"Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin"

Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: Our Tumultuous Years (Frank Bailey, Ken Morris & Jeanne Devon)

Reading though this book, I found myself amazed at two things:

1.) How incredibly vain and paranoid Sarah Palin really is.

2.) The fact that it took three people to write this book.

Let's deal with point two first. Frank Bailey is many things, but unfortuneatly he is not exactly a master wordsmith, and this book at times suffers. (I hesitate to think what the manuscript would look like without his two co-authors). This is kind of a minor point, which is why I want to get it out of the way now. Mostly all you need to know is that some lines hit ("Making me long for a chance to back in time to the Governor's Picnic and say to Sarah, 'Thanks, but no thanks, on that job to nowhere'") and more often miss (A realtively unimportant part of the book - Palin's vetting by the McCain campaign: - is described "As political perfect storms go, this resembled two Category 5s meeting head-on") and some really just sum up the whole book ("Punishing enemies and wealth accumulation became a full-time job").

Back to the first issue, this is an inside look at Sarah Palin before and after her veep run in 2008. (Bailey was out in the cold during the actual veep run, which I think ends up being a net positive; Her behaviour during the election itself has been covered exhaustively and I don't really think it needs to be gone over again here.) Bailey, describing himself as the original Palin-bot, gets in on the ground floor of the Palin campaign for Gov, showing up the first day to pry gum off the floors of her new campaign headquarters. What follows is his rise to becoming Sarah's right hand, kind of, and his subsiquent ups and downs as the Palin inner circle, which sounds like nothing so much as a horrible high school clique on steroids, raises some high and brings others down low.

Though it all, what astonished me the most was how vindictive and petty Palin appears; Even after she's elected Governor, she seems to spend more time reading blogs about herself and emitting steam from her ears when commenters say mean things about her than she does governing. For me, the low point came after she returns from the lower 48 to resume governing Alaska (before becoming the Alaskan Quitbull and resigning), when a neighbor complains about the air and noise pollution coming from tour busses going past her house. Palin sets out to destroy him, sending her daughter Willow out to set up a lemonade stand, then calling reporters to tell them that, gosh, this mean ol' grinch just hates little girls, lemonade, Sarah Palin, America, and probably the Baby Jesus, isn't that a shame?

Bailey has saved all of his emails, which he uses liberally to show the incredible amount of minute, petty matters Palin not only seems to enjoy wasting her time with, but can't seem to ignore to save her life, and the picture they paint is very difficult to refute. (One more piece of dirt: Sarah has had Lasik eye surgery, and only wears her glasses to look smart.) The book can occasionally be a slog, but as far as I've read it's the definitive Palin book out there, and in a sane country would probably be the nail in her political coffin, you betcha.

Grade: A