Going Rogue book review (SBP)
Print. January 6th, 2010It should, in theory, be possible to separate out one’s opinion of a book from one’s opinion of its author. But, in Sarah Palin’s case, it is hard to maintain the wall of separation.
Part of the issue is Palin herself. She has a good claim to the title of America’s most divisive politician. After all, this is a woman whom a large swathe of conservatives adore, but whom an even larger chunk of the US population considers to be manifestly unqualified for high office.
In Going Rogue, touching portraits of family life are again and again revealed as mere diagrams to illustrate the correctness of Palin’s political beliefs.
As a child, she gets stopped while out for a holiday ride on a snow machine with her brother, is irked with the policeman who hinders their fun and solemnly informs the reader that “maybe that was my first brush with the skewed priorities of government”. A conversation a generation later with her own daughter, Bristol, about the younger Palin’s goal of opening a coffee shop, includes the advice: “Don’t do this until this [Obama] administration understands government’s role in private business. Or wait until they’re out of office.”
The prose style of Going Rogue — which is, for the most part, fluent though uninspired — tells us little or nothing about the former Alaska governor, since it is the work of a ghost writer. But what Palin has chosen to emphasise reveals plenty.
Perhaps most jarring to European readers will be the frequent references to God. On this side of the Atlantic, even believers sometimes feel queasy about public protestations of faith from politicians — hence the famous remark by Tony Blair’s erstwhile spin doctor Alastair Campbell that “We don’t do God.”
Palin most definitely does God. Indeed, he keeps a close and nurturing eye on her political ambitions. He is apparently in favour of her 2002 run for lieutenant-governor of Alaska (“I knew that God was working on something significant in our small-town life”); her later bid for governor (“I thought of a passage from the book of Jeremiah 29:11-13: ‘“For know that I have plans for you,” declares the Lord’”); and for the vice-presidency itself (“When God presents those doors, we think, ‘Yes. This is right. This fits’”).
When not contemplating celestial matters, Palin propagates her most cherished image of herself: the ordinary mom-politician, bravely doing the people’s business yet assailed by influential enemies on all sides. The media, political opponents, purportedly inept aides — all get it in the neck, and always in a way that presents Palin as the embattled heroine.
The problem here is two-fold.
Firstly, a petty, churlish air permeates much of the book. No stranger to innuendo, Palin refers to two public figures in her home town base of Wasilla “who it was rumoured were good friends”; a later political opponent is an “effete young chap.” Elsewhere, pointless jibes are made at her supposed opponents in the despised mainstream media. “Well, I like his mom,” she remarks drily about one CNN anchor.
Secondly, many of the targets of Palin’s ire have come out since the book’s publication to say that certain details are simply untrue.
Steve Schmidt, the manager of last year’s McCain-Palin campaign, is portrayed as her foul-mouthed nemesis. But he has called many of her allegations “total fiction”. Sources within the campaign have said that an episode described at length in the book, in which Schmidt apparently erupted in rage on a phone call with Palin, simply never happened.
Another campaign advisor, Nicolle Wallace, has alleged the book is “based on fabrications” and that Palin’s depiction of a conversation in which Wallace sought to persuade her to do a TV interview, which proved to be a disaster, “is fiction”.
This is serious for its own sake, but it also erodes the only reason any nominally neutral person would have for reading Going Rogue.
Political junkies might be lured by Palin’s apparently willingness to dish the dirt on what went on behind the scenes of the presidential campaign.
If a cloud hangs over those descriptions, however, there is little left.
Palin-lovers will lap Going Rogue up. For the rest of us, this is a hollow, occasionally nasty and oddly dispiriting book.
First published in The Sunday Business Post, December 6, 2009.