Well, maybe Sarah Palin and John McCain ARE soul mates...they are clearly both resentful people who hold nasty little grudges. This is an interesting piece, you should read it in full at the link. There is also a portion that discusses the founding pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God, saying that in response to a banker expressing concern about whether the church would be able to pay back the loans, said of him later "He was gone before the church was finished. The bank went belly-up. ... I just felt in my own heart that God was giving us direction."
The New Republic
Barracuda by Noam Scheiber
The resentments of Sarah Palin.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8c130fe3-adab-4cb3-8443-c363f085cf13&p=1It's unlikely the name Sarah Palin would mean much to anyone if not for a man named Nick Carney. Long before she stood up to Republican cronies and "the good old boys" of Alaska, Palin stood up to Carney, a colleague on Wasilla's city council. As Kaylene Johnson explains in her sympathetic biography, Sarah, Carney had the gall to propose an ordinance giving his own company the city contract for garbage removal. In Johnson's telling, it was the first time Palin bravely spoke truth to power: "'I said no and I voted no,' Sarah said. 'People should have the choice about whether or not to haul their garbage to the dump.'" Johnson writes that Palin's vote made Carney into a "political enemy"--the first of many, it turns out.
snip
These days, Palin is engaged in this same fight against elites, though on a considerably larger stage. "I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world," she recently told Katie Couric. "No, I've worked all my life." That hardly makes her the first politician to run on class resentments--nearly every conservative from George W. Bush to Mitt Romney has sought a bond with voters by attacking the over-educated and entitled. But more often than not these conservatives are elites themselves; hence the spectacle of Yale legacies and Harvard millionaires (and most of the Fox News executive suite) railing against wine-swilling sophisticates. Palin, by contrast, may be the first conservative politician since Nixon to experience resentment so authentically. For her, it's not so much a political tool as a motivating principle. A trip through Palin's past reveals that almost every step of her career can be understood as a reaction to elitist condescension--much of it in her own mind.
snip
In 1996, Palin was also asserting herself more and more. For example, she'd demand to know why Stein, the mayor, had "raised the budget." Stein and Carney tried to explain that he'd done nothing of the kind--that, when a city grows, businesses collect more in tax revenue, but that new residents also increase demand for public services. Palin wasn't appeased. She'd say things like, "'Oh, okay. Well, that's the way you think about it,'" Stein recalls. "I was thinking--these are things she should know better. Why is she asking me these stupid questions?"Carney saw ulterior motives. During a break one evening, he stopped Palin as she was heading to the restroom. "Sarah, it sounds like you're running for mayor," he said, half-joking. Palin turned red and became visibly upset. "What makes you say that? I never said I was running for mayor." "You never denied it, " Carney responded. Palin just repeated herself and stomped off.
snip
Within a few months, Palin was officially challenging Stein and exploiting the cultural shift masterfully. She welcomed a national anti-abortion group in to carpet bomb Wasilla with pink postcards affirming her pro-life bona fides. She orchestrated an NRA endorsement and a mailing from the group falsely proclaiming Stein, a lifelong hunter, "anti-gun." (Stein complained to the local newspaper that Palin was telling voters he wanted to "melt down" all the firearms in the state.) And, in a move practically out of Karl Rove's playbook, she dwelled on how Stein's wife used her maiden name, going so far as to demand a marriage certificate as proof of their nuptials. Palin's campaign literature proclaimed her "deeply devoted to conservative family values"--all in the context of an ostensibly nonpartisan election. (Stein himself was a moderate Republican.)
snip
And Palin took every opportunity to humiliate her former mentor. "She had people coming in, castigating me," Carney recalls. "Anything I proposed, even innocuous resolutions, went down to defeat." At city council meetings, Palin would sit and chitchat with allies at great length while Carney held his hand waiting to speak. Finally, toward the end of the meeting, Palin would turn and ask, "Oh, Nick, did you have something to say? Well, keep it brief."
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