Frank Bailey joined Sarah Palin’s campaign for governor of Alaska in its earliest days, showing up at her shabby headquarters in Anchorage with a paintbrush, toilet bowl cleaner and hammer in November 2005 and becoming part of her “Rag Tag Team,” as she fondly dubbed her original inner circle. He’d grown up poor in Kodiak and worked as an airline baggage handler and middle manager. In Palin, he found a leader who elegantly fused faith and politics. She exuded charm, energy and idealism, and, most important, she inspired trust. Bailey was politically smitten: “In my mind, God had chosen her, and this was His will.”
But God had his own plan for Frank Bailey. The political novice spent nearly four years at Palin’s side only to wind up disillusioned by his “Ronald Reagan in high heels.” In “Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin,” his political kiss-and-tell based on more than 50,000 Yahoo account e-mails that he wrote or received as a campaign and administration staffer, Bailey paints a portrait of an erratic, vindictive, unethical politician. Palin emerges as a woman far more interested in power, fame and fortune than in the day-to-day grind of governing.
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“I am convinced,” Bailey writes, “that her priorities and personality are not only ill suited to head a political party or occupy national office, but would lead to a disaster of, well, biblical proportions.”
Written with Ken Morris, a novelist, and Jeanne Devon, an Alaska political blogger, “Blind Allegiance” will confirm what Palin’s critics already believe and will be derided by her proponents as nonsense from a disgruntled former staffer. The book’s value lies in its up-close peek into the mind and motives of a highly visible politician who manages to cloak her essence.
Bailey’s claims are hard to dismiss because they come not from a detractor but from a former “Palin-bot,” as the Republican governor’s doting warriors were called, and because of the abundant insider e-mails. Not surprisingly, with lightning-rod Palin at its center, the memoir arrives amid a flurry of pre-publication controversy. A leaked draft lighted up the Internet this year, and this month, Alaska’s attorney general announced an investigation into Bailey’s use of the e-mails.
Bailey served Gov. Palin officially as director of boards and commissions and unofficially as gofer and protector. He discovered early in her campaign that his boss did not separate family and politics and that she routinely set out to destroy those who criticized her or her loved ones. Bailey’s blind devotion allowed him to rationalize her bad behavior and carry out her bidding — no matter how objectionable her demands were.
“Behaviors I had previously considered myself incapable of condoning would become acceptable and commonplace,” he writes. Although Palin promised to take the high road in politics, Bailey was forced into “an ethical limbo dance” that included making up letters to newspaper editors and signing them with the names of supporters. On another occasion, Bailey and other staffers spent hours voting repeatedly to manipulate a television opinion poll on Palin’s decision to reject part of the federal government’s economic stimulus funding.
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