The Next Candidate--Sarah Palin

The rightwing blogosphere is in revolt against Rick Perry because of his stance on in-state tuition to illegals and his vaccine mandate for young women. The chant is near universal that only one person can save the conservatives--Sarah Palin. (not Chris Christie as Bill Kristol wants). SarahPac yesterday teased that Sister Sarah was about to make a big decision and if you wanted her to run than send her money. This morning Sarahphiles tweeted their disappointment with Rick Perry.

So it may not be bad timing for Joe McGinnis The Rogue after all. McGinnis has appeared on several morning shows talking about his book and the campaign against him when he rented a house next to the Palins in Wasilla. You've already heard about the affair with Todd' business partner, the relationship with the Los Angeles Laker and the snorting of coke on top of oil drums.

McGinnis's book has been roundly criticized in the Washington Post, New York Times and by David Corn in Mother Jones. Corn felt that McGuinness editorialized too much after he reported an incident and he showed his distaste for Palin too openly. Serious political journalism should not be so biased.

But McGinnis' book reveals much more than tidbits about the Palins as an utterly dysfunctional family and a bunch of grifters. Without probably intending to, McGinnis captured perfectly the grassroots aspects of the tea party movement--the blend between libertarianism and religious fundamentalism. To intellectuals, the two seem incapable but in reality they reinforce each other through their mutual hatred of our government.

Sarah Palin got her start by forming a funky coalition of dopers,boozers and fundamentalist Christians to become mayor of Wasilla. She ousted the former Mayor by an innuendo campaign that suggested he was Jewish--actually Lutheran--and he really wasn't married to his wife, which he was. Palin was the first to launch the notorious Republican gambit of demanding documents like Obama's birth certificate and Warren Buffett's tax return. She demanded her opponent release his marriage certificate.

The Mayor had alienated people in Wasilla because of cracking down on DUIs and getting saloons to close earlier as well as busting the dopers. Wasilla had become the transit point for drugs in that part of Alaska. He also implemented a sales tax and produced a surplus, which Sarah promptly spent. Ostensibly campaigning on getting mre bike paths, Wasilla citizens were slow to realize her far-reaching political agenda. She let the saloons stay open to 5am, tried to close down the local museum,and launched an effort by fundamentalists to censor books in the library. She started to employ fundamentalists in political positions and fired anyone who was not absolutely loyal to her and in fact fired those who were.

Joe McGinnis does capture Palin when she became a phenomenon taking on the establishment of the Alaskan Republican Party. She maneuvered her way on to the board overseeing oil production in Alaska by forcing a sitting member into an ugly ethics scandal, which cost the man his job. Her campaign to clean up that sector garnered her the reputation as a maverick that John McCain fell for.

It was only natural that Palin would challenge the Murowski family for top dog of the state's Republican party, a story McGinnis tells well. Think of it this way--Alaska is for Republicans, what Louisiana used to be for Democrats. A place where oil corrupts and corrupts absolutely.

Palin had an approval rating in the 90s when she first took office as Governor. She had enormous support from Democrats, who expected her to continue to reform the state. But dark clouds were on the horizon. She wanted to work from her home, which she billed the state. Todd Palin ended up making many of the most important decisions. And critics faced reprisals, sometimes physical ones. By the time she resigned, she was under seige by dozens of ethics complaints and lawsuits. During the 2008 campaign, these were spun as partisan attempts to embarrass her but once the campaign ended there remained real.

If you want to learn about Alaska, read McGinnis' "Going To Extreme" or watch DVDs of Northern Exposure. This is a book about real small-time politics and the personalities involved in a state with the population of a small city. And like small towns, when it gets mean, it really gets mean. During his stay in Alaska, citizens offered McGinnis use of their guns and warned him about retaliation. If you recall, his stay next to the Palins was accompanied by a campaign in the right-wing media suggesting he was a stalker, a pedophile, a peeping tom. Todd Palin actually built a larger fence on his property to hide the family from view.

What almost all reviews of this book miss is McGinnis' detailed explanation of Sarah Palin's religious beliefs and her relationship to the New Apostolic Movement. We remember the YouTube videos of the Kenyan pastor exorcising her and praying that God would show her the way. But McGinnis goes deeper into the pathology of this form of fundamentalism and shows it is integral to her appeal to people in the Republican base. Either the subject is too estoteric or reporters don't think it is important, this aspect of Sarah Palin rarely gets coverage in the MSM. McGinnis writes about how the network of journalists who were for Obama overtly warned their colleagues off this subject because they feared a negative backlash against Obama's race.

If she does become a presidential candidate, it is vital to understanding her worldview. As a less than rightwing evangelical preacher told McGinnis, her religious faith is central to who Sarah Palin thinks she is. As he explained, she doesn't believe you have to study to have good policy, you just have to pray for it. The pastor also explained that if you disagree,you are more than an opponent, you are evil.

The theological worldview of the Dominionists is too bizarre to be believed. They have mapped out the world in terms of demons. You are not trying to convert souls but are fighting demons. One of the groups affiliated with Palin in Alaska bragged that one of Sarah's critics, a conservative evangelical, died in a tragic car wreck because they prayed it would happen. The group also claims credit for the deaths of Mother Teresa because she had an incorrect understanding of the Virgin Mary and Princess Di because of her lifestyle. The purpose of these prayer warriors is to "weaken the Great Harlot of Babylon" who is secure in a block of ice hidden in a cave near Mount Everest. By praying for natural disasters and such, the prayer warriors will weaken the Harlot so Jesus Christ can return to earth. I know it sounds ike a computer game.

From people who know Sarah Palin religiously, she has been devout from an early age and has moved from one extreme form of Christianity to another during the years. She really does believe like most of these people that we live in the end times and that one of her God-given purposes is to hasten that end. During the campaign, one of the faithful approached her to say that she was Esther and Sarah Palin said that she felt it was true.

This part of McGinnis' book critics seem to avoid and it is also relevant to Rick Perry's Prayer-A-thon since many of the same people participated there. This is not the Religious Right but the Religious Far,Far,Far Out Right.

McGinnis says he doesn't believe Sarah Palin will run but just sit back and enjoy the money she makes from her reality show and as a Fox News commentator. I'm not so sure. You know she's watching the debates and she knows fellow Christianist Michelle Bachmann is going down and Rick Perry has violated the new conservative orthodoxy. If you've followed her steps the past year, you notice she has stepped on everyone's toes and upstaged even the announcements of candidates like Mitt Romney. Joe McGinnis says these moves are only to reinforce the media's co-dependency on Palin. I hope he's right but I'm not so sure.

Critics have complained that McGinnis uses too many anonymous sources in the book but I don't think so. Hundreds of people are directly quoted. The anonymous ones are those who feel threatened by possible retaliation by Todd Palin, the number is far less than those named.

This isn't one of McGinnis' best. And it will not exhaust the subject of Sarah Palin. But he does portray how fundamentalism came to libertarian Alaska and how toxic a brew it is. For that we owe him.