Flying By Instinct in Alaska

There's an interesting article on Sarah Palin in the NYT Magazine.  Here's a tidbit:

But it is Rebecca Mansour who especially personifies the amorphous yet fervid network of Palin World. Mansour said to me with undisguised relish, “I majored in English and history and minored in philosophy, but I’ve never been a Beltway person, so that does confuse people.” A graduate of the American Film Institute, Mansour was writing screenplays in L.A. when, following the 2008 election, her disgust over “what I perceived as unfair treatment” of Palin inspired her to start the blog Conservatives4Palin. Mansour’s knowledge of Palin became so encyclopedic that in the summer of 2009, Meghan Stapleton asked her if she would come to Del Mar to help with Palin’s biography. The blogger had never met her subject before. She showed up with binders full of research, and when she was introduced to Palin, “the first thing she did was hug me — I was like, ‘O.K.,’ ” Mansour said with a laugh. “She is the most ordinary person. She’s shorter than I am.” At the same time, Mansour was impressed with Palin’s nimble mind. “I remember sitting with her while she was working on the book; she would be typing furiously, and I’d ask her, ‘Governor, when was the year you did such and such,’ and she’d say, ‘That was the year we did the budget.’ And then she’d be reading the chyron at the bottom of the TV screen while typing and talking to me. And then would read to me what she just wrote, and it was brilliant.”

For her volunteer work on “Going Rogue,” Mansour would soon be rewarded with both a salary and a weighty portfolio. Mansour is Palin’s primary speechwriter, researcher, online communications coordinator and all-purpose adviser. Because Palin often works 20-hour days, so does Mansour, because “the governor reads, checks and approves everything that’s under her name.” Mansour regularly spars with the media on her private Twitter account for perceived inaccuracies about Palin. At the same time, she acknowledged, “I love it when they underestimate her.”

In truth, few are underestimating Sarah Palin anymore. In that endearing manner of the Beltway echo chamber, the prevailing narrative of Palin in 2009 was that that she was an incompetent ditz. This year’s story line is that she is a social-media visionary who purposefully circumnavigated the power-alley gasbags and thereby constructed a new campaigning template for the ages. The reality is that Palin’s direction is determined almost entirely by her instincts — or, as Fred Malek puts it, “There is no über-strategy.”