reading Going Rogue

Cover of Going Rogue: An American Life

I spent a chunk of the Christmas break reading the Sarah Palin memoir Going Rogue: An American Life.

I don't know what to call this book, exactly. It sort of fits into the shameless political autobiography category, sort of fits into the political tell-all category. I don't read much of either genre: this year I read the Gary Aldrich Clinton-era hit piece Unlimited Access, which fits neatly into the second category, and that's it, so I don't have much to measure it against.

This is an honest-to-goodness four-hundred pager, with lots of self-contained paragraphs that link up to tell the Sarah Palin story, in more or less five acts:

• Family history and life before she became mayor of Wasilla, Alaska
• Time as mayor of Wasilla
• Year-plus as Governor of Alaska
• McCain-Palin 2008
• Life after the campaign and a little future direction

It's a surprisingly dense read: it's written in fairly plain English, but with a fair amount of political jargon and the technical language of running a town or a state: a lot of talk about the nuts and bolts of town council politics and state budget negotiations, not to mention the technical details of running for Vice President of the United States. While a lot of these books get written on the basis of many interviews with the help of a ghostwriter, I got the impression that this was the distillation of a large number of journal entries: the narrative is at times disjointed, and there are lots of little vignettes that really contribute nothing to the overall story. I realize that Governor Palin has a lot to say about a lot of things to several different audiences, but I wondered repeatedly if the book could have done with some editing, perhaps to put the political stuff in political chapters, the family stuff in family chapters, etc.

I don't know if I'm in the target audience for this book; I suspect not. I am inclined to take the implied explanation in the last section of the book: she left the Alaska Governor's office owing a half-million dollars, and the advance for Going Rogue was a relatively painless way to cover those expenses and leave a little nest egg for the Palin family. I got the impression that the book was written as the end of something, rather than a bridge to the next phase of something. Governor Palin definitely sounds done with the whole sordid business by the end of the book.

I found this book painful to read. Palin's tone is earnest and occasionally miffed, and that wears thin pretty quickly, and frankly I didn't (and don't) care about all the scores she needed to settle and records she needed to straighten. The family stuff got old too: I realize that it's very difficult to juggle a career with the demands of being a single mom (Palin's husband works on the North Slope, more than a thousand miles from the Palin home in Wasilla), not to mention the twenty-four-hour-a-day demands of being the Governor of even a state with relatively simple politics like Alaska, but after a while the middle three children sort of blur together (the oldest, Track, is in the military, and the youngest, Trig, has Down Syndrome), and I just didn't care whether somebody was being mean to her kids, etc.

I started reading this book believing that Palin was woefully unqualified to be President of the United States, and the McCain campaign made a snap decision that thrust her into the spotlight. I still believe both of those things, but I'd be less disturbed than I was a year ago if she were appointed to a Cabinet position or were elected to Congress. She espouses a clearly-defined set of values, she's beholden to certain interests, etc. I tend to believe that a President needs to have served in an executive capacity, involved in policy-making, and either started and successfully run a small business or served in the military; preferably both of the latter. Palin is somewhat qualified on the first two counts, and not on either of the latter two counts. If she'd served out her term as Governor of Alaska and been re-elected I'd be more comfortable voting for her as Vice President. I'm not sure what she'd have to do for me to be comfortable voting for her as President. Maybe if she got the Republican nomination and she were running against John Kerry.

I realize that qualifications are sometimes a poor predictor of performance as President: Bill Clinton was poorly qualified, as was George W. Bush, while George Bush had the best resume in Washington, and Richard Nixon and Woodrow Wilson may have been the best-qualified of any candidates in the last century. Good Presidents tend to surround themselves with a mix of political operatives and visionaries, and of course have good luck.

I really didn't get a feel for who would be in a Palin Cabinet. She overplayed her outsider status during the 2008 campaign section of Going Rogue, repeatedly complaining about how she was part of "the B Team" while the campaign was being run by "headquarters." It isn't even clear to me who would be her Karl Rove or her Lee Atwater, much less who would be her Raul Emanuel. If anything, her story lent more credibility to the notion that the 2008 campaign had little or nothing to do with Sarah Palin per se.

I hate to say it, but I can't recommend this book as a stand-alone Sarah Palin biography; I wish someone in the McCain-Palin camp had written a less personal account I could have written first, even if it was a work of hagiography on the order of The Nixon Nobody Knows.

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Joe McGuinniss: The Selling Of The President 1968

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I'm getting married in a couple of months, and my fiancee and I are reading a bunch of marriage and relationship books as part of our preparation. It's a dangerous quest proceeding from a flawed premise (the gulf between relationships and writing about relationships is wide; the differences between a particular relationship and books about relationships generally are huge), but it's been an eye-opening experience, by turns enlightening, frustrating, and tedious.

As a result I'm finally reading The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss. I snagged a copy out of the free bin at Mesa Public Library some time in the grey blurry past and I've been meaning to get around to it for some time.

I've been fascinated by Richard Nixon for years, I think partly due to having read at least two volumes of the Stephen Ambrose's Nixon biography. He's the first President I remember, the one who ended the war in Vietnam, and frankly I think he's the most important person in American politics between about 1948 and 1980.

The McGinniss book is about the 1968 campaign, and it's one of the first "you are there" campaign stories I'm aware of, written during the campaign by an outsider and published immediately thereafter. It isn't about the campaign so much as it is about the television commercials and how they were produced. McGinniss spends his time with the media guys, the ones producing commercials and half-hour panel discussions, as opposed to Nixon himself and his handlers.

Nixon was suspicious of television, having lost the 1960 campaign to Kennedy due at least partly to having not looked good during their televised debates. He was already a mature politician, having already been Congressman, Senator, and Vice President, and his actual opinions and values weren't about to change, but he was chastened by his loss to Kennedy and so he was willing to work with his television people (advertisers, basically, with at least one of them hailing from the same ad agency that later employed Michael Gates Gill of Starbucks fame), but just enough to win. McGinnis, because he's looking at the campaign from the media side, holds Nixon at arms' length and lets the media guys tell their stories.

Nixon was bringing 1950s sensibilities to what was a very Sixties campaign, and was comfortable with people like Bud Wilkinson, John Wayne, and Connie Francis. His ad men instead want to produce updated Daisy ads, successions of trite but effective mood-creating moments, informed by documentaries, mostly. They're hired hands, and they tend to produce ads consistent with their values that are then reconsidered by the Nixon political people. They produce ads that suggest undertones of racial harmony, or at least confrontation of racial issues, then have them toned down by people who want to reach out to Wallace supporters. They produce ads that make reference to ending the war in Vietnam, then have them toned down to avoid alienating war supporters. And in all of this it gradually becomes clear that to McGinnis's eye Nixon is less concerned about any of the issues his campaign stresses than in winning the election.

All of this stuff is so new and borderline naive in 1968 that it makes for compelling reading. The idea that television time is expensive is a surprise to some of the characters, as is the fact that the crowds in Nixon's half-hour panel discussions are all Nixon supporters, or that the discussions are assembled to accommodate the eye of the camera much more than the people in the audience. McGinnis seems by turns surprised and fascinated at the power of television, and the terrible things it appears to be doing to the process of choosing a President.

Also interesting are the portrayals of Roger Ailes, Pat Buchanan, and Kevin Phillips. Man that was a long time ago.