400 Pages In Four Months

That's Sarah Palin's achievement for Jonathan Burnham, who runs the marketing company, Harper Collins. Several questions naturally arise. Did she actually write those 400 pages? Please. Her peregrinations in the  couple of months since she quit her "day-job" do not exactly reflect a period of personal reflection and diligence. She wrote that book as thoroughly as she wrote her speech in Hong Kong. The book was written by a hardcore Christianist; the speech by a hardcore neocon. She remains the hood ornament for a marketing campaign that now passes for the conservative movement.

The title itself lets us know that if anyone harbored any doubts about her own view of that disastrous campaign, she is immensely proud of it.

And by "it", I mean her refusal to cooperate with the McCain campaign, hijacking it for her own delusions of grandeur, generating immense drama and refusing to answer salient questions. Someone in her position with a decent sense of perspective and self-knowledge might have said no to John McCain in August of 2008. Or taken the pick as an opportunity to get boned up on policy. But we see now that she came to see her nomination as an entrepreneurial opportunity - for wealth, fame and irresponsibility. The notion of public service, divorced from reality show culture, clearly bored her and bores her still. She has now found her niche.

But why the rush? It couldn't be that she's trying to beat any other account of her bizarre career and surreal private life, could it?

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/400-pages-in-four-months.html