ROSITA BOLANDreviews Going RogueBy Sarah Palin Harper Collins 413pp; $28.99
IN AUGUST last year, Sarah Palin emerged like a jack-in-the-box into the US presidential campaign and whacked the world in the eye. At that point, I was less than two weeks into a 10-month stay in the US. Nobody then knew who she was, including the American media. In the e-mails I received from home, there was only one question: who is she?
As the world knows now, Palin was the most bizarre – but terrifyingly entertaining – vice- presidential candidate the US has ever run. I knew something was up when my new American friends passed on cocktails by saying they had to rush home to watch Palin give her speech to the Republican national convention on September 3rd, 2008. They never bailed on cocktails. They appeared the next day, looking bemused – and horrified.
Going Rogue was due to be published in spring of next year. It came out some months early, possibly as a spoiler to any book that Levi Johnston, the former fiance of Palin’s daughter Bristol, would produce in the meantime.
Watching the presidential campaign in the US, I always wondered whether Palin was as cuckoo as she seemed. Was some of it, at least, a hoedown-type act that was woefully misjudged?
She had the vocabulary and behaviour traits of a child, constantly winking, addressing her Democrat rival, Joe Biden, familiarly as “Joe”, telling us “you betcha”, or making ludicrous statements, just one of which was that she could see Russia from her home.
I was in Boston on Halloween night last year, and coming home to Cambridge on the subway, I found myself looking at about 50 Sarah Palins: that year’s costume of choice.
Judging by Going Rogue – I could see no evidence of it having been ghostwritten – it seems she truly is more cuckoo than a room of clocks. In 413 pages, she shows not a shred of self-knowledge, humility or grace. Boastfulness, whining, jingoism, ignorance and entitlement suffuse every sentence.
Palin seems to be utterly incapable of understanding that her point of view is not the only one, which seems doubly strange in a politician. If you are lucky enough to be invited to the Palin house for dinner with Sarah and First Dude, Todd, you won’t be eating much if you don’t eat meat.
Moose chilli, we learn, is Palin’s keynote dish. “If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”
Don’t bring your science book with you either for a moose chilli night. Despite the fact that Palin’s father is a science teacher, “never had Dad or anyone else convinced me that the Earth had sprung forth conveniently stocked with the ingredients necessary to spontaneously generate life and its beauty and diversity”.
All the train-wreck moments of the “Country First” McCain-Palin campaign are there. The shameless manipulation of prodding her pregnant daughter into a sham engagement. The interview with Katie Couric, from which Tina Fey made herself famous, simply by repeating Palin’s words verbatim. The hoax call from “Nicolas Sarkozy”, aka two Canadian comics. And none of it, she would have us believe in Going Rogue, is in the slightest bit her own doing.
You might start reading this book with the hope of being entertained, but you’ll end it feeling there is a giant wasp trapped inside your head.
Rosita Boland is an Irish Times journalist
