Friday, November 13, 2009

Drudge Report posts two-page Going Rogue excerpt

With the release date for Sarah Palin's Going Rogue still five days away, details from the memoir continue to leak out, despite the publisher's embargo of the book's contents.  Matt Drudge posted a two-page excerpt early Friday morning.  Here's a portion of Drudge's excerpt:
Going Rogue: An American Life
by Sarah Palin
Chapter Four; Section 8, pages 255-257

By the third week in September, a “Free Sarah” campaign was under way and the press at large was growing increasingly critical of the McCain camp’s decision to keep me, my family and friends back home, and my governor’s staff all bottled up. Meanwhile, the question of which news outlet would land the first interview was a big deal, as it always is with a major party candidate.

From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News. The campaign’s general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn’t have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon.

[...]

Meanwhile, the media blackout continued. It got so bad that a couple of times I had a friend in Anchorage track down phone numbers for me, and then I snuck in calls to folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and someone I thought was Larry Kudlow but turned out to be Neil Cavuto’s producer. I had a friend call Bill O’Reilly after I was inundated with supporters in Alaska asking why the campaign was “ignoring” his on-air requests for a McCain campaign interview. I had another friend scrambling to find Mark Levin’s number. Aboard the campaign plane I was within twenty-five feet of reporters for hours on end. Headquarters’ strategy was that I should not go to the back of the aircraft and talk to the press. At first this was subtle, but as the campaign wore on, Tracey or Tucker would call headquarters to request permission, and someone in DC would respond, “No! Absolutely not- block her if she tries to go back.”
Advance copies of Going Rogue were supposedly only sent out to "Palin associates" -- although some media figures who have been granted interviews with the former governor must have also been sent copies.  Sean Hannity, for example, has mentioned on his radio program that he was reading a copy in advance of his scheduled interview with Sarah Palin next week.  But Hannity didn't divulge any details.  Either some of the "Palin associates" or some in the media who have advanced copies of the memoir have to be responsible for the leaks.

Link Love: Sister Toldjah

- JP

2 comments:

  1. The almost dissonant note in this Couric recollection is that Sarah was told that Couric "has such low self-esteem." I find it shocking that an aide (Wallace, who knew Couric) would've revealed something of that peculiarly intimate nature to anyone, Sarah included. A weird thing to say: "Go on the Couric show because Katie has such low self-esteem."

    Wallace sounds like a real piece of work. If that's the way she talks to other people about her supposed friends, I shudder to think of how frustrating it must have been for Sarah to endure the farcical aspects of the McCain campaign for five minutes. We'll know more when we read the entire book, presumably, but it becomes ever clearer that McCain's people hated that she was totally upstaging McCain, and that they wanted her to sit down and shut up, playng the role of the grass-roots conservative "ornament" of the Dem-Lite McCain platform.

    No wonder she felt inhibited--eager to get her message out, stay loyal to her "boss," and deal with a media that could bash her, but to which she was not allowed to respond in ~her~ way for fear of upsetting handlers. Maddening!

    Yeah, Sarah chose the title of this book well, because it's clear she "Went Rogue" at one point, fed up with the foolishness, and I'm glad she did.

    I have no fondness for Couric at all, and highly doubt that she "admired" Sarah. Judging by the interview, it's clear she was there to sneer down at her nose at the governor and, in doing so, secure the favor of journalistic peers who had long considered ~her~ a lightweight.

    That being said, nobody (liberal or conservative) needs a "friend" like Nicole Wallace, I'd say.

    This is going to be a good book--Sarah's not holding back, it would appear. Straightforward account.

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  2. Althouse didn't like this leaked snippet. I read this brief passage as Palin thinking Wallace's statements were fishy but nonetheless went forward with the interview like a good team player only to realize that the game was rigged. Chalk that up Palin being naive. Althouse seems to think it was stupidity on Palin's part and naturally leads her post with a "Palin is stupid tag." *sigh* Ann...some days she's on, some days she completely misses it.

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