Palin: An author’s venomous portrait

I never thought I’d say this, said Jonathan Capehart in WashingtonPost.com, but “I feel sorry for Sarah Palin.” Even a vapid publicity hound like her does not deserve the trashy hatchet job author Joe McGinniss does on her in his new, unauthorized biography, The Rogue. Relying heavily on anonymous sources, McGinniss dredges up lurid tales of sex, drugs, and dysfunction from Palin’s past, including a supposed one-night stand with basketball player Glen Rice, an alleged affair with her husband’s business partner, and the charge that she once snorted cocaine off an oil barrel. What happened to Joe McGinniss? asked Janet Maslin in The New York Times. His 1969 debut, The Selling of the President, about Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, is a classic of diligent political reporting. The Rogue, however, is nothing but “caustic, unsubstantiated gossip” that finds the once-respected political writer “too busy being nasty to be lucid.”

Palin’s sex life doesn’t interest me, said Erik Wemple in WashingtonPost.com. But “hypocrisy is a quality that must be exposed in our political leaders,” and Palin opened the door to this kind of intimate revelation with her outspoken support for abstinence-only sex education. The fact that Palin herself indulged in hanky-panky before marriage perfectly illustrates why it’s wrong to deny young people information about sex and birth control. The same goes for the drugs, said Tony Newman in HuffingtonPost.com. Palin likes to pretend she’s tough on crime, so she’s part of the political system that currently jails 500,000 Americans for nonviolent drug offenses. If she, like “an ever-growing group of elected officials,” once used illegal drugs recreationally, she should be exposed as a phony.

If Palin were still Alaska’s governor or had joined the presidential race, said Matt Latimer in The​DailyBeast.com, those arguments might hold some water. But her poll numbers have plummeted, and even most Republicans have written her off as a viable candidate. So there’s no defense for the sexist glee with which McGinniss tries to destroy Palin’s character. Not only does he try to prove she “had sex with a black guy,” he takes great pains to portray her as a lousy mother who was too busy with her narcissistic climb to fame to feed the kids. “Is anything in this book true? Who cares?” For McGinniss, and the millions of Americans who have loved to hate Palin these last three years, “it’s really time to move on.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up