Sarah Palin hits the (book) trail
If Sarah Palin were running for president, this is where she’d come: The outskirts of a second city in the conservative heartland of Western Michigan, where thousands gathered Wednesday to see her, shake her hand and have her sign their copies of “Going Rogue.”
And if she were running for president, she’d be doing about what she did Wednesday, under the watchful eyes a half-dozen capable advance hands, veterans of the White House and the McCain campaign, who herded the press and the public into even lines. She had a VIP list for key local conservatives, shuttling them discreetly to the front of the line. She had a few talking points, tailored for the local area, to deliver after she stepped down with a big smile from her big bus, handing baby Trig off to an aide after her four-inch heels hit the sidewalk outside a shopping mall Barnes & Nobles, where she held her first book signing.
“They deserve more credit than they’re getting for the level of early organization that they have,” observed John Yob, a Grand Rapids political consultant who served for a time as political director of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.
The stop in Grand Rapids felt like a political campaign event, not a book tour. For a woman written off as a disorganized celebrity on a tour run by monomaniacal book publicists, Palin and her aides were clearly thinking politics.
Yob was ushered past the rope line with his father, Chuck, a former Republican National Committeeman and regional power broker. The elder Yob penned an open letter to Palin after McCain announced that he was abandoning Michigan, cheering her public dissent from the campaign strategy, telling her she’d “kicked Joe Biden's butt in the debate,” and inviting her to “come to Michigan immediately.”
Also there were the minority leader of the Michigan House, Kevin Elsenheimer, and Joanne Voorhees, the conservative Kent County Republican Party chairwoman who was briefly in the news for abruptly cancelling an event for former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, on the grounds that hosting a moderate would be breaking with Republican “roots.” Two local state Representatives, Bob Genetski and Dave Agema, both devout Christian conservatives, were also invited to meet Palin.
The logistics weren’t perfect: The Kent County Republicans could be heard muttering that they’d been rushed past the former Alaska governor. But Chuck Yob said he was pleased after an advance man walked him and his son to the front of the line, and Palin reacted with pleased surprise to their presence.
“Oh my God, that’s neat,” she said.
Palin’s roadshow travels in a campaign-style bus painted to match the cover of her book, with a giant picture of Palin and Facebook and Twitter logos. She emerged with a wave for the adoring crowd, which had begun massing 24 hours earlier, and a few words for the television cameras.
Her staff was made up of volunteers: Jason Recher, a campaign advance man whom she describes in glowing terms in her book, and John Roberts, a former White House staffer, who steered her through the media scrum after she handed off her son. Also on the bus was an aide to her Political Action Committee, former RNC Finance Director Tim Crawford.
Western Michigan – an "awesome area of this great land" – can be rescued "if we apply some good free enterprise principles in our federal government," she said in a brief interview with reporters, where she dismissed Newsweek’s decision to put her on its cover in running shorts as “cheesy.”
"I would never have posed for Newsweek in shorts," she said of the picture, which was taken for an article in Runner’s World that ran last August.
Grand Rapids was where Palin first “’went rogue’ trying to reach out during the campaign,” she writes in “Going Rogue,” and it’s the beginning of a tour that will retrace many of the stops on the Republican primary in Palin’s demonstration of how the contest might have looked if she’d had her way.
Palin, meanwhile, ends “Going Rogue” with a tribute to the state.
“I’m thinking when I get back, I‘ll bake the kids a cake. And I’ll pull out a road map – I want to show Piper the way to Michigan,” she writes in the final line of her book.
The state seemed to be returning her affection Wednesday, as locals began lining up Tuesday evening outside the bookstore. By 5:00 a.m. Wednesday, hours before her appearance, the store had already handed out more than 500 wristbands entitling their bearers to a place on line. Aides said that in all, over 1,000 people had their books signed, and hundreds more came for a glimpse.
“She's one of us. She doesn't seem like a Washington elite,” said Denese Crouch, a homemaker who lives outside Grand Rapids, echoing the dominant theme in a canvass of the long line, which was the ease of identifying with Palin. “She seems to figure solutions to problems like I'd do with my own family,” Crouch said.
Indeed, though the line was broadly Republican, Palin’s persona and her outsider status seemed to trump any particular issues with most of her admirers.
“She stands for everything I believe. I wear a suit and nylons and pumps to work” while loving nature, said Kim VandeKoppel, who runs a printing business in Grand Rapids, and who also praised Palin’s “Christian beliefs.”
At the front of the line was Robin Case, 44, who’d driven the previous evening from Traverse City and who sat at the front of the line in sweatpants giving an endless series of interviews to local and national reporters. “What she represents is what I’m standing in line for,” she said repeatedly. “She's like you and me -- someone who represents me when we're sitting around the table like other normal folks.”
Case said she stopped working to take care of her in-laws, who suffer from dementia and were driven into poverty and onto Medicaid when “they got into that donut hole with prescriptions” she said, referring to a much-criticized provision of 2003 Republican legislation.
Her criticism, a reporter noted, sounded a bit like President Barack Obama’s. What did she think of his health care plan?
The politicians currently debating health care “just want to line their pockets” she responded. “Sarah Palin’s not like that.”
The event also drew its share of more ideological conservatives. Bob Weinert, 56, a fencing salesman from Lansing, said he’d heard Rush Limbaugh say recently that Palin is “the most conservative candidate out there.” She represents, he said, “limited government and traditional values,” including “putting homos back in the closet.”
“And putting Christmas in the stores,” added his wife, Rexanna, who said she felt she could trust the “down-to-earth” Palin.
A few minutes later, a diffident young man wandered by with a handmade “Homos for Palin” t-shirt until he encountered a mall security guard.
“You’ve got to zip it up or leave,” said the security guard and the young man, who said he was a college student but wouldn’t give his name, complied.
Palin’s tour will take her through the battleground states where, she writes, she felt the McCain campaign made her pull her punches. There are stops in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Fairfax, Virginia, Florida’s The Villages, and the Missouri Ozarks.
Michigan, though, is a particular preoccupation of hers, despite its place as the ancestral state of the presumptive 2012 GOP front runner, Mitt Romney, whose father was governor.
“In Michigan, the [2012] race will come down to Mitt Romney and one other candidate and if a candidate were to beat Mitt Romney in Michigan, that candidate will be the nominee,” John Yob noted.
Might that be Palin?
"I am inspired by these crowds to fight for the right thing in this country,” she said on her way into the Barnes & Nobles Wednesday before signing three hours worth of autographs and then returning to the bus, waving Trig’s hand to the crowd.
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Sources: Politico, OK Magazine, Google Maps
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