Sarah Palin, a skilful self-promoter and consummate actress, is a savvy user of social networking–Twitter, Facebook–and also a highly marketable brand. Say ‘Palin!’, and presto the media and paparzzi appear, and in the background the kerching of cash registers.
Palin is self-advertising in motion. She has the looks of an angel but the tongue of a devil. And from her Etna-hot mouth spews a stream of lava to scorch and dry and wither her enemies. To her camp followers, it matters little that she lacks logic or that she displays her ignorance of general culture or the wider world or that in her private life she strays from her evangelical Christian beliefs; for them, she’s the ‘little woman‘ from a humble background, who has had to work hard in life for everything in this earthly life; for them, too, she’s a who knows how to stick it to the big, privileged rich kids, born with silver spoons in their mouths.
Palin’s a media star with the same tawdry appeal of a ‘Kooki‘ Her antics and hijinx resonate with the very people who relish putting the ‘rich’ into uncomfortable and awkward postures, while at the very same time that she is laughing all the way to bank and hobnobbing with the very people she socially despises. She’s, in other words, a parvenue and in a perverse way a grand entertainer of the masses. The country’s right-wing moneyed and political elite have made a place for her in their midst for the plain and simple reason they believe that the American people are too lazy or stupid to understand what the powers-that-be are talking about, even if they have an interest in politics. For them, it takes a great effort to approach things logically. To get them on your side, say the big guys, requires a shoot-gun effect. And, that packet of pellets of the right-wing is Sarah Palin.
Writers of two ‘tell-all’ book on Sarah Palin are engaged in a ‘battle royale‘ over whose book is going to cash in on the life of the woman who had the ears of the world stand up by proclaiming that she was like a ‘pitbull with lipstick‘ in 2008, thereby instantly becoming a recongizable, global household name.
Frank Bailey, Ken Morris and Jeanne Devon‘s ‘In Blind Allegiance‘, soon to be published by St. Martin’s press has been blindsided by Joe McGinniss who ‘leaked an early copy of their book’ on his blog, Mudflats. At the same, he was keeping his own book ‘The Rogue: searching for the real Sarah Palin‘, to be published by Broadway Books in September 2011, under wraps.
Bailey, Morris and Devon, through their lawyer, have accused McGinniss of behaving with malice of intent of wanting to destroy their book’s ‘marketability’. What’s more blame him of more than being a ‘jealous author sabotaging a competitor,’ but a man who would stoop to get his way ‘vai unlawful and unscrupulous means’.
McGinniss at the age of 26 burst on to the best seller list with The Selling of the President, describing the marketing of presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. His book was a ‘tour de force‘ in the way it described the staging of political theater in getting the ‘new Nixon’ elected as president. His book became a classic in campaign reporting, as well as a key to the sleights of hand used by the old media in projecting a man who, after his defeat to JFK in 1960, famously announced to the press that ‘they won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.’ And there he was eight years later the 37 president, thanks, in part, to a favorable manipulation of the media.
McGinniss did play dirty pool. Leaking his competitor’s manuscript, he torpedoed any hope that ‘In Blind Allegiance’ would sell like a hot-ticket item. Unfortunately, Bailey, Morris, and Devon may not have taken the full measure of him, nor appreciated his telling how a man like Nixon could be turned into an ‘Abraham Lincoln‘. It was though a bully had come into the children’s sandbox and threw dirt in the kids’ eyes.
Yes, McGinniss by leaking his competition’s manuscript played dirty. He learnt his lessons well during the 1968 campaign, it seems. He was out for the big bucks his book will bring to his publishers and the royalties he will garner. Nonetheless, as he might have had Wikileaks in his sights, a leaked document has news value but hardly turns a profit but for the ones who leaked it.
McGinniss may not be Mr. Nice, but like the subject of his book, Sarah Palin, he knows where the beef, oops, the Greenbacks are.
Comments: “Alas, unlike old generals who fade away, dirty tricks are here to stay.”
“The ooze of deceit percolates through them thar Mudflats.”
