Book review by Nick Gillespie
In an America where a whopping 66 percent of adults hold an unfavorable view of 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin (according to a recent Bloomberg poll), author Joe McGinniss has done something truly remarkable. He actually makes the short-serving former Alaska governor and widely panned reality TV star a slightly more sympathetic character, at least for the regrettable time one wastes reading “The Rogue,” his sketchily sourced compendium of low blows and inconsistent accusations.
McGinniss, who came to prominence 40 years ago with his groundbreaking study of political marketing, “The Selling of the President 1968,”
serves up any and all rumors and calumnies about Palin, the more salacious the better. His hope, he admits, is to cut short whatever is left of her political life, a spectacle he likens to “the cheap thrill of watching a clown in high heels on a flying trapeze.”
As readers of The Washington Post may recall, I’m no Palin fan myself, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with unapologetic political bias, but all-consuming contempt rarely makes for good journalism. Despite his intensely close proximity to his subject — McGinniss famously rented the house adjacent to the Palin home while researching his book — he consistently fails to sift through competing versions of the same story for something approximating truth. For instance, McGinniss writes that in 1987, “whether in her professional capacity as a sports reporter or simply as a basketball groupie who’d begun to find black men attractive, Sarah linked up” with University of Michigan player Glen Rice during a college tournament in Anchorage. One unnamed “friend” (the book is jam-packed with them) says, “I can’t say I know they had sex,” while a different “friend” proclaims, “The thing that people remember is her freak-out, how completely crazy she got: I [expletive] a black man! She was just horrified.” To his slight credit, McGinniss gave Rice a call to check these claims, but he fails to record a point-blank answer to the straightforward question of whether the player and Palin slept together. Instead, McGinniss asks, “So you never had the feeling she felt bad about having sex with a black guy?” to which Rice politely answers, “No, no, no, nothing like that. . . . I think the utmost of her.”
More important, and beyond basic questions of facts, McGinniss fails to specify the significance of Palin’s premarital sexual history (one wonders if and when male politicians will be subjected to the same examination).
He leaves no ambiguity, though, about the import of what he calls “the unanswered question” of Trig, Palin’s son with Down syndrome, who was born in 2008. Untroubled by a lack of actual evidence, a small but unbowed band of Palin critics has long wondered aloud whether she is the boy’s biological mother. Like all conspiracists, they insist that they are only asking questions that could be readily answered by nothing more out of the ordinary than a full data dump of Palin’s obstetrical records. McGinniss approvingly quotes blogger Andrew Sullivan, who has insisted that “if Palin has lied about [giving birth to Trig], it’s the most staggering, appalling deception in the history of American politics.”
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