The Sept. 8 New Yorker contains a brief "Talk of the Town" in which reporter Philip Gourevitch interviewed Sarah Palin in her office. Gourevitch was in Alaska working on a story about Alaska politics: Palin plays a role but is not the whole story.
The "Talk of the Town" is mostly Palin herself talking. About her values. About Alaska. About political change. The voice is familiar. It's the voice of the woman from Wasilla who became governor -- relaxed, informal, amiable, nonpartisan.
It might be the last time we hear that voice -- ever.
At the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, GOP spin doctors from Washington gave Palin a voice transplant. The effects of their surgery were obvious in her acceptance speech, which rocked the convention and thrilled conservatives nationwide. The voice was harder. More partisan. More calculating.
The ever-imaginative Maureen Dowd of The New York Times compared Sarah to Eliza Doolittle of "My Fair Lady" who, with coaching, is transformed from flower peddler into faux royalty.
Pick your metaphor, Palin's voice is new -- and offers the spectacle of a woman auditioning for high office while attempting to change her self.
The obvious danger is that Palin, trying to pass for fluent in domestic and foreign affairs, will commit gaffes. Her inability to define the so-called "Bush doctrine" in her ABC interview with Charles Gibson demonstrates what can go wrong.
But that's not the greatest danger to Sarah and her Republican handlers. Inauthenticity is the real threat.
Palin's quoting Abraham Lincoln to Charles Gibson is a prime example of inauthenticity. Palin's constituents know she doesn't walk around quoting Abe Lincoln -- or telling stories about Harry Truman as she did at the Republican convention. Somebody told her to invoke Lincoln and Truman. It's obvious.
Her partisanship also is forced and unnatural, although it has been greeted with wild applause by Republicans. Palin has never been known as a partisan. Her career has been built on transcending partisanship.
Palin's disdain for Obama the "community organizer" was equally false -- gratuitous and stupid. This is the 50th anniversary of Alaska statehood. Who founded the state of Alaska but community organizers, the men and women who wrote the Constitution, lobbied Congress, made the case to the nation?
Listening to Republican leaders like Karl Rove, Fred Thompson and Rudolph Guiliani talk about Palin at the Republican convention, I was stunned at how little they knew and how much they made of the little they knew.
Like con men in the Old West, RTG used a few nuggets to salt a gold mine. Then they went out to sell the mine to gullible suckers who didn't know the difference between a gold mine and a hole in the ground.
The nuggets are the truth about Palin. She did challenge party bosses. She did take on the oil companies over the gas line and oil taxes. She is independent, not part of the local establishment.
But when RTG argued that Palin had more military experience than Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined, they were making it up. And they kept making it up, fabricating her domestic and foreign policy credentials. (She has more executive experience than Biden because she was mayor of Wasilla?)
Sarah Palin ran for governor in 2006 on who she is. In 2008, she's running for vice president on who she is not. This is a breathtaking high-wire act that will have life-changing consequences for her whether she succeeds or fails.
Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.
MICHAEL CAREY
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