Sarah Palin bus-tour 'hoax'

The governor-turned-book-promoter said she'd tour America in a humble bus. So why's she flying by private jet?

Sarah Palin in front of her tour bus.
(Image credit: Corbis)

Sarah Palin's folksy "promotional bus tour" to publicize her new memoir, Going Rogue, has come under question. Reports that she's been traveling between at least some stops on a $4,000-an-hour Gulfstream II private jet, first reported by an Alaska anti-Palin blog, Palingates, have been confirmed by Palin's publishers, Harper Collins. Does staging a faux bus tour damage Palin’s populist credentials? (Watch Sarah Palin's bus get a warm greeting at a book tour stop)

This bus tour’s a “hoax”: There’s “nothing the least bit inappropriate” about an author flying from one promotional stop to the next, says Joe McGinnis in The Daily Beast, but that’s not how Palin’s bus tour was sold to the media and the public. What we have here is “apparent fakery created and sustained for the sake of building pseudo-populist appeal—and selling books”—and that’s unseemly, if not fraudulent.

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