I'm reading Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue"

Got it this morning, and will be reviewing it on NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon. The story so far: Sarah loves Alaska, she loves America, she loves serving "ordinary, hardworking people," she loves tax-cutting, and she loves our free enterprise system. She hates hates hates people who tell her she can't do this or that because she's a woman. A hundred pages in, two things jump out:

1. She's selling a personality, not a platform. This might change as I get further into the narrative, but there's very little of substance here, and a whole lot of attitude. That may be politically smart, given how Americans tend to vote on personality.

2. She's a conflicted populist, and doesn't understand that. It's simply bizarre how she can write with passion about how badly Exxon screwed over the people of Alaska in the Exxon Valdez incident, and how the cozy relationship between Alaska's government and the oil industry worked against the interests of ordinary hardworking people ... and yet repeat shopworn GOP nostrums like this one:

Somebody is not connecting the dots. OK, back to the book. I'll update this later.

UPDATE: Page 239:

Writing my convention speech was really a team effort, and the captain of the team was an ace speechwriter named Matthew Scully. Scully had worked for Bush 43, Dick Cheney, and John McCain. He is, to use author Rod Dreher's term, a 'crunchy con.' A political conservative, he is a bunny-hugging vegan and gentle, green soul who I think would throw himself in the path of a semi truck to save a squirrel.

Heh.

UPDATE.2: OK, here's the text of my NPR review, which is now airing on All Things Considered. The gist? "Going Rogue" does nothing to relaunch Palin or establish that she's capable of running the country. There's lots of tedious detail about Alaska politics, and loads of chatty stuff about Palin family life. And there's plenty of bitchy stuff about the McCain campaign and the media and various cultural elites. All of it is liberally laced with the usual right-wing buzzwords and boilerplate. But there's nothing to her. She spends seven pages dishing about her appearance on Saturday Night Live, but only just over one page discussing her national security strategy (which amounts to: America must be strong and win the war on terror). Know what her economic strategy is? Cut taxes and get government out of the way. Really, it's no more detailed than that. You don't expect to read Friedman here, but come on, is that the best she can do?

It is fascinating, though, to read how she discovered through her work how big business gets cozy with big government, to the detriment of the common good. But she cannot let that knowledge get in the way of reciting her 1980s GOP catechism about the market. Weirdly, she goes on and on about how capitalism must be allowed to work, and let the creative-destruction chips fall where they may ... and yet later will talk about how wrong it is that Alaska's natural gas industry remains undeveloped because it's been cheaper for Big Oil to explore and develop natural gas sources in places where the labor and infrastructure is cheaper. Sarah, I hate to break it to you, but you can't complain about government meddling in the economy as a Bad Thing, but then turn around and complain about Big Business doing what Big Business does, which is to maximize profits by cutting labor costs.

If this incoherent pot of message is populism, nuts to it!

UPDATE.3: Thinking back to the book I read today, it's noteworthy how completely unreflective Palin is regarding her own shortcomings. Anything she did wrong was somebody else's fault (e.g., Katie Couric's "biased" questions, the McCain campaign overpreparing her, etc.), or if it was her fault, it was because people she foolishly trusted let her down. To be sure, I think Palin is probably a likable person, and she really has suffered some nasty, disgusting attacks from Trig Truthers and others. But she is so far from being capable of being president of the United States it's not even funny. I know, I know, this isn't news, but you'd think that if there was anything more to her in terms of intellectual seriousness and judgment than we saw last fall, she'd have brought it out in a memoir she had most of a year to write with the help of a professional writer. But there's no there there. I'm not saying she's a bad person -- I don't believe she's a bad person at all -- but I am saying she's not a credible national political leader.