Sarah Palin and the Politics of Winging It

You betcha it did — as evidenced by the all-terrain coverage that, true to precedent, trailed Sarah Palin wherever she motored last week.

But how dare she disregard the media like that?

That was a subtext of so much of the press grumbling that followed Ms. Palin and her family as they zigzagged through a Northeast itinerary of “biker caravanning” (at a veterans’ motorcycle rally), historic sightseeing (Gettysburg, etc.), office politicking (the headquarters of her employer, Fox News) and Donald Trump (his own category). By “winging it,” or at least not telling journalists where she was headed next and leading them on what some called a “wild goose chase,” Ms. Palin once again showed contempt for a class of people she plainly despises.

“I don’t think I owe anything to the mainstream media,” Ms. Palin said in an interview aboard her bus with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News.

Ms. Van Susteren’s husband, John Coale, a longtime Democratic fund-raiser who became a Palin friend in 2008, marveled at the media’s nerve. “They have trashed her every which way, and they still expect to be kowtowed to?” he said.

You could argue — as many exasperated bus-chasers argued — that dispensing the most basic of logistical information would not fall under the category of “kowtowing.” Rather, they would say, it would fall somewhere between common courtesy and rudimentary public relations.

But whatever. This is all part of the familiar Palin approach. Call it “The Politics of Doing Whatever the Heck I Want.” There she went again, disrespecting the almighty “process,” playing by her own rules and seeming not to give a flying hoot what anyone thought about it. That included the so-called key Republicans, party insiders and self-important activists whom she also seemed to ignore en route. These are many of the same people who trashed Ms. Palin’s bus tour as ill-conceived and disorganized in (often anonymous) comments to the wild-goose-chasers.

These are many of the same usual suspects who complained that Ms. Palin had breached campaign decorum by showing up in New Hampshire last week on the very day Mitt Romney was formally announcing his presidential campaign there. Never mind that Mr. Romney has essentially been running for president for six years (or since kindergarten). He had designated Thursday as his “announcement day,” and, the decorum police felt, the rest of the field was obliged to stay out of the way in deference to the “unwritten rule” that says Mr. Romney should have the stage to himself on these special occasions. Likewise, the political media was obliged to treat Mr. Romney’s impeccably choreographed non-news event as a news event. And everyone pretty much abided by their designated “unwritten rules;” everyone except Mrs. Palin, for whom “unwritten rules” are just another category of the political orthodoxy to run over like roadkill.

What was most striking about the bus odyssey was the apparent relish Ms. Palin seemed to take in driving reporters nuts. While there have been numerous media-loathing politicians over the years, no possible candidate of Ms. Palin’s wattage has so blatantly blown off (or actively thwarted) the trailing press corps to the degree that she did.

This resulted in some comic spectacles that included Ms. Palin’s using her bus as a decoy at the back entrance of a hotel in Pennsylvania so she could slip out a side entrance; or encountering a Sarah Palin impersonator in Boston and instructing her to “go talk to all these reporters” on her behalf.

Why does Ms. Palin behave this way? The simplest answer is, “because she can.” Despite her scorn for much of the press corps — a scorn not infrequently reciprocated — they covered her anyway. It brings to mind the oft-stated belief that if the press really wanted to punish Ms. Palin, they would ignore her. “What’s the sound of an 18-wheeler when not trailed by a caravan of reporters?” asked Mark Salter, a longtime aide to Senator John McCain and top adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign of 2008. “The answer is silence.”

Not likely anytime soon, in other words, wherever Ms. Palin turns up next.

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Saving Sarah From Herself, Oprah Style

IN the past year or so, Sarah Ferguson, the much-maligned Duchess of York, has been caught trying to sell access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew; has narrowly escaped going bankrupt; and was shut out of the royal wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Among other memorable low points, she recalled one recent afternoon over lunch in the penthouse at the James Hotel here, was a rain-soaked weekend near Edmonton, Alberta, when she showed up to give a motivational speech at a Canadian resort.

“I got there, and it was a casino in the middle of nowhere, right?” said Ms. Ferguson, as she picked at a plate of sliced pastrami and a bowl of lettuce leaves. “I was working weekends. I was working 24/7 to pay for my staff. And I got to the tent and, because of the pouring rain, the water had come into the tent, and only eight people showed up. I took a photograph of the billboard that looked like Buffalo Bill had come to town.”

Ms. Ferguson scrolled though her BlackBerry until she found it: her airbrushed portrait pasted onto a piece of flimsy white paperboard. “I had gone from marrying the queen’s son to now being on a poster in a casino in the pouring rain in a tent in the middle of nowhere with eight people in the audience,” she said with a sigh and a roll of her azure eyes. “I’d got down to bowling alleys.”

Before there was Bethenny Frankel, Kelly Bensimon or Camille Grammer, there was Sarah Ferguson, the irrepressible royal housewife of Windsor. Few other English princess brides have lived their lives so like a reality television star: feuds with the in-laws; weight fluctuation calculated in the tabloids; romantic misadventures captured on film — and, after it all fell apart, a plucky extension of the personal brand with books and a spokeswoman gig for Weight Watchers.

So it seems only natural that when Ms. Ferguson’s self-hatred and poor judgment caused her to “go into the gutter,” as she described it, her rehabilitation would be played out on a small screen.

Who better to oversee her transformation than Oprah Winfrey? It was she who persuaded Ms. Ferguson last year to ditch an offer from “Dancing With the Stars” and become the subject of a six-part documentary called “Finding Sarah: From Royalty to the Real World,” scheduled to be broadcast on the Oprah Winfrey Network beginning June 12.

Ms. Winfrey is attracted to people who need to be made over or done up or who are in the process of reinventing themselves. And Ms. Ferguson’s story in theory makes for compelling television. American audiences are practiced at seeing fallen potentates make a comeback (see Eliot Spitzer). And the British royalty, in particular, remains popular: an estimated 23 million Americans stumbled out of bed in the early hours of April 29 to watch the royal wedding live, with millions more watching it later online.

“With Catherine going up the aisle, you know what went through my head?” Ms. Ferguson said, referring to Ms. Middleton’s wedding walk at Westminster Abbey, retracing the steps that Ms. Ferguson took in 1986. “I feel like I’ve handed her the baton and said: ‘Well done. And you’ll do it right.’ I didn’t do it right, and now I am going to go get Sarah right.”

HOURS before her interview at the James Hotel, Ms. Ferguson arrived at 8 a.m. in the green room at Ms. Winfrey’s Harpo Studios, where she was taping her sixth appearance on “Oprah,” one of the host’s treasured final shows. Forced to jettison a staff of 12 last summer because she had no money to pay them, Ms. Ferguson was trailed by Martin Huberty, her personal assistant whom she has known since she was 16. With no makeup, her curly hair gathered in a knot, she looked like a suburban soccer mom in a knee-length navy and white pleated Ann Taylor skirt, her skin freckled and creased from too much sun.

She plopped into a makeup chair where a hairstylist crowned her head with orange and green curlers. “I lost 45 pounds on Weight Watchers,” the hairstylist whispered to Ms. Ferguson, who congratulated her.

A little before 9 a.m., Ms. Ferguson, 51, slipped into a black Michael Kors dress — the label had been snipped out — that hugged her shapely figure. When she walked onstage, carrying a blue-and-red flowered handkerchief that she later tucked under her left thigh (in case she began to cry), the mostly female crowd cheered wildly.

And she did not disappoint. Audience members nodded sympathetically as Ms. Ferguson dabbed her tears while watching a clip from the new series in which she describes the 1998 death of her mother by decapitation in a car accident. During breaks in taping, they were equally engaged. Ms. Ferguson demurred when Ms. Winfrey asked what kind of pajamas Queen Elizabeth wore, instead effusing about the more than 20 royal attendants available to her at Buckingham Palace before her divorce in 1996, including six ladies-in-waiting. “Get out!” Ms. Winfrey shouted, as the audience gasped. “No wonder you are finding Sarah!”

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