There is an absolutely wonderful article in the London Review of Books entitled "Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill" about Gov. Palin.
London Review of Books
A few choice excerpts:
Like Wally the Green Monster, Baxter the Bobcat, the Mariner Moose and other giant furry creatures who accompany major-league baseball teams from game to game, Palin is the adored mascot of the anti-fiscal crowd. Her actual performance as mayor and governor counts for little beside her capacity to keep the fans happy during the intervals between play, which she does in the style she developed as mayor of Wasilla and then perfected in her triumphant gubernatorial campaign in 2006. Transcripts and videos from her time in Alaska show her parlaying the barest minimum of rhetorical and intellectual resources into a formidable electoral weapon. The least one can say of her is that she quickly learned how to make the most of herself.
After she left the commission, Palin told people that her whistleblowing had ‘destroyed her political career’ – a calculated disingenuity if ever there was one. But she came closer to the truth when, in an understandably cocky op-ed piece, published in the Daily News in April 2004, she wrote: ‘Success in the sports arena is essentially the same in the political arena . . . All I ever really needed to know I learned on the basketball court.’ Following Murkowski’s appointment of his daughter to the Senate, Palin had taken possession of the ball, dribbled it brilliantly through the ranks of her slower-witted opponents, leaped for the hoop, and scored a clean slam dunk.
In Alaska, she has deployed her end-times fundamentalist beliefs with considerable adroitness, nimbly walking the tightrope between pleasing the church crowd and reassuring her secular constituency of her essential moderation. She appears to have learned from her early experience in Wasilla, when, pressed by her backers in the Assembly of God, she suggested to the librarian that such ‘unsuitable’ books as Daddy’s Roommate and Pastor, I Am Gay be removed from the library, only to backtrack later with the claim that she was merely asking a ‘rhetorical’ (she meant hypothetical) question. Since then, as governor, she’s handled such issues with impressive wiliness. When the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that gay partners of state employees must receive the same benefits as heterosexual spouses, the legislature passed a bill to block the payments. Palin made clear her sympathy with the bill’s intent, but refused to sign it on the grounds that to do so would be to ‘violate my oath of office’. Similarly, she endeared herself to Evangelicals during her gubernatorial campaign by saying that ‘intelligent design’ should be taught alongside evolution in the state’s public schools: ‘Teach both,’ she said, but then declined to back a bill which would have made that teaching mandatory. Playing politics by the rules of basketball, improvising her moves according to the requirements of the moment, she is too opportunistic (some say pragmatic) to be an ideologue. While she likes to trumpet her narrow theology, with its stress on Calvinist predestination and the imminence of the Rapture (the Iraq war is ‘a task that is from God’), she simultaneously manages to embody her state’s peculiar brand of live-and-let-live libertarianism.
A nice summary of her ideology (or lack thereof) and history -- beautifully written. Just about the perfect length for an article to be read by everyone in your contacts list.