The "You betcha" lady is no more. In her $1.25 million memoir "Going Rogue" (Harper, $28.99), Sarah Palin introduces a new voice, and it’s that of a chronic complainer. So much so you want to shout at the pages, "Man up, woman!"
The news from the book has already spilled, and it is essentially this: John McCain’s senior aides were mean to her. Katie Couric was mean to her. Her critics, who are by definition supposed to be mean, were mean to her.
But rather than come back swinging, she comes back whining.
They done her wrong, she tells us over and over again.
According to Palin, she did not make one mistake during the campaign. Her problems arose, she claims, because McCain "headquarters" held her in check. They constantly underestimated her. Or undermined her. Actually both.
In one hilarious anecdote, in which it’s apparent she doesn’t understand what she’s broadcasting, Palin relates how a senior aide ordered her to knock off the Atkins bars while she was preparing for the debate.
He lectures her that beyond protein, carbohydrates are necessary for cognitive connection. Obviously headquarters was so distraught at how badly the prep was going that they were looking for something, anything, to make her brain work.
The first half of the book is filled with the familiar anecdotes of the feisty girl from Alaska who did it her way. Unfortunately for Palin, the national media beat her to her own life story long ago, so this material is tediously familiar.
It only steps up when McCain makes that fateful call to her at the Alaska State Fair asking if she would be interested in being vice president.
Possibly even more audacious than her belief she was qualified to be the person a heartbeat away from the presidency is her conviction that she was a superior comedy writer to those on “Saturday Night Live.”
Before her appearance on a brilliantly hilarious episode late in the campaign, she and her team worked up a skit that they submitted. She was to play a journalist asking Tina Fey (as Palin) such lame questions as:
"What do you use for newspapers up in Alaska -- tree bark?"
Palin has no insight whatsoever into the fact that to much of the nation, she was a natural joke, not a scripted one.
It’s true McCain’s staff unloaded on her after the election. That was nasty. But also understandable. She was the one who couldn’t name for Couric one publication she read. And is it possible that all those critics in Alaska are dead wrong? There are so many, after all.
Lurking behind the moaning and groaning, of course, is a sense of grievance. There’s no question the lady can hold a grudge. Were she ever to be elected to the highest office, after the first playing of "Hail to the Beef," her enemies might duck and run.
Or maybe not.
She can shoot, but the problem has always been, she can’t aim.