A Ghostwriter Reviews Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue'

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Clayton Cramer, an author who has some experience as a professional ghostwriter, has a review of Going Rogue up at Pajamas Media and found, to his surprise, that while Lynn Vincent may have helped her with the memoir, Sarah Palin did indeed write it:

"In a few places, I noticed sentences with 'I' instead of 'me' for the direct object — a mistake that a professional writer wouldn’t make. There is also a bit more use of 'I'... than a professional writer might use, even in an autobiography. There are also quite a few places where her tangents in telling her story mark this as a first book; they don’t show the organization that I would expect from a professional."

Nevertheless, Cramer says, Gov. Palin wrote a good book her, especially for a first effort:

"Going Rogue is well written, and it reads quickly and easily. Unlike some other 'first books'" that I have read (and many books by academics), I almost never found myself going back over a sentence to figure out her meaning. Palin’s B.A. from the University of Idaho is in journalism and she worked as a journalist for a while." 

The reviewer also found some more surprises between the covers of Going Rogue:

"She makes a point of telling you that her administration set a goal of achieving 50% of Alaska’s energy from renewable resources by 2025. Throughout the book, she emphasizes the importance of both developing resources and protecting the environment."

What was behind the McCain campaign's problems was yet another surprise for Cramer as he read the memoir. He had assumed that the issues between the vice presidential candidate and campaign operatives were rooted in ideology. Instead, he concludes that McCain's people were merely incompetent and were worried about their prospects of getting hired to work on future campaigns. There was, however, at least one circumstance where ideology was at work:

"It appears that a left-wing mole had been planted in Palin’s campaign, a friend of Couric’s, who contributed to this disaster."

That would be Nicole Wallace, a friend of Couric's from Wallace's stint at CBS, although Cramer doesn't mention her name.

The reviewer concludes that although Sarah Palin wasn't as well-qualified as he would prefer a presidential or even vice presidential candidate to be, she still had more executive experience in government than Obama, Biden and even McCain. We agree with his point that "many years in Congress are no substitute for executive experience."

Cramer adds that he would prefer a candidate for one of the top two jobs in the federal government who is more of an intellectual than is Palin. However he acknowledges that...

"... the incredibly ignorant goofs by President Obama (there is no 'Austrian' language, Emperor Hirohito did not sign the surrender with General MacArthur, the United States did not invent the automobile) show that this isn’t a job requirement."

Read the complete book review at Pajamas Media.

- JP