Word: palin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...maybe someone else. For now, having surrendered her official position, Palin is free to give speeches, write a book and watch for the fish to arrive. A person learns in the Alaska vastness that humans can respond to events but never control them...
...Outsider Palin's breakneck trajectory from rising star to former officeholder - with more twists sure to come - has everything to do with her Alaskan context. As the writer John McPhee once observed, "Alaska is a foreign country," a statement legally false but true in terms of culture and attitude and location. Recall how the story begins. It is June 2007, and a ship docks at the remote port of Juneau, a place tightly bound between sea and mountains. Down the gangplank walks a pair of pundits - Barnes and editor William Kristol - bound for lunch with an unknown first-year governor...
...Suppose that Palin somehow channels this grim and possibly gathering sense that America's institutions and authorities are no longer worthy of deference. Suppose that the Obama Administration's expansions of government don't prove as popular - or successful - as Democrats hope. Maybe then she will have picked the right time to declare in her resignation speech, "I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title" to be effective. In fact, a title might slow you down if your message is that our nation's leaders are so deeply and abidingly inadequate that the only appropriate attitude...
...square miles as people? Alaskan feuds are straightforward and personal, against a backdrop of "live and let live." Washington combat has an impersonal cruelty to it, reflected in a maxim of the strategist Lee Atwater: "Never kick a man when he's up." As Barnes and Kristol began feeding Palin's name into the swirl of Washington gossip known as the Great Mentioner, they might have overestimated how ready she was for battle in the big time...
...Dillingham, Palin traces her decision to resign directly to Aug. 29, 2008, the day she was announced as McCain's running mate, the day "the distractions," as she calls them, "ramped up." They ranged from the bizarre - a blogger's campaign to prove that Palin faked her last pregnancy (she didn't) - to the humiliating. The National Enquirer sent four reporters to Alaska, hoovering up gossip about drug use by her older children and long-ago marital infidelity. Despite rave reviews for her Republican National Convention speech, Palin soon became the target of late-night comics and snarky columnists...