Man, oh man — I wonder if Karl Rove regrets these words:
“There are high standards that the American people have for [the presidency]… and they require a certain level of gravitas. People want to look at the candidate and say, ‘that candidate is doing things that gives me confidence that they are up to the most demanding job in the world.”
I didn’t dig up this little musing on my own. It was at the tail end of the late Joe McGinniss’ The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, where McGinniss takes stock of Palin after she quits the governorship of Alaska to milk as much money as possible from her instant celebrity as hero of the rubes.
The above quote from Rove is directly linked to an interview he gave about a presidential candidate slapping her face all over a reality TV show, which is ironic to read in 2018 for reasons beyond obvious that I don’t need to list here. I’ll just add the words “Donald Trump” and “The Apprentice” for the sake of some cheap SEO.
The Rogue has been sitting on my Kindle for over a year now, and it’s a book I’ve wanted to read ever since I learned nearly 10 years ago that Joe McGinnis, of all people, was reporting on Sarah Palin up in Alaska from the house next door to the Palin estate in Wasilla. I couldn’t believe it: the guy who wrote one of the best true-crime books out there, Fatal Vision, schlepped all the way to Alaska to investigate the shrill, mean-spirited, and proudly dumb Sarah Palin?
Yes, he did, and the resulting book is a gem. It’s also not a hit job, and most pleasing to me was how half the book was investigative journalism and the other memoir. Why is this? Well, if you’ve forgotten, the national media in its heyday of fawning all over Palin for the most cynical reasons possible, thrust McGinniss into the story by vilifying him as a predator and pervert next door. The opposite was true, of course, and the end result is a wonder story that not only sheds some much-needed honest reporting on Sarah Palin’s character and ambitions (Spoiler Alert: she has no character outside of narcissism and her ambitions are fame and glory achieved any way possible).
I read The Rogue right after finishing Michael Wolff’s funny-and-scary-as-hell Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Presidency, only because I was looking for another witty political fix. And who better to provide that than someone like McGinnis (a favorite nonfiction author of mine) on Sarah (a woman who revolts me in every conceivable way possible). I wondered if the book would still be politically relevant — even, if only, as a fun read — because, after all, he did begin his research in May 2010. I’m happy to say that it very much is — The Rogue is required reading to understand the conservative, proudly lowbrow, and anti-intellectual zeitgeist that has its sausage fingers around the throat of American politics.
Need more evidence of how important The Rogue is? Here’s another block quote, but this time from McGinniss himself, following up on the above quote from Karl Rove:
“I have no reservations about saying that in the history of American politics, no candidate for national office has ever displayed less gravitas (that is, high seriousness, substance, a dignified demeanor) than Sarah Palin.
Over the course of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, she became such a caricature of herself — in one episode cavorting, giggling, and pouting with the queen of reality television’s housewives, Kate Gosselin — that by the time it was over she’d all but removed herself from the 2012 political equation. She earned millions of dollars, but she paid a fatally high price in credibility for every dollar.”
Again I say: sound familiar?
