Sarah Palin vs. Levi Johnston, the sequel: Can too much exposure ruin a potential presidential candidate?

 
The timing had to be awkward.

Just as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was wowing crowds in a book tour for "Going Rogue," her one-time almost son-in-law Levi Johnston -- the father of her grandson, Tripp -- celebrated a publication of his own -- full-length photos in the nude for Playgirl Magazine.

Palin, who does not mention Johnston in her book, told Oprah that she considers his poses porn.

"By the way, I don't know if we call him Levi -- I hear he goes by the name Ricky Hollywood now, so, if that's the case, we don't want to mess up this gig he's got going," she said. "Kind of this aspiring, aspiring porn -- the things that he's doing. It's kind of heartbreaking."

As for Johnston's relationship with his son, Palin said: "He hasn't seen the baby for a while, but we will let that be the discussion between Bristol and Levi, as they work out their relationship. Because Levi will forever be the father of this beautiful little baby, and I continue to hope for the best, and pray for Levi."

Asked if he would be invited to Thanksgiving, Palin said, "He is part of the family...This can all work out for good."

Johnston has already generated some political heat by saying, in an interview with Vanity Fair, that Palin found her job as governor "too hard" and that she offered to adopt Tripp to hide the teen pregnancy.

The Playgirl shoots provide further evidence that even as Palin's national profile rises, Johnston's not going away anytime soon. As The Times' Meghan Daum put it the other day, "He's hot, he's cute, he's playing hardball."

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Levi Johnston, photo credit: Getty Images

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Huckabee: Republican attacks on Obama 'deplorable'

He could go down as the first Republican to spar with conservative icon Rush Limbaugh and live to talk about it.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told the Hudson Union Society some weeks ago that Republican attacks on President Obama for everything from visiting Dover Air Force Base to opening the White House to local trick-or-treaters on Halloween are hurting the country.

Now, his comments are circulating on the net, posing a direct counter to Limbaugh, who has criticized Obama's Dover visit as a photo op.

Said Huckabee:

When he was at Dover the other day, and went there to pay respect for soldiers, I heard a lot of people on the right say, "Aw, that's just a cheap photo-op." No, I think it was the commander-in-chief of our military paying respect to a dead soldier, and I'm grateful that he did that, and I was proud of him for doing that. And I think we all -- as Americans -- should give him credit for doing that.

Perhaps cognizant of public opinion polls that show Obama personally popular with most Americans, even those who disagree with his policies, Huckabee added: "When he and Michele hosted the trick-or-treaters on Halloween, quit finding something wrong with that. Say. 'Good, I'm glad that he and the first lady are treating children to an experience at the White House.' And I just find it deplorable that some people on my end of the aisle want to find everything wrong and nothing right about the man as a man."

Finally, recalling that liberals regularly reviled George W. Bush no matter what he did, Huckabee, a former pastor, pleaded for comity.

I hated it when people did that to George Bush. They couldn't even laugh at the man's jokes. They found something wrong with everything and if we do that to Barack Obama, then shame on us, shame on us. No wonder our country is so divided when that happens.

Huckabee made the comments while on book tour for "A Simple Christmas." Republican insiders, mindful of all the attention focused on former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue," are calling Huckabee's "the other book tour."

-- Johanna Neuman

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Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue': A powerful testament to a good woman's endurance in a mean world of politics

"Reviewing" Sarah Palin's new book is quite an assignment. There are a lot of pages. And not many pictures. But here goes:

Despite the involvement of a professional ghostwriter, Republican ex-Gov. Palin has penned one of the most powerful pieces of personal or political literature in a generation of American books. It's "Going Rogue: An American Life" (HarperCollins, $28.99).

Her behind-the-scenes memoir -- you may have noticed a photo of the cover above -- is flying off store shelves across the country even as you read this. (Now, see video below.)

It's a 413-page masterwork of personal and political insight that makes Dick Cheney's upcoming memoir look like a Golden Book. Based on the first 48 hours of....

... sales reports, HarperCollins has already ordered additional printings. And Palin is destined to become a millionaire. Again.

With her trademark down-to-earth tone and gee-gollys, Palin takes her readers inside a compelling personal quest from her loving family's upbringing through the....

Going berserk over 'Going Rogue;' Democrats' reaction to Sarah Palin book and publicity

Wow, for somebody who's supposed to be such a political joke, an Arctic ditz and eminently dismissable as a serious anything except maybe a stay-at-home hockey mom, Sarah Palin is sure drawing an awful lot of attention from Democrats and eager critics.

The launch of her "Going Rogue" interviews Monday on "Oprah," of her book today, of her on-air chat today with Rush Limbaugh at 10 a.m. Pacific and of her mid-America bus book tour Wednesday ignited a surprisingly large blizzard of derogatory Democrat dis-missives.

Every few minutes another note from Democratic National Committee operatives and others dropped into electronic mailboxes across the media-verse, helpfully passing on even the tiniest tidbit of negative news about Palin.

You know how sometimes a friend tells you how much he/she doesn't really care about....

What Sarah Palin had in common with that TV show 'The Prisoner'

A presidential campaign can be a disorienting thing, especially for a novice like Sarah Palin, who was plucked from the Alaska governor’s mansion and tossed onto the national stage with very little seasoning and preparation. The pressures on her were immense, as she recounts in "Going Rogue: An American Life.”

In fact, it occurred to us as we were reading the book today that in some ways, her version of the campaign can be likened to the great 1960s British TV show “The Prisoner” (which has just been remade for American TV).

In “The Prisoner,” a man called No. 6, played by Patrick Mcgoohan (photo above), is trapped in “The Village” and has no idea why he is there or where he is. Under constant surveillance, each time he tries to escape, he is subsumed by a giant white ball and returned to his cottage.

Palin recounts in her book that she didn’t understand the rules of the campaign but was expected to follow them. She was constantly told by high-level campaign staffers that someplace called “headquarters” was overruling her or issuing commands about what she could and could not do.

Headquarters’ wishes were relayed to her by McCain chief strategist Steve Schmidt and campaign spokeswoman Nicole Wallace.

“The Schmidt-Wallace tag team,” she writes, “would continually invoke the all-powerful ‘headquarters,’ a mysterious, faraway entity whose exact identity and location were never fully explained.

By the end of the campaign, my VP teammates and I would look at each other and say, ‘Who is headquarters?’” Toward the end of the campaign, Palin and her staff used air quotes when they uttered the h-word.

“I had visited the physical headquarters once in Washington, D.C., and met amazing volunteers working round the clock for the GOP ticket,” she writes. “But somehow I must never have met the tight inner circle of shot callers."

At one point, during preparation for her debate with Democratic VP nominee, Joe Biden, Schmidt and McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis sat her down. “Suddenly, I felt I like I was on thin ice.”

“Schmidt leveled his eyes at me. ‘We don’t have the money Obama does and the numbers don’t look good. We’ve got to change things up….So headquarters is flying in a nutritionist.”

Palin writes that she thought that was a splendid idea for Schmidt and his fellow staffers, whose “chain-smoking, junk-food-packing, recirculated-air-breathing habits were probably catching up to them.”

“No, it’s for you,” Schmidt told her. “You’ve got to get off the Atkins diet.” 

Only one problem: She wasn't on the Atkins diet, she writes.

“I’m a forty-four-year-old, healthy, athletic woman raising five kids and governing a large state, I thought as his words faded into a background buzz. Sir, I don’t really know you yet. But you’ve told me how to dress, what to say, who to talk to, a lot of people NOT to talk to, who my heroes are supposed to be, and we’re STILL losing. Now you’re going to tell me what to eat?

“I suppose if headquarters had flown in a nutritionist, I would’ve listened to what he or she had to say. But as with much of what headquarters said, it never happened.”

--Robin Abcarian

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Rogue rage: Team McCain strikes back at Palin

Arizona Sen. John McCain has been a gentleman abut the whole thing, artfully dodging questions, urging his staffers to hold their tongues too.

But for many of the top political names who worked on McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, "Going Rogue," by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is just too much to take quietly.

In the book, Palin attacks campaign manager Steve Schmidt for silencing her. She accuses communications aide Nicolle Wallace of forcing designer clothes on her and cajoling her into doing that disastrous interview with CBS' Katie Couric out of pity for the anchor's low ratings. She complains that the McCain campaign charged her $50K for her own vetting.

Schmidt calls Palin's memoir "total fiction." He added: "Why is the bald guy always the villain?"

As for the allegation about Wallace, former campaign manager Mark Salter told Politico that was unlikely.  Wallace "did not decide which interview requests the candidates would accept," Salter said. "Nor was she tasked with securing the candidates’ agreement." Wallace said the account was "totally fabricated."

As for the vetting accusation, campaign counsel Trevor Potter told the Atlantic, "I can confirm that she was not billed for any vetting costs by the campaign."

Using the book for "petty and pathetic" score-settling, said former McCain strategist John Weaver, belittles Palin's own stature.

"Sarah Palin reminds me of Jimmy Stewart in the movie 'Harvey,' complete with imaginary conversations," he said. " The score-settling by someone who wants to be considered a serious national player is petty and pathetic. The problem wasn't who her interview was with, the problem was her interview," he added.

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Brian Adams / Runner's World

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Oprah talks about what Sarah Palin talks about

As we pointed out here last week when the manager of Barack Obama's never-ending presidential campaign agreed to go on the dreaded Fox News Channel to sell his book, book tours have a way of making superficial friends out of past opponents.

Thus, we will be treated Nov. 16 to the sight of Oprah Winfrey, arguably Obama's biggest celebrity booster, chatting up Sarah Palin, arguably America's most argued- over celebrity politician in recent years.

The subject, of course, is Palin's new book -- "Going Rogue: An American Life" -- which goes on sale the next day, with 1.5 million copies in print so far.

Palin took Piper and Willow with her to Chicago for the interview, which was taped at Oprah's studio Wednesday.

As The Ticket reported Wednesday night, Palin wrote on her Facebook page that the unlikely pair had such a great conversation that they ran overtime.

Which, goldarnit, means that Oprah will have extra exclusive minutes of video she'll simply have to post on Oprah.com for folks to click on. One thing exiting audience members said was that when asked if she wanted her own TV show, Palin did not say no.

And then, of course, Barbara Walters gets second crack at Palin, which will be broken into five parts on various ABC platforms midweek. What's-her-name and what's-his-name over at CBS don't seem to be on the Palin schedule just yet.

Right after Palin left the studio, Oprah (who looks shorter without makeup) made a short video here to....

...describe the O-P encounter and what all they talked about: inside the campaign, The Pregnancy, both babies and, well, pretty much everything.

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-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Joe Burbank / campaign pool.

You betcha! The Sarah Palin speech(es) we never heard one year ago tonight

This is Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin one year ago right now during the concession speech of her Republican running mate, Sen. John McCain, outside the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix.

Turns out Palin would have liked to give a little speech too, thanking some folks, graciously wishing the best to the Barack Obama winning ticket of Democrats and introducing with effusive praise the man who plucked her from the political obscurity of Anchorage and thrust her, unprepared but eager, onto the national stage.

Turns out now, we may be hearing more about her in coming years than the military hero who picked her.

Anyway, in their new book, "Sarah from Alaska," two journalists - Shushannah Walshe and Scott Conroy --  publish among other interesting information the two speeches the first female on a Republican national ticket was prepared to give, one a victory speech and one a concession. The Beast has published a story about the book over here.

The Ticket has independently confirmed that the speeches from the book are, indeed, the....

Social conservatives sense a change in the political weather, say shift bodes ill for Obama

Tuesday was a good day for social and religious conservatives, who haven’t had many of those in the year since Barack Obama was elected president.

But with Republican victories in the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, and the passing of Maine’s ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage, they are feeling -- to paraphrase President George W. Bush after his 2004 reelection -- the wind of the American people at their back.

“We are a nation moving in a conservative direction,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which supports anti-abortion candidates.

“Last November when Barack Obama won, there was a sense that there had been a dramatic shift to the left,” said Gary Bauer, the Christian conservative who is president of the political action committee Campaign for Working Families. “I think we saw yesterday, it’s not 2008 anymore. There wasn’t a big ideological shift; this is still a center-right country.”

Bauer and Dannenfelser were joined on a conference call by Brian Brown, director of the National Organization for Marriage, who was celebrating in Portland, Maine, after an effort to legalize same-sex marriage there went down to an unexpectedly lopsided defeat.

After California voters outlawed gay marriage last year, Maine was viewed as an important, and potentially game-changing, battleground for the same-sex marriage movement. After all, Mainers are considered independent, tolerant of differences and eager to keep government out of their bedrooms. A win there would have gone far to support the contention by gay rights advocates that it’s just a matter of time before the country accepts the notion that gays should be allowed to marry.

But voters have now defeated gay marriage in 31 states -- gay activists' only victories have been in the courts and legislatures -- and social conservatives believe they can snuff out what had started to become conventional wisdom about the inevitability of same-sex marriage.

“It’s a crushing blow to those who think same-sex marriage is inevitable,” Brown said. “They were 100% wrong…In a deep blue state, when voters had the chance, they voted to protect marriage for a man and a woman.”

The conservative leaders said from this point on, they are expecting the Republican Party establishment to shape up and get with their program.

They will not tolerate any more races like the closely watched contest in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, where Republican Party officials chose a pro-gay-marriage, pro-abortion-rights candidate, Dede Scozzafava, to run against Democrat Bill Owens, who opposes gay marriage. When it became clear that grass-roots Republicans who were turned off by their own candidate would support a third-party candidate -- Doug Hoffman of the Conservative Party -- Scozzafava dropped out and endorsed the Democrat, who won. (If Tuesday’s contests were a harbinger of bad things to come for Democrats in 2010, then perhaps the New York race could be interpreted as a slap at former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who campaigned for Hoffman with the not-so-catchy slogan, “Hoffman, baby, Hoffman.")

“If we had had a candidate who was principled in terms of embracing Republican platform, we would see a Republican being sworn in,” Dannenfelser said. “The real power of the Republican Party is in a burgeoning, grass-roots movement that is very conservative, and the more out of touch they are with their natural base, the more they will lose. If we have to have that conversation in a high-profile way, so be it.”

Though the White House has downplayed the notions that Tuesday’s races were any sort of referendum on the president’s policies, Bauer is convinced that trouble looms:

“I think the results yesterday are going to make it harder for all the initiatives that are unpassed -- whether healthcare or cap-and-trade and soon-to-come tax increases. Those will be more dicey for the White House and congressional leadership. If you are a red state senator or congressman, there is a lot of second-guessing going on about whether they want to go further out on the limb of voting for these incredible bills. …That’s why people who voted for Barack Obama last year voted Republican yesterday.”

-- Robin Abcarian

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Joe Biden update: Now, a secret oath-giving closed to the press

A short time from now Vice President Joe Biden will disappear again from the public eye.

Don't worry too much. It's nothing involving a hidden bunker, that anyone knows about at least.

We've mentioned here before the Veepster's proclivity for the same kind of private, which is to say closed to the press, which is to say secret meetings that his evil predecessor Dangerous Dick Cheney also preferred, despite denunciations by Democrats in Congress, where Biden had served since his current boss was 11 years old.

Funny coincidence too because today is the first anniversary of that 2008 election eve when Obama and Biden wrapped up their successful $750 million campaign for the White House promising change to believe in and historic governing transparency involving such things as no lobbyists, publicly posting legislation days before signing and open meetings on C-SPAN.

This is another busy day for Biden, full of speech-listening and lunch-giving. This morning he heard German Chancellor Angela Merkel address a joint session of Congress. Then, Biden hosted a closed lunch for U.S.-European Summit participants, and later he'll sit in on the private meeting between President Obama and Secy. of Defense Robert Gates.

But the Biden schedule item that intrigues most today involves another one of his secret meetings, one that on the surface would not seem to require secrecy. It's the swearing-in of the president's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

Not only that, it's the ceremonial swearing-in, meaning they're already been sworn in officially. This one is just for fun.

What kind of Democratic arts projects require secrecy?

Here's how the session appears on today's official vice presidential schedule as published by the White House, which apparently forgot to turn its clocks back last weekend:

At 4:00 PM EDT (sic), the Vice President will administer the oath of office at the ceremonial swearing-in of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This event is closed press.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Joshua Roberts / Bloomberg News