How Vanity Fair's Palin Profile Helps Her

Rather than a blow to a career, Todd Purdum’s piece is a spectacular tribute to a force of nature built for another national race.

The excuse for the Republican circular firing squad of the holiday weekend is that Weekly Standard editor and party brainiac Bill Kristol claims that pugnacious McCain campaign enforcer Steve Schmidt has been caught gossiping to Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum about Sarah Palin’s rambling and incoherent vice presidential campaign last fall.

Purdum, writing with a polite disdain, does flatter Palin as “the sexiest and riskiest brand in the Republican Party,” before he goes on to mention unnamed McCain campaign sources who tell stories of Palin’s erratic behavior on the trail supposedly caused by her “post-partum depression.” Kristol asserts as evidence that Schmidt was the source of this defamatory rumor that Kristol knows that Schmidt has recently e-mailed Palin out of the blue. “Perhaps Steve was nervous someone would finger him for the Purdum piece,” Kristol proposes.

Firing back, Schmidt immediately e-mailed a reference to Bill Kristol’s distant youth when he worked for the perennial GOP chump, Vice President Dan Quayle: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”

Meanwhile, the sniping continues to deteriorate, with erstwhile McCain campaign advisers like Randy Scheunemann choosing sides with Kristol (Scheunemann hates Schmidt, who tried to force him out of the campaign as a leaker and confiscated his Blackberry), while Schmidt reveals that he had the permission of McCain and Palin to ferret out who was leaking unkind details on Palin to the media. No comment yet from the senator and the governor on their genius of a Plumbers Unit. Another campaign aide, Nicole Wallace, and her husband, Mark Wallace, are mentioned as founts of poison on Palin. “This is all news to me,” Nicole Wallace proclaims.

Is this normal after a losing presidential campaign? No. Nor is this a normal year for the Republicans. Kristol and Schmidt and their cronies all know that the Republican brand that they depend upon for a job and for money, lots of money, has been wrecked to the point of no return. They are veterans of a lost cause with one wild adventure to try before history moves on—and the adventurer’s name is Sarah Palin.

What is going on right now in the Republican Party are the early scenes of the 2012 campaign for the presidency with Sarah Palin as the once and future hero. Like Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth Regina and, skipping four centuries of quarrelsome princes, Margaret Thatcher, the Republican Party has already decided that the governor of Alaska will rescue the GOP from its ruination.

If you scoff at Palin for president, you are likely insufficiently cynical to work on a national campaign. Eight months after the election, the governor is as natural and gifted a presidential candidate as anyone since Huey Long. The farther she stays away from Washington and the longer she pushes away those sharpies clamoring for her to raise PAC money, to prepare gray-bearded policy positions, network at the barbecues in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina (well, maybe not South Carolina right now), the more box-office irresistible she will be to the Republican primary voters. What most recommends the Palin boom is that she is now, forty months to the election, as celebrated by the GOP right wing as she is reviled by the Democratic left wing.

Rather than a blow to a career, the Purdum piece in Vanity Fair is a spectacular tribute to a force of nature that became an “ineradicable” caricature before she became a household name. Tina Fey’s talent is a walking advertisement for presidential debates to come. Purdum employs his talent for disregard in order to collect a posse of anonymous tattle-tales, back-stabbers and snitches—many of them unsurprisingly males—to weave a political biography that is compelling in its improbability and breathtaking in its portrait of a young, deceitful, driven, unapologetic, spontaneous, and cunning scalawag. Purdum’s notion of a sober put-down is to quote the wooden fossil of a cigar store Indian, Governor Walter S. Hickel, who complains that after he helped Palin get elected governor, “She never called me after that.” The stories about Palin and her rambunctious daughters, her riveting special needs child, her cheerful parents, her innate affection for the strangeness of Alaska, and her magical romance with her rock-star attractive husband Todd are all a setup to learning that in the governor’s office she is Elmer Gantry in a skirt, as clannish, vengeful, petty, tireless, ill-read, pouty and manipulative as anyone Hollywood could dream up and play Mildred Pierce. The darkest revelations about Palin are that she didn’t like preparing for the tedious TV interviews; she treated the dull Biden debate as irrelevant; and she wanted to make her own concession speech on election night. In sum, the governor does not like losers, does not like to lose, and was liberated the moment she shed the burden of bootless John McCain.

What Kristol and Schmidt know is that the only Republican candidate worth cutting each other up about is Sarah Palin. The governor certainly does not need either of them other than as stable hands for Joan of Arc’s replacement horses or as Joan Crawford’s makeup artists. In fact, the governor does not need much more than a ballot line from the aimless, tongue-tied, villain-rich GOP. She certainly does not need the GOP to do well in the congressional mid-terms in 2010; she does not need the party to improve its flabby polling on health care or trust; she does not even need the Republican Party to raise a voice to explain her positions on the burning controversies on Capitol Hill. Palin does not need to prove anything at all about wise government, because she appeals directly to the anti-authoritarian crowd that has been with us since Shay’s Rebellion in 1787. It is an accident of history, and of John McCain’s whimsy, that Sarah Palin caught Potomac Fever in September ‘08, and it will carry her either to the White House or to that place even rarer, where the Kingfisher dwells, called what-could’ve-been.

John Batchelor is radio host of the John Batchelor Show in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

As far as the Republican brand being wrecked beyond repair....I remember 1964, when some “savvy” politicians claimed that the only hope the GOP had was to go a-begging to Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton to take control of the Goldwater “mess”.

George Romney, a liberal, was going to lead the party out of the conservative wilderness.

It didn’t work then, it won’t work now.

I just want Freepers to know who STEVE SCHMIDT" is. He is blaming Palin for his and McCaca's failures...:)

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This is the "weasel" who tried to bamboozle social-conservatives into trying to elect Lefty-Traitor McCain and move the party to the LEFT... He thought that Palin would put MaCaca over the top... NAHHHH... We are not that dumb. And now, after the election, his CAMPAING MANAGER, is showing his true colors.

Warning: this links to the Huffinton Post!... We should not go there, but that is where the article came from)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/17/steve-schmidt-mccain-camp_n_188354.html

She was exciting for a while, but I wouldn't blame anyone for moving on after the artillery bought down on her.

Now they can all do High Fives and what not and celebrate their magnificent victory in ruining another fine human being.

The people love her, and the more they see of her, the more they love her. I think she can beat a (by then) discredited Obama in 2012.

I guess she could make a lot of money going on a speaking tour and also stoke up her campaign fund. It would cut off all the complaints in AK that are taping her funds.
I’m sure she can draw a big crowd wherever she goes. It would give her an unlimited opportunity to dump on Zero..he needs it.

Poor ole John B. Looks like he released this article a few hours too early!

If I can remember to tune in to his show Sunday night, I’ll be most interested to see how he analyzes her decision to “get out of the kitchen.”

Palin is acting as irrrationaly as Ross Perot did.

She`s toast, done, spent, kaput.

Dream on?

She just QUIT . A quitter acting irrationaly. How`s that for qaulifications.

She just gave the dominan left-wing media a sledge hammer to bash her with.

It`s over, way over.

She just QUIT . A quitter acting irrationaly. How`s that for qaulifications.

She just gave the dominan left-wing media a sledge hammer to bash her with.

It`s over, way over.

She just untied her hands from behind her back. Whether she runs or just speaks out, the MSM has good reason to be as scared as they clearly are.

I don`t dislike it it`s just that a blogger forced to to say no mas !

After the Kouric interview the press knew an easy kill/fresh meat when they saw it and now with her Ross Perot irrational behaviour, nope. She`s done even if she runs for national office.

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