted, a political statement slighting her former running mate, and said that her family decided to head home early because the media attention was annoying other vacationers.

“In an attempt to ‘go incognito,’ I Sharpied the logo out on my sun visor so photographers would be less likely to recognize me and bother my kids or other vacationers,” she said in a statement. “Todd and I have since cut our vacation short because the incognito attempts didn’t work and fellow vacationers were bothered for the two days we spent in the sun.”

Sarah Palin’s Dad Chuck Heath and ‘The Minority Type Thing’

Sarah Palin, then Sarah Heath, left, with classmate Stacia Crocker at a dorm party at the University of Idaho.

Sarah Palin’s school years come back to haunt again, this time with a quote from father Chuck Heath. During the presidential campaign, the media scrutinized her college history, which begins in — of all places — Hawaii, Obama’s home state. Back in 1982, Palin and her high school buddy Kim “Tilly” Ketchum left Alaska for the Aloha State, eventually attending Hawaii Pacific University. But after one semester they returned to North Idaho College. Both blamed the weather for their departure. [Tip to Hyphen]

Ketchum told the LA Times:

“When you’re used to having some cooler weather, you get tired of the heat.”

While Palin echoed this explanation in her new book “Going Rogue,” her father gave reporters Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe a different reason. The New Yorker’s Sam Tanenhaus points out:

[Palin] is equally circumspect on the issue of ethnicity, pointing out that Todd, whom she met in high school, is “part Yupik Eskimo” and opened her to the “social diversity” of Alaska. (Wasilla is more than eighty per cent white.) Palin, though notoriously ill-travelled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not.

But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” In any case, Palin reports that she much preferred her last stop, the University of Idaho, “because it was much like Alaska yet still ‘Outside.’ “

Palin’s Father Insinuates Sarah Uncomfortable Around Asians

Chuck Heath, father of Sarah Palin.

Based on recent comments from her father, it appears that Asian Americans are partly responsible for Sarah Palin‘s spotty undergraduate career. Palin’s father suggested that she left her first school in Hawaii, ultimately attending four different colleges before graduating, because there were too many Asians in the tropical paradise. Which made her uncomfortable. Apparently, Palin felt much more comfortable studying in Idaho.

Learning this about Palin doesn’t surprise me in the least. Maybe she couldn’t make out all those Asian Americans in Hawaii from looking outside her window in Alaska.

Recap of Sarah Palin’s Many, MANY Lies

The many lies of Sarah Palin continue to emerge in "Going Rogue: An American Life."

The lies of Sarah Palin are different from any other politicians’. They are different because they assert things that are demonstrably, empirically untrue; and they are different because once they have been demonstrated to the entire world that they are untrue, Palin keeps repeating them as if they still were true or refuses to acknowledge that she was wrong.

Once again … here are the lies I mean. Go through them. See if you think they are Clintonian type parsings of the truth or artful political hedging or anything like what we find in most pols. They really are not. They are functions of delusion and a worldview that wants things to be a certain way and cannot absorb that they are not. If you find the slightest error or come across a fact that we should add to this list of current lies, please let us know. We want this list to be as accurate as Palin is delusional. We want to create some template of easily-accessible reality as some kind of guard against the fantasies and fabulisms of our post-modern and fundamentalist age.

“Going Rogue” Review: Sarah Palin Shows She Knows How to Hate; Needs Injection of Pinocchio Serum

Outgoing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (2nd L), her husband Todd (C) look on as incoming Governor Sean Parnell (2nd R) is sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Daniel Winfree (L) during the annual Governor's Picnic July 26, 2009 at Pioneer Park in Fairbanks, Alaska. Parnell' wife Sandy held the bible for the ceremony. Craig E. Campbell was sworn in as the new Lieutenant Governor.

Last July in Fairbanks, with Todd smiling at her side and Piper sitting in her lap, Sarah Palin watched Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell take the oath to fill out her term in office as Governor of Alaska. Then she vanished. For the past four months the Forty-Ninth State has seen neither hide nor hair of the woman. No speeches at chambers of commerce luncheons. No sightings on the street. No Sarah cheering on the sideline at Wasilla Warriors girls basketball games. No Sarah sitting in the pew on Sunday worshiping at the ChangePoint and Anchorage Baptist Temple evangelical mega churches. She’s been gone. Disappeared.

It now turns out that while Alaskans were hunkering down for winter Sarah was in San Diego working for a woman named Lynn Vincent, the ghostwriter HarperCollins hired to cobble together Going Rogue: An American Life, Sarah’s first person account of her it-only-would-happen-in-America rise from small town mayor to small state governor to Republican Vice Presidential candidate to popular culture icon.

Since Tuesday when Going Rogue was released nationwide copies of the book have been flying off the shelves at Barnes & Noble in Boise and Grand Rapids and not flying off the shelves in San Francisco and Seattle.

Since I already have enough to read, I had intended to give Going Rogue a pass until I had time this weekend to motor over to the Anchorage Barnes & Noble and give Ms. Vincent’s word-smithing a skim. But on Monday I learned that I’m in the book. Not surprisingly, that piqued my interest. And then yesterday a friend lent me a copy.

I’ve now read it. Here’s the review.

Trooper Mike Wooten Breaks His Silence On Palin’s Troopergate Lies

Former Alaska Public Safety Employees Association Executive Director John Cyr (left) and Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten, Sarah Palin's former brother-in-law and the trooper at the center of the Alaska Govenor Palin Troopergate Scandal.

The Alaska State Trooper at the center of Sarah Palin‘s so-called “Troopergate Scandal“–which impeded her run for the vice-presidency and stained her record as Alaska governor–has broken his more than year-long silence since his embattled divorce with Palin’s sister, Molly, became a cause celebre during last year’s presidential campaign.

After reading passages from Palin’s memoirs Going Rogue that deal with his marriage and subsequent divorce, a “fed up” Mike Wooten, 37, who still serves as an Alaska State Trooper in Anchorage, called the book “a pack of lies.”

According to Wooten, Palin and her father, Chuck Heath Sr., have “interfered with my life–and my children’s lives–for at least the last five years. And it is still going on. I’m done with it.”

Characterizing his adversaries as “snakes,” Wooten said he has kept quiet long enough. “From this point on I’m speaking my mind,” he declared. “I’m speaking the truth. Let the chips fall where they may.” He acknowledged that he is considering taking legal action against Palin on multiple fronts.

Although Palin would try to claim otherwise during the presidential campaign, an independent investigation ordered by the bipartisan Alaska Legislative Council (composed of ten Republicans and four Democrats) and conducted by former Republican prosecutor Steve Branchflower, resulted in the finding “that Governor Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.”

Going Rogue Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign

Former Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska on the presidential campaign trail in September 2008 with Senator John McCain.

“Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the presidential campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy and its decision to pull out of Michigan, and for speaking out about reports that the Republican Party had spent more than $150,000 on fancy designer duds for her and her family.

The most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the news media, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet — someone who could command a reported $5 million advance for writing this book.

In what reads like payback for disparaging comments by John McCain’s aides about her after the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunderheaded — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insisted, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”

The Persecution of Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin's overwhelming vindictiveness is apparent throughout "Going Rogue."

Maybe in their business lives, conservatives are the stern, unforgiving masters of capitalist lore. But when it comes to politics, oh, do they love a whiner!

It is her mastery of the lament that explained former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin‘s appeal last year, and now her knack for self-pity is on full display in her book, “Going Rogue.” This is the memoir as prolonged, keening wail, larded with petty vindictiveness. With an impressive attention to detail, Ms. Palin settles every score, answers every criticism; locates a scapegoat for every foul-up, and fastens an insult on every critic, down to the last obscure Palin-doubter back in Alaska.

From Ms. Palin’s masterwork, we learn that the personal really is the political. Every encounter with a critic seems to be a skirmish in the culture wars, from the Alaska debate moderator who didn’t play fair once to the “wealthy, effete young chap” who ran against her for governor but who, in one of the quickest transitions from anti-snob to snob in all of literature, is also said to have served as “our limo driver at [her husband] Todd’s cousin’s wedding.”

Palin Misrepresents Timeline on Daughter’s Pregnancy

Sarah Palin, husband Todd and their three daughters, Bristol, Willow and Piper.

On page 214 of her memoir “Going Rogue,” Sarah Palin writs the following in regard to when the McCain campaign knew about her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy:

“I was impressed with these guys. They were thorough. For example, they already knew that Bristol was pregnant, a development that I thought only loved ones were privy to at the time.”

Yet Palin should have known the campaign was aware of the pregnancy by that point: She told the campaign’s vice presidential vetters as much, in writing, far before she was chosen to be John McCain‘s running mate.

Palin and the other vice presidential short-listers were asked to fill out a written questionnaire during the vetting the process, according to a “senior official close to the vetting process” who talked to reporters on September 2nd, 2008.

Palin revealed Bristol’s pregnancy on this written questionnaire, adding that she wanted to discuss the pregnancy orally with the campaign, according to the campaign official.

A written report, which included info about the pregnancy, was presented to campaign manager Rick Davis as well as McCain before the campaign flew Palin down for the meeting she describes on Page 214.

Steve Chaggaris
CBS News