Vanity Fair: Sarah Palin

Vanity Fair has a 500,000,000,000-word article written by Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin in its August issue, discussing how her arrogance and refusal to be coached ultimately convinced McCain's team that they'd made a horrifying mistake in nominating her as the VP candidate. Some highlights:

Sarah Palin's swift journey from her knockout convention speech to Tina Fey’s dead-eyed incarnation as Dan Quayle with an updo played out in real time, no less for the bewildered McCain campaign than for the public at large. As in any marriage of convenience in which neither partner knows the other, there were bound to be bumps. McCain had spent only a couple of hours in Palin’s presence before choosing her. The difficulties began immediately, with the McCain team’s delivery of the bad news that the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter Bristol, which was revealed to the McCain team at the last minute.

Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, two-bit blood feuds, tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.


By late September, when the time came to coach Palin for her second major interview with Katie Couric, there were severe tensions between Palin and the campaign. Palin was either unwilling or simply unable to prepare. But her lack of knowledge turned out not to hurt her. Andrew Halcro later remembered that Palin said to him, “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”

By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction and a post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and “whack job.” One referred to her as "Little shop of horrors."

More than once in Alaska, people brought up the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several said, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder”—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly.

As Palin has piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. Most make it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: They can’t quite believe that for two frantic months, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States, someone who they believed was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. “You nailed it.”