JOE McGINNISS

If I could summarize my 2008-2009-2010 research in Alaska about Sarah, I’d say the most surprising thing I found was that those who know her best like her least.

Perhaps I should amend that now to say that those who know Sarah best dislike her most.

It’s only the outliers, who know little or nothing, who cling to their fantasies about the woman who never was.

Alaska Daily News today reports on a new Hays Research poll that shows that President Obama would defeat (“The Oft-Defeated”) Palin 42-36 in Alaska.

And this poll was commissioned by right-wing Alaska radio talk show host Mike Porcaro. Commenting after seeing the results, Porcaro said, “the surprising result is she has become highly unpopular in her home state.”

Porcaro is a good guy and a reasonable man. But if he considers the result of his own poll “surprising,” it shows he hasn’t had his fingers on the same statewide pulse I detected last summer, and even in the fall of 2009 when I was researching THE ROGUE in Alaska.

In any case, now no one can deny the reality: Alaskans would rather re-elect an African-American Democrat than see their ex-Governor in the White House.

My first alert to the fraudulence of Sarah Palin came in June, 2008, and it came from a conservative, my friend Tom Brennan, the ex-newspaperman and p.r. man and present-day author, about whom I write in Going to Extremes. I was thinking of revisiting Alaska to write about the changes since the mid-1970’s, the period about which I wrote in Extremes.

That’s when I learned that Alaska had its first woman governor. Because she was described as a conservative Republican, I wrote to Tom, thinking he’d tell me that she was a brilliant crusader for all that was right (as in “right wing”) and that I should make her the centerpiece of my new book about Alaska.

Well, she has become the centerpiece, but not in the way I first intended. Tom wrote back that she was an ignorant nitwit. He quoted a high-ranking military friend who’d met her as governor and who’d said she had “less depth than a worn-out dime.”

That was my first clue that there was trouble in paradise. I started to pay attention to Palin. What I sensed from the start, and later verified through extensive research, was that by late summer of 2008 Sarah was already sourdough toast in Alaska.

As I write in THE ROGUE:

“As August waned…Sarah found herself at the low point of her political career. Former supporters, both Democrats and Republicans, turned against her. After promising honesty, transparency, and the highest ethical standards, she found herself accused of lying, cover-up, and actions that seemed, at the least, a grievous ethical breach.

Autumn is a mere blink of an eye in Alaska, and looking beyond it, Sarah would not have been able to see anything other than a long, dark winter of turmoil, acrimony and discontent. Then, like an angel on a mission from her Heavenly Father, John McCain swooped down to tap her with his magic wand.”

The rest is history.

And now more Alaskans would vote for Obama than for Sarah.

Repudiation–and that’s with a “p”–does not come in a stronger dose.
To put it another way to Palin supporters: Refudiate this.