This will be Sarah Palin’s week. She’s traveling around the country in a bus painted to look like the cover of her book, “Going Rogue,” which comes out Tuesday (and was No. 1 on Amazon.com's bestseller list long before release). Oprah has a sit-down interview with her today, and we started seeing clips from it last week. Barbara Walters has nearly taped a mini-series, parts of which will air on Good Morning America, ABC News, Nightline and 20/20. It’s a sure bet that the interview will be a hot topic on The View, as well.
If you visit your local bookstore, undoubtedly you’ll see Palin’s book displayed front and center, and she’ll be on the cover of numerous magazines. The media blitz will certainly cover everything from Palin’s disastrous Katie Couric interview to her infighting with John McCain’s campaign staff to her views on the current administration, including notes on now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Along the way, it wouldn’t even be a surprise to see a nod to Tina Fey.)
Some see the book as a revenge play, where Palin finally gets to have her say; others as a grand gesture to present herself as the viable candidate of the future. Politics is politics, after all. But the book is also something else: a new glimpse into a world where a mother of five children deals with rumors about her marriage, her teen daughter’s pregnancy, her special-needs son and the pressures of her full-time job, which she left in July. No matter how big a celebrity Palin has become, these are things that a lot of American women can identify with.
For instance, from a Barbara Walters clip: “Let’s talk a little bit about Bristol. Did you know that she was sexually active?” Walters asks.
“Nooooo,” Palin responds, “and that is why it was shocking. Truthfully, we were devastated.”
And in an Oprah clip, Palin responds to Oprah’s question as to whether Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin’s baby son, will be welcome at Thanksgiving dinner. Palin responded not as a woman who has been in the middle of an ongoing spat with Johnston, but more as a mom: “I think he needs to know that he is loved and he has the most beautiful child, and this can all work out for good, it really can.”
After the interview, Oprah taped a behind-the-scenes reaction: “Governor Palin just left, and it was really an interesting interview. You know, lots of people didn’t want me to have her on, lots of people did. Lots of her supporters didn’t think that she should come here, but she did. And we talked about everything. We talked about inside the campaign, about what it felt like when she first was asked to be vice president, the campaign, we talked about Bristol, the pregnancy, we talked about Trig, her baby, we talked about Levi Johnston, we talked about her marriage, we talked about everything. There’s nothing that we didn’t talk about.”
The political side of the book will be discussed ad infinitum on talk shows and in blogs. And it will be a fascinating study of a woman with power who does not really control that power at all, but rather must maneuver her push-pull relationships with the Republican Party, the press and the voters. This is Sarah Palin: Long Form, not Sarah Palin: Sound Bite.
But the insight into the woman, the mom, the wife and the grandmother may be the most interesting of all.
The clip from the Barbara Walters interview:
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=9081994
Video excerpts from Oprah’s interview:
http://www.oprah.com/media/20091111-tows-sarah-palin-couric
And an audio clip from Oprah’s radio interview with Holly Robinson Peete and Rodney Peete right after it was announced that Bristol was five months pregnant:
http://www.oprah.com/media/20080902_oaf_20080902_oaf_hr
The Wall Street Journal blog:
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/11/15/sarah-palins-going-rogue-media-blitz-courting-the-press-and-slamming-it-too/
I'm really interested in your take on Sarah Palin. What's your take on the candidate, the woman, the mom? Do you feel like you have anything in common with her? Will you buy or read "Going Rogue?"