Where to now for Sarah Palin, the beveled beauty and former Governor of Alaska? The criticisms against her are valid and true but let’s take a step back for a minute and examine how she gained media traction – for a little while at least – in last year’s Presidential campaign, as Senator John McCain’s Vice-Presidential running mate.
Just one year ago Palin was a media darling; she was plucked from the backwoods of that other Pacific Rim wilderness, Alaska. According to ‘Vanity Fair’ (“It Came From Wasilla” by Todd Purdum, August 2009), McCain had only met her for a couple of hours before choosing her as his Vice-Presidential running mate. Here was a fresh-faced, ‘hockey-mom’ with a pregnant teenage daughter – the perfect antidote to Hillary Clinton, who was embattled in the Mother of All Primaries. Clinton was paranoid and media-hating and it showed. For the Republicans Palin was, as ‘Vanity Fair’ says, “by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs.”
