Sarah from Alaska by Scott Conroy & Shushannah Walshe
Public Affairs, £15.99
For a short time in his 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain looked like a cross between a genius, a poker player and a magician. With a burst of intelligent thinking and a deft sleight of hand, he reached into his metaphorical top hat and pulled out an amazing surprise. When it was announced that Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, was to be McCain’s running mate, the world, America and the “last frontier” state seemed to gasp in wonder at his audacious decision.
Compared to Barack Obama’s sidekick Joe Biden, here was a feisty, no-nonsense candidate to excite the race in general and McCain’s flagging strategy in particular. It was a gamble and proved beneficial for a short while but, in this era of media micro-analysis, it wasn’t long before the dream ticket became a nightmare.
Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, two journalists in the thick of it, monitored Palin close up, witnessing her struggles with wider political issues and observing how she reacted to the stresses of working within a hectic, tightly controlled campaign. Her preference had always been to speak off the cuff in the relatively comfortable confines of Alaska, using her considerable charm and folksiness to deliver her messages. But in the national arena the vice-presidential candidate had to get used to reading from painstakingly prepared scripts and to following instructions not to go off message to a hungry and sometimes mischievous media.
Palin’s exposure to American television’s heavyweight interrogators showed glaring weaknesses in her knowledge of some national and most global affairs, as well as highlighting her destructive ability to ramble rather than shut up when in a tight spot. She would blame the media for a lot of the negative stories and detailed analysis of her personal and political background and the intrusiveness, as she saw it, into her family life.
The McCain-Palin truck couldn’t stop the Obama-Biden juggernaut. But, for a couple of months, she threw a few showbiz sparks into American politics. In this book there are various descriptions of her from political sociopath to hockey mom to diva to rogue to whack job to superstar. She was portrayed as all of these things at one time or another. She made new friends, lost old friends, made new enemies and converted a few old foes. This is a fascinating snapshot of her rocky journey, a journey that, perhaps, has not yet reached its final destination.
Joe Cushnan
