Sarah Palin Is Reloading… Rogue On The Loose!

Sarah Palin’s 2008 vice presidential bid fell short. Then she resigned as Alaska’s governor, But she hasn’t bowed out gracefully. Her autobiography, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” has sold a million copies and tops the best-seller list.

Thousands are flocking to her book-signing tour, including a November stop at Noblesville’s Hamilton Commons (granted, that’s friendly territory, given that a convention of Hamilton County Democrats could be held in a voting booth). For all the targeted trash she took during the campaign, Palin has captured the imagination and admiration of much of the populace.

“Going Rogue” lays the background for whom Sarah Palin is — an Alaska native very much a part of the state’s culture, who put her tenacity to work as its chief executive before John McCain tapped her to be his running mate.

Unknown outside Alaska, she was, like Indiana’s Dan Quayle in 1988, branded a lightweight.

No mainstream politician, Palin. That proved both a blessing and a curse. It got her elected to the highest office in the 49th state, unseating a sitting governor of her own party. A fiscal conservative, she rejected much of the state’s sacred-cow spending and pushed for responsible use of Alaska’s rich store of natural resources, including oil.

But it also made her a target of foes from the right and the left, as she explains in the book. She cites endless legal harassment — none of which has ultimately been upheld — as driving her to terminate her governorship early.

Palin tells her side of the story on most of the high-profile issues that surfaced during her vice presidential campaign. She discovered the hard way how national campaigns are managed as her handlers followed the dictum to first do no harm. With the McCain-Palin campaign trailing to start with and making little headway as it heated up, it is difficult to imagine how turning a maverick loose could have caused further harm.

And with the media complying with Barack Obama’s request to leave his family alone, Palin was understandably chagrined at probes and swipes at her own family. She tells of the endless times her doctor had to tell media-types that, yes, she was the real mother of Trig, the special needs baby with whom many have identified.

She carefully avoids going into detail about daughter Bristol’s erstwhile boyfriend beyond the basics of Bristol’s much-publicized pregnancy and unwed motherhood (later Bristol was criticized for encouraging premarital abstinence, as if “don’t make the same mistake I did” were an invalid stance).

What now? For the moment the book tour will suffice. There are many who encourage her to mount her own presidential campaign. And certainly she has the base for it.

But even many of her staunch supporters wonder if that is enough to carry the swing votes among a notoriously skeptical electorate.

Don’t count her out just yet. As her father, Chuck Heath Sr., said, “Sarah’s not retreating; she’s reloading.”

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