On May 22, 2010, Joe McGinniss moved into a strategically well-situated house in Wasilla, Alaska. It was next door to the home of former governor Sarah Palin and her family, but that understates the highly exploitable proximity of the two places. They were very close together. The Palins could probably hear tweets from the newly hatched birds that McGinniss excitedly uses as filler for The Rogue, his book about his summer-long experiment in homesteading. “The grebe chicks have hatched!” he needlessly exclaims. Tweets emanated from the Palin place too. But they were the kind that McGinniss could have monitored from home in Massachusetts.
McGinniss, who has been writing best-sellers since The Selling of the President in 1969, starts this book by affecting a gee-whiz attitude about his amazing new digs. (“Forty years in the business and I’ve never had a piece of luck like this.”) But he doesn’t get far with that attitude. Ten pages into The Rogue he has already blown his cover, printing a map to the Palins’ isolated house. He describes having gone to the Palin door with a copy of his book about Alaska, Going to Extremes, and exploiting this encounter to engage the family’s older son, Track, in conversation. But had McGinniss been a good neighbor, he would have delivered that book without showing up unannounced.
McGinniss explains that he was shocked, just shocked, at the angry response his presence in Wasilla provoked. But The Rogue makes the Palins’ widely publicized anger understandable, even to readers who might have defended his right to set up shop in their neighborhood and soak up the local color. Although most of The Rogue is dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access, McGinniss used his time in Alaska to chase caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins, often from unnamed sources like “one resident” and “a friend.”
And these stories need not be consistent. The Rogue suggests that Todd Palin and the young Sarah Heath took drugs. It also says that she lacked boyfriends and was a racist. And it includes this: “A friend says, ‘Sarah and her sisters had a fetish for black guys for a while.’”
McGinniss did make a phone call to former NBA basketball player Glen Rice, who is black, and prompted him to acknowledge having fond memories of Sarah Heath. While Rice avoids specifics and uses the words “respectful” and “a sweetheart,” McGinniss eggs him on with the kind of flagrantly leading question he seems to have habitually asked. In Rice’s case: “So you never had the feeling she felt bad about having sex with a black guy?”
So much for the soft sell. Soon McGinniss is settling in to enjoy the fuss his mere presence has created. “Normally, for a news story to continue beyond the first 24-hour news cycle, something newsworthy must occur,” he writes loftily, but The Rogue is filled with proof to the contrary. What was his hate mail like? He quotes it. What did Glenn Beck call him? That’s here too. Who took umbrage at this venom and chose to help him? One man offered him a hideout, despite McGinniss’ slight skepticism about his motives. “But you don’t know me,” McGinniss protested.
“Hell, I’ve even got an AK-47 you might like,” the man volunteered.
Is it any wonder that such shenanigans found their way to Doonesbury? The Rogue-related controversy escalated earlier this week with the news that some newspapers have declined to run installments of the comic strip that incorporate excerpts from the book. But what exactly is stopping them? Is it the book’s intrepid reporting, or its questionable tone? McGinniss’ most quotable, inflammatory lines call Palin a clown, a nitwit, a rabid wolf and a lap dancer — and those aren’t the parts that assail her as a wife and parent.
He even finds a species of Alaska yenta willing to remark on the condition of the Palins’ toilet, and he too has a place in The Rogue. A journalist as seasoned as McGinniss surely knows what these details will do to his credibility regarding the book’s more serious claims.
The Rogue reopens many knotty arguments about Palin’s public record, mostly the same ones that were hashed over when she became part of the 2008 presidential campaign. It cites the investigation that became known as Troopergate, the questions about her involvement with the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act and her possible commitment to such extreme theological ideas as dominionism, although here too The Rogue is too busy being nasty to be lucid. McGinniss suggests both that Palin is committed to stealth religious control of government, and that she is not sufficiently devout.
With the same imprecise aim he cites conspiracy theories that Palin may not be the mother of her youngest son, Trig, and questions the circumstances under which he was born. McGinniss puts forth a provocative case for doubting Palin’s account of Trig’s birth, which involved a roundtrip between Alaska and Texas while she was supposedly in labor. But then he comes to an indefensibly reckless conclusion: “It is perhaps the most blistering assessment of her character possible that many Wasillans who’d known Sarah from high school onward told me that even if she had not faked the entire story of her pregnancy and Trig’s birth, it was something she was eminently capable of doing.”
There is one area, and only one, in which The Rogue is dead-on. McGinniss knows how publicity works. He appreciates, not to say emulates, the way members of the Palin family cash in on celebrity and contradict themselves without penalty. He also denounces the media’s willingness to let this happen. How was it possible, he asks, for Palin’s daughter Bristol to assail Levi Johnston, the father of her son, as being “obsessed with the limelight,” then turn up herself on Dancing With the Stars?
Speaking of Johnston, McGinniss interviews his resentful mother, who was under house arrest on a drug charge at the time. He leaves her house “wanting to find Levi and give him a good hard shake and tell him to forget his sputtering career for half a second and go home, because his mother needs him.” Since absolutely nobody connected with The Rogue seems to lack ulterior motives, there is one here as well. Johnston’s sputtering career has produced a memoir, Deer in the Headlights. Next week it will compete for attention with The Rogue, when both are officially published on the same day.
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