Posted on 10/06/2011 1:50:34 PM PDT by Second Amendment First
The muted GOP reaction to Sarah Palin’s departure from the Republican presidential field Wednesday suggests the party had moved on months ago. Not so for the thriving cottage industry that grew at her feet, and whose future is now in danger.
Palin-lovers, Palin-haters, a half-dozen publishing houses, and elements of the mainstream media who tracked her plans long after the Republican campaign bypassed her suddenly face a future without their entertaining, unpredictable, and now scarcely-relevant subject.
Palin’s circle of online admirers greeted her announcement with shock and dismay. The camp who saw her as a nascent American Mussolini, with shock and joy. And the publishers, broadcasters, and reporters who yoked themselves to Palin were already moving on.
“I hope I can continue to cover the GOP primary and election as I have been doing,” said ABC’s Shushannah Walshe, the co-author with RealClearPolitics reporter Scott Conroy of the 2009 “Sarah from Alaska,” a evenhanded biography of Palin based on their time covering her as network campaign “embeds.” Conroy declined to comment on what her withdrawal would mean for him, but had already turned his attention to intense coverage of the early primaries, and posted a story Wednesday night that barely mentioned his former subject.
The partisans were more emotional.
“The reason I wanted her to run is if there were one person who could [win the nomination] it was her,” said Tony Lee, a Human Events writer who regularly took to Twitter to lecture dimwitted pundits on how they were missing her obvious and calculated steps toward declaring a candidacy.
The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan, who risked his mainstream reputation to question Palin’s character, politics, and even maternity, told POLITICO that now he can “get a life.”
“Helping to prevent her from getting her hands on power was one of my guiding goals once I realized the MSM was never going to do it,” he wrote. “I lost vast tracts of time and not a few t-cells trying to understand and expose this farce and it’s a huge relief that this preposterous saga is over. Just knowing she isn’t a threat is a huge psychic relief if you care about America and the world.”
The Palin industry rested on two premises: That she was personally capable of mounting a presidential campaign and that Republican voters, whose admiration for her was unquestioned, actually wanted her to run.
Doubts have built steadily about both of those notions — her inability to finish her term overseeing a small state government suggested the presidency was out of reach, and there was little evidence she was capable of laying the groundwork for a national campaign. And Republican voters, in polls and interviews, said increasingly they saw her as a party cheerleader, not a player. Tellingly, by early 2010, a majority of Republicans polled said she wasn’t qualified to be president.
But Palin’s admirers, detractors, and those who fed the dreams and fears of both held the line, and made the case: She was disorganized like a fox, preparing to run an unconventional but formidable campaign. Those pundits had it all wrong.
“Many prominent political analysts and Republican operatives have expressed skepticism that Palin is seriously considering a presidential bid, since she has not taken many of the steps that candidates traditionally take before jumping into the race, such as signing early-state consultants, contacting key powerbrokers and boosting their travel schedules,” Conroy wrote in July. “But Palin has a long history of shunning the Republican Party machinery and taking an unconventional approach to campaigns — a mind-set that appears to have been in play throughout the past several months.”
As the summer continued, her standing in polling sagged. Still, with some frequency, there were voices suggesting the real story was being overlooked.
“It’s important to note that no matter what, Palin plays by her own rules. It’s plausible that she could decide on Sept. 3 that she does want to announce without alerting her inner circle, much like her decision to resign from office in July 2009,” Walshe wrote. “Palin knows that a surprise announcement in front of her most passionate supporters would solidify her as the candidate that can always suck the oxygen out of the room. In a cycle with so many announcements before the announcement, she would be able to trump all the beltway pundits who have signaled her demise since 2008.”
Others in the Palin-media complex went far further. Fox’s Greta Van Susteren, whose husband John Coale backed a Palin campaign and helped Palin set up some political infrastructure, at times seemed to act as a Palin surrogate. When The Daily Caller published prurient quotes from boxer Mike Tyson about Palin, Van Susteren crusaded against its editor, Tucker Carlson, calling him “a pig” and a “purveyor of smut” and labeling the article he published an instance of “violence against women.”
And Van Susteren also at times blended admiration and prediction.
“First, I have absolutely no inside track (despite what some may think) but I am guessing Governor Sarah Palin is running for President in 2012,” she wrote in July, after privately celebrating the July 4 holiday with Palin.
Coale didn’t respond to inquiries after Palin dropped out, but Coale, a trial lawyer who typically supports Democratic causes, told POLITICO’s Alexander Burns earlier this week that he was prepared to switch his allegiance to pizza executive and talk radio host Herman Cain.
“I think [Cain] would be my guy if Sarah doesn’t get in,” he said. “The less establishment the better.”
Van Susteren’s consolation prize: The first Palin interview after her Fox colleague chose to break the news in an interview with radio host Mark Levin.
Of course, partisans of both sides and much of the press – POLITICO included – pursued the Palin beat with gusto and had an interest of sorts in seeing Palin as a candidate.
“Fox News has been making a serious charge about mainstream political reporters: They hate Sarah Palin,” POLITICO wrote last February. “This is not just wrong; it’s absurd. The reality is exactly the opposite: We love Palin.”
She spawned an industry not just of click-driven online news, but of books. She wrote two; her daughter Bristol wrote one. Estranged former aides and family-members cashed in too, with the father of Bristol’s son penning, “Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs.”
The legendary non-fiction writer Joe McGinniss moved in next door for a critically-panned long-form evisceration, but any number of lesser-known writers also took their cracks at it. Conroy and Walshe came out with the first and perhaps most straightforward attempt at a biography. They were followed by an array of admiring tomes – Matthew Continetti’s “The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star” and Stephen Mansfield’s “The Faith and Values of Sarah Palin” — and ones warning of her danger, such as Geoffrey Dunn’s “The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power,” and “Going Rouge: An American Nightmare,” by Richard Kim.
And there were the frankly commercial quote books: “You Betcha: The Witless Wisdom of Sarah Palin” designed for the haters, and “The Quotable Rogue” for her admirers.
Amazon.com lists more than 200 Palin books in all, many self-published.
“There’s little doubt that had Palin entered the race in, say, June (when The Quotable Rogue was released and she was on a bus tour), it would have nicely boosted book sales,” emailed that book’s author, The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis. “As it is, The Quotable Rogue will now likely become a graduation present or stocking stuffer for people who already like and admire Governor Palin — which is fine by me.”
By the time a pro-Palin film, “The Undefeated,” was released this summer, though, the boom had mostly passed, and it closed after a short and modest run.
“I owe lotsa people dinners,” Lee, the Twitter Palin admirer, said ruefully.
The media professionals and staffers on the margins of Palin’s world, meanwhile, expressed some relief that the spotlight would now dim.
Tina Andreadis, who managed Palin’s book tour for HarperCollins, joked that New York Magazine’s Palin chronicler would finally leave her alone.
“At least Gabe Sherman will stop torturing me!” she emailed.
Live and learn. Or not!
What I meant was: I disagree.
Cheers.
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