Originally published at times.co.uk – Who is Sarah Palin and why is she making everyone so crazy? Here in Manhattan, with the carefully orchestrated release of Palin’s memoir Going Rogue: An American Life hitting bookstores this week, we are in the midst of what a colleague has called “Palinmania”. Some quarters are in a rage; some are laughing; some are defending and some are inspired. No one is neutral.

There she is on the cover of Newsweek, in short shorts and running shoes, smiling coquettishly; there she is on her Facebook page, denouncing the Newsweek cover (from an image shot for Runner’s World) as being taken “out of context” and as sexist. Here’s her alternatively charming and whiny Oprah interview; there’s the book cover itself, stacked at Barnes & Noble at the top of the bestseller list, showing her in Gainsborough-type heroic portraiture convention, positioned before a glowing blue sky. When I went to my local chain bookstore, I asked the manager how the book has been received. It was attracting crowds, he said, but they were “the gigglers”, not buyers. “It’s the West Village,” he noted dryly. He said with a half-wink that he was planning to release the book in a package with the forthcoming Playgirl issue that features revealing pictures of Levi Johnston, the former boyfriend of Palin’s daughter, Bristol, and therefore the father of Palin’s grandchild. “Levi did an interview with Michael Musto,” he said, mentioning a campy gay journalist.

“That’s an odd choice,” I said foolishly.

“Is it?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

She is like an itch that the nation needs to scratch, and I have watched popular culture long enough to know that, when a country can’t get enough of reviling or scrutinizing or sexualizing or exalting a woman, something is going on that has less to do with her and more to do with the way our collective unconscious projects on to certain women contemporary fears, hopes and anxieties from deep within.

Going Rogue is an illumination — but of issues that the critics have totally wrong. I have long had strong feelings about Sarah Palin. When the campaign rolled her out — audaciously having her address her daughter’s pregnancy in People magazine — I thought: “We are in trouble.” The choice seemed at first to have hallmarks of brilliance. We were all excited about a black candidate: “Well,” I could imagine McCain saying to himself, “I’ve got a woman!” She was indeed telegenic and down-to-earth in that Ronald Reagan, approachable style.

Most of all, I recognized the power of two elements of her persona: she was a working-class woman. Her husband is a fisherman. She was not educated in the Ivy League, but at Idaho State. Even though women had made inroads into national politics, from Anita Hill to Michelle Obama to Hillary Clinton, they were all Ivy League-educated, and therefore now upper-middle-class. There was a demographically and emotionally powerful symbol here — that a working-class woman could embody the highest aspirations of the millions of American women who did not write law briefs and hire nannies but who wiped up coffee in diners and punched time clocks. Her candidacy would represent a real fissure in the class edifice of the nation’s leaders.

I now understand better where she got both her courage to be herself in the face of the US Establishment, and her cluelessness about the Eastern elite. The first 200 pages of the book are a coma-inducing litany of bucolic scenes of growing up in frontier small towns — fishing and proms, neighbors joining together to help each other out. The tactic of the first half of the book is to compel you to like Sarah Palin through sheer force of her cheery banality. You need to wade through sentences such as: “We were all expected to participate in most everything offered in our hometown: of course we’d be in 4-H, and Campfire Girls, and Scouts and ballet and band . . . The 1970s also ushered in the running craze across America, and my family was hooked.”

The numbingly pleasing power of this half of the book is testimony to her ghostwriter, who has edited out her natural whiny plaintiveness and left in the good cheer and grit. If you get through this, you understand — especially if you grew up in the West yourself — that Palin is actually a type from the 19th-century Manifest Destiny movement: an energetic, believing-in-oneself daughter of settlers, who is not intimidated by the “Eastern elite” and who drives them crazy for that reason. That strain could have been salutary — had she herself not betrayed it.

Second, I recognized something that I have been warning my feminist colleagues about for two decades. Feminism in the US and the UK has been largely defined by issues on the Left and spokeswomen on the Left, so much so that feminism is often taken as a subset of liberalism, and assumed to be pro-choice by definition, big-government and secular. But there is a conservative feminism, a pro-life, religious, small-government feminism, and the first candidate who comes along espousing that philosophy will be formidable.

Her summary of this position in feminism is not mine, but it is not unpersuasive: “I didn’t subscribe to all the radical mantras of that early feminist era, but reasoned arguments for equal opportunity definitely resonated with me. It was not a matter of ideology but of simple fairness.” She quotes a libertarian feminist writer approvingly, that “instead of reflecting and, indeed, reveling in our expanded horizons, the feminists of the National Organization for Women and other so-called ‘women’s groups’ … depict women as passive victims rather than the makers of their own destinies, and overlooks our individuality in favor of a collective political identity that many of us find restrictive.”  I couldn’t agree with this sentence more. She could have been a true force for women’s empowerment: a strong voice on the other side for gender equality. Instead, as we will see, she not only played into the hands of those who sought to silence and use her in standard degrading ways, but she yields her power again and again and plays standard feminine games.

Last fall, I had noticed something scary: she had begun to espouse positions that were not John McCain’s — but those of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Her soundbites were Bush soundbites; her position and language on torture, for instance, was not that of McCain, a former PoW who had been tortured. Same for other issues.

I wrote a piece that was widely picked up, which argued that history often showed that when a democracy is weakening the cabal in power will select a telegenic, charismatic, often populist “leader” with no power base of her or his own — an Evita type — as a front person for the same old policies and power relationships. I argued that someone with McCain’s age and melanoma condition had a seven-year life expectancy, and that it was possible that the people in power during the Bush era — including Rove, who handpicked the incurious, telegenic George Bush out of relative obscurity — were counting on an eventual Palin presidency with an airheaded, easily manipulated puppet figure.

At the time, and to this day, my assertion that she was being groomed as a puppet has been met on the Right with howls. But I was more right than I knew: Palin’s book confirms it. She willingly became a puppet to a group of professionals, many of whom were the same team that had redrafted, speechwritten, styled and messaged the Bush-Cheney years.

When the McCain campaign professionals finally step forward in the second half of the book, they treat her like a Stepford vice-presidential candidate. They buy her beautiful clothes and have her turn in front of the mirrors while they style her: but they hand her a copy of a statement they’ve crafted about her daughter’s pregnancy — putting feelings in words she doesn’t share — and when she tries to edit them, they’ve already released their version to the national media. They keep her from calling her press contacts. They stop her from staying near supporters on the rope lines; they hustle her away from the special-needs children in wheelchairs into the private plane. They make her wear $70 pantyhose. They try to tell her what she can and cannot eat. This is not a vice-presidential campaign — and I say that as someone who has worked for the Vice-President in such a campaign in 2000. It is the high-level grooming of a political geisha.

Unfortunately, more exposure to the “Eastern elite” and their ways would have served her well: again and again in Palin’s narrative, the McCain team’s handlers are grooming, silencing and turning her out in all the wrong ways — and those are exactly those moments in a campaign that the candidate is supposed to fight with the consultants: no, I won’t give this speech; no, you f***ed me by releasing it to the media without my consent; no, that’s the wrong media strategy.

Her fatal flaw as a candidate and a potential feminist heroine is that she colluded with her own geisha-ization; again and again, presumably because she was thrilled at the high-level “marriage,” she silenced herself. A classic moment is when she addresses the clothes scandal. (After the campaign, she was accused of taking $150,000 of expensive suits and jewelery.) She portrays herself as a bemused Cinderella figure as the mysterious “stylists” heap her with designer jackets and ply her children with pearl necklaces. She reports that her daughter asks who is paying for all this, and that her daughter is told that it is standard and that the campaign takes care of it. Palin reports this as if the scandal were utterly unjust. Well, Nancy Reagan was blasted for accepting expensive clothing. Hillary Clinton was attacked for accepting furniture. It’s illegal, it’s called graft, and any adult woman who expects to be considered for any responsible job, let alone to be a heartbeat away from the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, doesn’t let her teenager ask who is paying and if it’s kosher to accept costly gifts. She deals with it herself.

Now that I have read Going Rogue, I see her in more dimensions but I am just as scared of her. She is going to be around, and she is going to be a force. She will be picked up by the hard Right and will, as she grows in sophistication, make her peace with them. So she will be one of the great demagogues. All it takes to make her credible for a 2012 run is a solid vice-president who can whisper in her ear about national security or climate change. What scares me about Palinmania is that it is playing out on a stage in which, in the US, no one even expects candidates to have gravitas, to know the issues or to be accountable for their positions.

“We rolled her out in the wrong venue,” was the jaded comment by the McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer on Larry King Live this week, referring to the infamous Katie Couric interview in which Palin could not name a single newspaper or magazine she regularly read. It doesn’t matter. My readers are telling me that people are lying out in sleeping bags overnight in Michigan to hear her speak. She has touched a nerve with exhausted, underpaid populists who are sick of “business as usual” in Washington, and they won’t care that much that the same special interests will be sponsoring her; by now, any candidacy is just about how she — and others — make us “feel.”

For what it’s worth, I call on Sarah Palin to remain on the scene as a messenger for her issues but to spare her nation, and keep herself free to speak for herself, by growing up as a serious woman — and by avoiding public office.