Caribou Lasagna and Science Lessons at the Dinner — Sarah Palin Talks About Her Father in ‘Going Rogue’

Sarah Palin writes in Going Rogue that her father, an Alaska science teacher, often taught his children lessons at the dinner table:

“Dad’s curriculum was cleverly all-Alaskan. His spelling tests included words like ‘ptarmigan’ (Alaska’s state bird) and ‘akuutaq’ (Eskimo ice cream). We learned the difference between glacial crevices and crevasses, and a cave’s stalagmites and stalactites. His lessons spilled over to the dinner table. We ate together every night, and I just assumed every kid learned clever acronyms for planet alignments and the elements of the periodic table between forkfuls of caribou lasagna. Didn’t every family talk about what differentiated a grizzly from a brown bear?”

A review of Going Rogue appeared last week. You can also follow Jan Harayda on Twitter www.twitter.com/janiceharayda.

Spin, Baby, Spin – Sarah Palin’s ‘Going Rogue’ Sets the Record Askew

“There’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals – right next to the mashed potatoes.” — Sarah Palin in Going Rogue

Going Rogue: An American Life By Sarah Palin. Harper, 413 pp., $28.99.

By Janice Harayda

How desperate was John McCain to rein in Sarah Palin during his failed bid for the U.S. presidency? On the evidence of Going Rogue, desperate enough that a campaign strategist wanted to fly in a nutritionist who would force Palin to go off the Atkins diet and eat only “meals balanced in carbohydrates and nitrates” to see if it would help her stick to the script.

Like much else in this memoir, this anecdote — if true — shows how bizarre American political campaigns have become. But Palin gives such a loopy and self-serving account of the incident that her words are hard to credit fully. She says she wasn’t on the Atkins diet and had no idea why the strategist wanted to hire a nutritionist: “The Atkins bars – that must be it. They were everywhere, in every hotel room and on every snack table along the train. They were great when I didn’t have time to slow down and eat, but I didn’t know why they were all over the place.”

Maybe Palin didn’t know why the bars were everywhere. But something was apparently behind the incident that she can’t or won’t admit. And Going Rogue has so many such one-sided or off-kilter stories – some involving far more serious issues — that a better title for  the book might have been: Spin, Baby, Spin.

With help from the writer Lynn Vincent, Palin gives a colorful account of a childhood that involved eating caribou lasagna and using wooden sidewalks in a frontier community that got television shows on a one-week delay. And she suggests why her state remains unique: “You know you’re an Alaskan when at least twice a year your kitchen doubles as a meat-processing plant.”

But Palin also engages in the same kind of backstabbing she says she faced during the campaign. And she saves some of her most cynical and sarcastic comments for McCain staff members, who she believes failed to appreciate what she could contribute even as they raised her from obscurity to a fame that enabled her to receive a reported $5 million advance for this book. Nancy Pelosi writes in her memoir Know Your Power that she got valuable advice from the former Congresswoman Lindy Boggs of Louisiana, who told her: “Never fight a fight as if it’s your last one.” If Pelosi and Boggs are right, Going Rogue bodes poorly for any national political ambitions held by its author: In this book Palin fights as though it were her last fight.

Best line: No. 1: “I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals – right next to the mashed potatoes.” [cq “all animals.”] “In Alaska, we joke that we have two seasons: construction and winter.”

Worst line: No. 1: “But when the boom went bust, the golden goose still ruled the roost.” No. 2: On how she won the Miss Wasilla pageant, which included a swimsuit competition: “Then I shocked my friends and family, put on a sequined Warrior-red gown, danced the opening numbers, gave the interview, and uncomfortably let my butt be compared to cheerleaders’ butts.” No. 3: “I breathed in the autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.” No. 4: On her lack of freedom as the vice-presidential nominee: “But now I felt like a bit of a captive, pulled away from my loved ones in favor of a ‘higher priority,’ as though in the final analysis there is any such thing.”

Editor: Adam Bellow

Published: November 2009

You can also follow Jan Harayda on Twitter at www.twitter.com/janiceharayda.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.