The main problem with Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” is that it doesn’t. In fact, despite all the hype, the book doesn’t go either rogue or anywhere else of much interest in 413 easy-reading pages.
And yet, I spent $28.99 and nearly five hours of my life on the book. Fortunately, I used the company credit card and have a job where you actually get paid to read.
If you’re thinking of buying your own copy, though, you should know that if you’ve seen Palin on “Oprah” or listened to her on “Rush,” you’ve already got the basics. She doesn’t much like Katie Couric. She does like Ronald Reagan and, of course, “every-day, hard-working Americans.” She doesn’t much like the McCain people, the same ones who set her on the path to fame and, with the proceeds from this book, fortune.
As it turns out, Palin had good reason not to like her handlers. The McCain campaign worried at every turn that she was a disaster waiting to happen. They weren’t alone.
The book’s first half is a not-very- interesting ode to growing up in Alaska. (You do learn about Palin’s first kiss with Todd. You don’t learn much about the five colleges she attended.) And the second half is an entirely predictable ode to the politics of resentment. When asked by McCain adviser Steve Schmidt — the villain of the piece — what she knew about Iraq, Palin wrote, she told him she “knew the history to the extent that most Americans did.”
That, she figured, was enough. And that, as much as anything, explains the state of our democracy, circa 2008, or maybe just the state of Glenn Beck’s audience, 2009.
What the McCain people didn’t get about Palin is what has become obvious: The really interesting thing about Palin is not what she says and certainly not what she writes. What’s fascinating — endlessly fascinating, apparently — is the reaction, from right and left, to anything she says, writes or does. It’s not the book itself, after all, that has created the excitement. It’s the rollout of the book.
A look at the reaction to Palin would be a book worth reading. The mix of celebrity and politics is not a new story, but it seems to be happening in a different way.
Take Barack Obama, a mixed-race kid from Hawaii who channeled John Kennedy and became among the best and the brightest, not to mention most charismatic, of his generation.
His critics called him the Messiah. But many of those same critics fell just as hard for Palin, whose story, that of the beauty queen who became governor of Alaska and raised a houseful of kids while maybe missing a few issues of Foreign Affairs, rivaled the Obama narrative.
OK, Obama’s books are better written. His story, if you check the polls, has wider appeal, which may reflect the relative standing of the Democratic and Republican parties.
On the other hand, Palin is the reality-show candidate whose life is People magazine perfect and for whom it seems perfectly natural to feud with a late-night talk-show host. (By the way, from Letterman’s top-10 list on revelations in Palin’s book: She nearly dropped out of the campaign after spraining her winking muscle.)
Those who say McCain regretted choosing her have their history wrong. The excitement Palin generated briefly rescued a campaign that couldn’t, in the long term, be saved.
But what Palin didn’t get is that McCain picked her as his running mate not because she was a maverick — but because picking her made McCain look like a maverick.
I know that seems like so much water under the bridge to nowhere. But clearly, Palin wanted her version of the 2008 campaign on the record, even if the McCain people disputed much of it. She didn’t need to do that to sell books. She did it, we can only assume, to run for president in 2012.
Will she run? Did quitting her day job as governor make that impossible? Can you run if 60 percent of the nation thinks you’re not qualified? Is 60 percent more than half?
Reaction is all over the place. There’s a Newsweek cover of Palin posing in running gear. Sexist? You betcha. Rush Limbaugh says Palin’s book is stuffed with policy insights. Nutty? You betcha your fat, uh, cigar. Liberal websites are fact-checking the book. Conservative intellectuals are split. David Brooks calls Palin a “joke.” Meanwhile, Matthew Conti netti writes a Washington Post review that begins: “Like a lot of people, as soon as I got my copy of Sarah Palin’s ‘Going Rogue,’ I immediately thought of the German literary critic Hans Robert Jauss.” Seriously.
Anything’s possible. Palin is the only person I know whose grandson’s father is posing for Playgirl while, at the same time, people argue whether she is the new William Jennings Bryan. I wonder if Tina Fey can do a Bryan imitation.
What’s clear is that Palin can write about “death panels” on her Facebook page and, however absurd it might be, temporarily hijack the health care debate.
Who has that kind of power?
You don’t need to read a book to know that. But any good book reviewer will tell you Palin’s career options at this point are either presidential candidate or, yes, talk-show host. I’m thinking it could go either way.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
