Sarah Palin practices politics as lap dance, and we’re the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred-dollar bills into her G-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don’t take her seriously.
– Joe McGinniss, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin
It seemed odd that Joe McGinniss’s new biography of Sarah Palin had received so many poor reviews from media outlets typically hostile to the former Alaska governor.
After I read it, the reason became clear: The Rogue is so lurid, malicious, and self-evidently false that Palin’s opponents fear it will undermine their cause. It also reveals more about the shared mindset of the left and the mainstream media than many journalists would care to admit.
McGinniss seems driven by an irrational hatred of Palin. That is apparent from the nasty charges he makes about her, which are not only sensational but also self-contradictory. His malevolent accusations evoke George Orwell’s observation on antisemitism: “Obviously the charges made about Jews are not true. They cannot be true, partly because they cancel out, partly because no one people could have such a monopoly of wickedness.”
Take McGinniss’s most infamous claim, leaked days before The Rogue appeared in stores–the accusation that Palin had sex with basketball player Glen Rice in 1987. The charge appears in the book exactly one page after McGinniss claims Palin declined to enroll at the Hilo campus of the University of Hawaii because “the many people of color there made her nervous,” and that she later abandoned the Honolulu campus because “[t]here were people of color…even on Waikiki Beach.” McGinniss attempts to explain the abrupt transition by speculating that she might have become “a basketball groupie who’d begun to find black men attractive.” And then, on the very next page after that, he quotes an unnamed “friend” who claimed that Palin “totally flipped out” about her alleged encounter with Rice: “I fucked a black man! She was just horrified. She couldn’t believe that she’d done it,” the alleged “friend” claims (original emphasis).
Other contradictions recur throughout the book. McGinniss can’t decide, for example, whether Palin was a “housewife who happened to be governor” (quoting Gary Wheeler, a state employee whose job she cut), or that Palin neglected her maternal duties such that “the children literally would have a hard time finding enough to eat” (quoting an unnamed “friend”). The only common theme is McGinniss’s palpable hatred for Palin.
That, and his apparent misogyny. Here is how he describes Palin on the book’s final page: “Sarah Palin practices politics as lap dance, and we’re the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred-dollar bills into her G-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don’t take her seriously.”
It is a fitting conclusion to a book in which McGinniss often uses sex to mock Palin and her family.
McGinniss contends, for example, that in high school Palin had a “proclivity for sleeping naked on athletic trips.” (Source: a “schoolmate.”) He relates a claim that as mayor of Wasilla, Palin put on her “biggest push-up bra” and used her “titties” to win city council votes. (Source: “someone who knew her well at the time.”) He includes a quote stating that Mayor Palin was happiest when “her boobs were sticking out good and her pants were good and tight…” (Source: an “acquaintance.”)
He also sexualizes Palin’s popularity in Alaska, claiming there was something more than political to the state’s “infatuation” with her. “Men with dominatrix fantasies took note,” he says, of a column in the Anchorage Daily News that praised her decisions in her first weeks as governor, finding sexual innuendo in the following: “There’s something refreshing about Palin. She’s like your high school English teacher, quite capable of scolding when necessary.”
Sex was even the key, McGinniss suggests, to Palin’s vice-presidential ambitions in 2008. When a Weekly Standard cruise docked in Alaska in 2007 with several leading conservative writers aboard, Palin arranged a lunch with them. She won them over, McGinniss claims, “[b]asking in the adulation of these older men and glorying in her ability to seduce them,” though they declined her efforts to tempt them with dinner.
And yet, the contradiction: Palin is sexually frigid, says McGinniss. He writes of her sex life with her husband, Todd: “Neither did Sarah find nourishment in the joy of sexual intimacy with her husband. ‘Todd complained a lot about never having sex with Sarah,’ a friend of his tells me….One former houseguest says Sarah’s aversion to intimacy was so extreme that she didn’t even like to think about other people having sex.”
Throughout the book, McGinniss bemoans the fact that his investigation of Palin has become so controversial, particularly his decision to move next door to her family. He complains about comments on conservative blogs, and commends the simple Alaskans who, in quaint gestures of solidarity, offer him their firearms to fend off death threats. He even professes alarm that Todd Palin “seems to think I’m here to snoop on Sarah.” McGinniss seems incapable of self-criticism on this point, lamenting the fact that people are watching him in Wasilla–even as he imposes himself on the Palins: “[A]lmost anytime I glance out my kitchen window, I see a car parked by the chain. Not the same car–dozens of different cars and trucks and campers….”But we just want a picture.” I tell them they can take all they want from outside the chain. And they do, morning, noon, and night…”.
Yet snooping is what McGinniss clearly intended to do, dredging up nameless enemies with scores to settle and probing rumors about her personal life, including her children. McGinniss even indulges “Trig Trutherism,” the debunked theory–by Salon.com, no less–that Palin faked her fifth pregnancy. (He concludes that “even if she had not faked the entire story of her pregnancy and Trig’s birth, it was something that she was eminently capable of doing.”)
When he does address her political record, McGinniss revisits well-worn accusations against Palin–from rape kits, to Troopergate, to “blood libel.” Invariably, his version of events takes her enemies at their word, and presents Palin in the worst possible light. Unfortunately for McGinniss and other persistent Palin critics, a recent mainstream media witch-hunt into tens of thousands of Palin’s emails as governor turned up nothing.
But the facts, after all, are not the point in The Rogue. McGinniss is driven by the desire to prove that Palin is a “dominionist,” an evangelical Christian whose goal “is to put Christian extremists into positions of political power in order to end America’s constitutionally mandated separation of church and state.” (The “dominionist” conspiracy theory is not an original one, nor confined to Palin alone: the New Yorker published similar accusations against Michele Bachmann last month.)
The genius of Palin’s political method, according to McGinniss, is that she is prepared to use non-Christian means to achieve her Christian end. He claims, for example, that “the dopers and boozers combined with Wasilla’s evangelical Christians to form Sarah’s first political base.” She pursued a “covert Christian extremist agenda” on the city council, McGinniss alleges, and, as mayor, purged those “insufficiently Christian” from city hall.
Likewise, as governor, McGinniss claims: “…as she’d done in Wasilla ten years earlier, Sarah was peopling her administration largely with high school friends and/or born-again Christians, whose qualifications in no way matched their job descriptions.” McGinniss ignores contrary evidence, including articles he cites for other purposes, such as the aforementioned “dominatrix” column, which actually praised Palin’s cabinet choices.
McGinniss struggles to square these accusations with his contention that Palin’s faith is a fraud: “Sarah wraps herself in her children as ostentatiously as she wraps herself in the arms of Jesus and in the American flag. She uses them shamelessly, from Track in his uniform to Trig in his diapers. But it’s all just part of the show.” He cannot decide whether her Christianity is extreme, or hollow. So he simply accuses her of both.
He attributes her successful political career to being “in the right place at the right time” and a creative use of “ignorance”:
The [gubernatorial] campaign taught Sarah that ignorance, if accompanied by a bright smile and a catchy phrase or two, was not necessarily a drawback. On the contrary, it allowed her to connect with that bloc of churchgoing, gun-toting, God-fearing, government-distrusting voters who, like her, might not grasp the intricacies of public policy, but who knew, doggone it, how they felt.
Unwittingly, perhaps, McGinniss echoes then-Senator Barack Obama’s infamous declaration, during the 2008 presidential campaign, that Americans in small towns “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
That antipathy towards Americans outside the elite “progressive” bubble is a persistent theme in McGinniss’s book, from his very first description of Wasilla: “enough small-fry evangelical Christian churches to make Jesus himself weep from the effort of trying to count them all.” He claims that racism is “rampant in Wasilla–then and now,” and that a young Todd Palin beat up an (unnamed) black student “simply because he was black.”
Palin is also an antisemite, McGinniss insinuates, claiming that during her campaign for mayor, her “doper/boozer-charismatic Christian coalition” spread a rumor that the incumbent mayor’s wife was a Jew. (Ironically, McGinniss appears to invoke an anti-Jewish stereotype himself, noting that there are no synagogues in Wasilla, despite the town’s high number of chiropractors–whom McGinniss apparently assumes are Jewish.) McGinniss also alleges that upon taking office as governor, Palin committed “racially motivated firings” of about “two dozen” people with dark skin. Here, at least, he names a source–John Bitney, an ex-employee with an axe to grind. The fact that Palin’s then-press secretary, Bill McAllister, was (and is) “of African American descent” (according to another Palin detractor), does not interfere with McGinniss’s effort to tell the “real” story of Palin’s origins from a cesspool of small-town bigotry.
That same prejudice, we are (predictably) told, was reflected among Palin’s followers in her new role as “patron saint of the right-wing extremists who would soon coalesce into the Tea Party.” His “proof ” of Tea Party racism is a stray comment by an older white woman–he is careful to notice her race and age–in the crowd after a Palin speech: “I would love for her to get to the White House so bad. We need an American like us there.”
McGinniss says that he agrees with Palin on one thing: “…you can’t trust what you read in the mainstream media.” He arrives at that insight only after he himself becomes the target of inaccurate media accounts of his intrusive research methods. McGinniss actually believes the mainstream media “largely ignored Sarah’s religious extremism” during the 2008 campaign, and that its decision to abandon Trig Trutherism was a regrettable dereliction of journalistic duty.
But The Rogue is parasitic on accusations the mainstream media–and the tabloids–have already made. Ironically, while McGinniss tried to write the definitive Palin exposé, he inadvertently exposed how the left-wing gentry and the media think–not just about Palin, but about Americans in general. It is no accident that McGinniss’s impressions of Wasilla and Obama’s thoughts about rural Pennsylvania are virtually the same.
Nor is it a coincidence that the Glen Rice story was the first “scoop” McGinniss leaked. Many on the left seem to enjoy the idea that conservative ideas sprout from sexual repression, rather than genuine conviction. For those who have convinced themselves that Palin’s primary appeal is to racist Christian extremists, there seems no better way to undermine her political strength than with a tale of pre-marital, interracial sex.
That tone-deaf tactic hasn’t worked, as Palin’s recent surge in opinion polls shows. And it won’t work, because most reasonable people have stopped buying the lies about Palin.
To borrow from Orwell: they cannot be true, partly because they cancel out, partly because no one person could have such a monopoly of wickedness. Sarah Palin will be judged on her public record, for good or ill–not for what McGinniss saw, or invented, one summer in Wasilla.
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