Clayton E. Cramer: Surprises Abound in Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue
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I picked up Going Rogue at Target a couple of weeks ago. It has a number of surprises, some pleasant, some just startling. It tends to confirm my belief that Sarah Palin, while perhaps not qualified to be president or vice president last year, was certainly more qualified than McCain, Obama, or Biden.
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My biggest surprise was that Going Rogue was apparently not “ghostwritten.” In a few places, I noticed sentences with “I” instead of “me” for the direct object — a mistake that a professional writer wouldn’t make. There is also a bit more use of “I” (at least, properly used as the subject) than a professional writer might use, even in an autobiography.
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Going Rogue is well written, and it reads quickly and easily. Unlike some other “first books” that I have read (and many books by academics), I almost never found myself going back over a sentence to figure out her meaning. Palin’s B.A. from the University of Idaho is in journalism and she worked as a journalist for a while.
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Another aspect of the book that surprised me is her portrayal of what went wrong with the McCain campaign. I assumed that part of why McCain operatives tried to throw her under the bus in the closing days of the campaign was ideological: that they represented the left end of the Republican Party (like McCain) and therefore found Gov. Palin offensive. My guess was that these left-wing Republicans had picked Palin in the hopes of getting conservatives to enthusiastically support the McCain ticket. When it became apparent that this was not enough to win the election, I assumed they vented their personal disapproval.
Palin’s version of events is a bit different. Her take is that the foul-mouthed and amoral campaign managers who blamed her for the campaign failure did so for a purely mercenary reason: concern that they might have trouble getting another job, if they were perceived as the failure.
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I still think that Gov. Palin is less qualified to be president of the United States than I would like. I would have preferred she had at least two terms as governor. But what’s the alternative? Palin’s executive experience — and especially her experience cleaning up the notoriously corrupt Republican Party of Alaska — dwarfs anything that Senators Obama or Biden brought to the table — and even Senator McCain’s many years in Congress are no substitute for executive experience.
I would also prefer someone who is a bit more of an intellectual. But the incredibly ignorant goofs by President Obama (there is no “Austrian” language, Emperor Hirohito did not sign the surrender with General MacArthur, the United States did not invent the automobile) show that this isn’t a job requirement. (I fear at times it might even be a disqualifier.)
There does come a point where honesty and some connection to ordinary people who have to work for a living are worth more than fawning and gushing from the mainstream media. So far, Gov. Palin is looking like our best shot for 2012.
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