REVIEW: Palin Launches Mighty Battleship with Shrewd, Compelling 'Rogue'

- By Ian Ransom

Sarah Palin has built a career and well-deserved reputation upon being lost when it comes to "politics-as-usual." The fact that so many people are still too willfully blind to see that Palin is an astonishingly effective politician, however, now makes everything that's happened to this woman since late 2008 deliciously understandable.

That is because Sarah Palin is the most compelling and effective conservative politician of the new millennium, and her memoir, Going Rogue, drives this reality home with all the mammoth, unstoppable force of an Alaskan glacier.

It's not just because of the extraordinary sales figures or even the thousands of frostbite-braving supporters who have already flocked to book-tour appearances. These things are great, but they're on the periphery, in this context. Palin's gleaming "Excalibur," at the moment, is the book itself, and believe me as I explain to you why the book is not to be missed, and far less to be underestimated.

I wasn't able to read Going Rogue right away and, frankly, did not know what to expect, despite my own unflagging support of Palin's conservatism. It was to be her first book, after all. The project had been rushed--considerably rushed. She was teaming with a respected collaborator, but a collaborator nonetheless. All good reasons to expect a product that might indeed miss the mark, or fail to capture the authentic voice and vision of Palin the person. The first sign that I need not worry came when it was revealed that the AP had hired eleven--count 'em!--eleven fact-checkers to tackle a book written by a woman routinely dismissed by their unhallowed association as a lightweight dunce. Conservative commentators initially saw this act as yet another sign of the liberal media's automatic condescension toward Palin, an act of blind aggression in the continued effort to "destroy" her.

Oh, no, friends. No. That may have been part of the impetus, but after finishing Rogue last night, I now realize exactly why eleven AP hounds were unleashed and why Rachel Maddow has been looking more fatally constipated than usual this past week.

Going Rogue is effective. Head-smackingly effective. Dirt-roads-being-paved-with-money-culled-from-budget-cuts effective. Ronald Reagan-shutting-up-a-liberal-heckler effective. Barack-Obama-being-summarily-trounced-in-2012 effective.

This brings us inevitably (and in no uncertain terms) back to the Land of How Can There Be Any Doubt? Sarah Palin not only knows who she is and what she believes, but she demonstrates who she is and does what she believes. Put it on a basketball court. Put it in a salmon fishing boat. Put it in a small-town cabinet meeting. Put it on the stage at a national convention. Put it in a book.

Put it anywhere: Sarah Palin is the realest thing you're going to see in American leadership, which is why liberals--attuned to illusion, enamored of ciphers and abstractions--can't even see her at all. The book is one mighty flex of an arm attached to that particular heaping helping of "real," the latest manifestation of Palin's effectiveness. What tantalized and thrilled me most about Going Rogue, however, was its jaw-dropping shrewdness.

Yes, Going Rogue is most certainly a memoir, and an eminiently readable one at that. Formative events, environments, and endeavors are delineated and Palin rewards us with a "picnic-blanket-on-the-tundra" feast that is compelling without being affected, evocative without being egotistical, and loaded with integrity in that her narrative lets the reader draw the self-evident conclusion, instead of the self-serving conclusion trying to "draw" the reader (take that, Audacity of Hope).

Palpability is the order of the day, the week, the year, the month, the sentence, and certainly the very word in Palin's book. The frosty, hardscrabble streets of Skagway are palpable. The "gentle warning" that all families are tested by life's travails is palpable. The self-doubts that come after normal human mistakes are palpable, as are the lessons learned which open the door to victories big and small. All palpable. To this reviewer, the most palpable thing of all about this book--the thing that literally gripped me and made me pause to think about it the most (among dozens of notable things)--was the concept of work. "Concept" doesn't begin to do justice, though, because work is not a concept for Sarah Palin. It's a quality, an attribute.

This woman's life is about work. Constant, dedicated, relentless, enthusiastic, back-breaking WORK. I have to admit it; even I was stunned. The thing that Sarah Palin knows best, from the irrefutable evidence of her life, is how to work her tail off if she wants to get something done, and how to do so with unfailing optimism and not a shred of entitlement. Not even with a hint of self-aggrandizement! "Refreshing" hardly begins to capture this dynamic. No wonder liberals think she's some sort of fearful alien. Yes, hard work and uncluttered dedication are in the blood and the bone, for Palin. It's not a thing needing explanation, and Palin doesn't attempt to explain it. It's like breathing. Take a lungful and move on to the next breath. The work ethic that literally leaps from the book's pages applies to cultivating a cherished and well-adjusted family life, to sports competition, to making ends meet, to toting happy kids in a red wagon from door to neighborly door in a fight to build a better town, to digging in one's heels for endless months and seeking to build a team out of mutinous administrators, to...everything.

Truly, if the reader takes only one thing away from this always steady, often moving, frequently humorous American story, it ought to be the sobering and expansive scope of hard work that Palin represents in every fibre of her history and lifestyle as person and public servant, juxtaposed against this contemporary liberal culture of snarky disillusionment with work, with our offices, with our output, and with the almost reptilian sense of entitlement.

Man, does this book ever make a shattering statement without even needing to "make a statement."

That's another potent aspect of Going Rogue. Palin wastes no time with insipidly cerebral circumlocutions about the possibilities of this or that wyrmhole of wonderment. You'll find no unicorns in her book. Plenty of moose. There's not a sniff of fairy-dust. Lots of snow, though. Beginning with her parents' adventurous journey to the Alaskan frontier and extending all the way through the Governor's mansion and deep into the bowels of the identity-challenged McCain presidential campaign, Palin isn't out to impress herself by communicating through a conceited veil of sophistry, or "navel-gazing," as Rush Limbaugh was quick to pipe. Her story is sensible, responsible, and linear--like her politics. When Sarah tells you how things happened, she tells you how they happened. C happened after B, and B happened after A, and A came about because A is where things begin.

In adhering to a method that favors the logical progression of events and reactions to events, Palin reveals far more of substance and interest than any amount of wistful ruminating ever could. Most effectively, Palin's very specific and straightforward delineations of policy are at the service of her natural narrative, and not the other way around. Her expertise on issues of energy and executive fiscal strategy are powerful not because she's trying to make sense out of them, but because she's already made sense out of them via experience.

More than a few liberal (and conservative) critics have grumbled that the book represents some sort of bitter "payback" to transparently out-of-touch campaign managers Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, but nothing could be further from the truth. Palin's frustration at being so terrifically mismanaged by the people she trusted (and was expected to heed by the top of her ticket) comes through, but her frustration merits a revealing explanation in an autobiography dealing with events that impacted and shaped (or misshaped) the perceptions of millions of observers around the globe. Here again, Palin recounts what happened from her purview, touches upon her frustration without belaboring any one incident, describes how she moved on--remember, with this woman, there is always more and more work to be accomplished--and she covers this material without bitterness. In straightening the lopsided Katie Couric "painting-over-the-mantelpiece," Palin marshalls transcripted evidence of just how very much was sliced-and-diced to expose the "perky one's" agenda for what it was (Creepy Liberal Ambush). Nicolle Wallace's managerial ineptitude in this department is especially and meritoriously glaring.

At last, this brings me back to the shrewd quality of Palin's achievement regarding Going Rogue. In one fell swoop she has reversed the prior damage done by the vampiric "lamestream" media and has very wisely maneuvered herself into position as a Reaganesque "teflon-style" figure on the global political landscape. Her resignation from the Governorship of Alaska--once a catalyst of caterwauling derision--is now crystalline in its emergence as potentially the most brilliant political move of the decade. The decision hearkens back to everything Palin has fought for and come to understand about being most effective at the most important junctures, for those who most count: American people. Careful and objective readers who may have harbored doubts will pick-up on this in a revelatory flash.

Palin's strength and savvy as a genuine leader is likewise exemplified in the construct of this narrative. To wit: Palin knows that she's got the the courage of her convictions, she knows that people respond to courage of conviction because its so damned rare today, and Palin very deliberately uses her courage of conviction to connect with her base. The coup de grace? You can't fault or assail courage of conviction! It's impossible.

Oh, my. Sarah Palin has arrived.

- Ian