Every time the media headlines Sarah Palin's name, the blogosphere goes nuts, the ink dedicated to this woman is amazing.
New York Magazine has a piece out about Sarah Palin and I think about her first appearance with John McCain, the reactions from both the left and the right and I look at the facts of the NY Mag piece and simply have to shake my head in wonder about the genius of what she is accomplishing and how it was made possible, not only by her fans but more so by her critics, the Palin-Haters.
NYMag:
The numbers are staggering. Over the past year, Palin has amassed a $12 million fortune and shows no sign of slowing down. Her memoir has so far sold more than 2.2 million copies, and Palin is planning a second book with HarperCollins. This January, she signed a three-year contributor deal with Fox News worth $1 million a year, according to people familiar with the deal. In March, Palin and Burnett sold her cable show to TLC for a reported $1 million per episode, of which Palin is said to take in about $250,000 for each of the eight installments.
While she’s waiting for her television career to begin in earnest, she’s been busy on the speaker’s circuit, having signed with the prestigious Washington Speakers Bureau. Palin commands $100,000 per speech, putting her in the same league as fellow Speakers Bureau clients Colin Powell, George W. Bush, and Rudy Giuliani.
Her secret which is not really a secret:
Though Palin may not like it, she makes money for Democrats and Republicans alike. Across the political spectrum, Palin is a ratings magnet. Whenever she appears on Fox News, ratings tick up by 10 to 15 percent. At MSNBC, she’s also a ratings phenomenon, albeit with opposite adjectives. Tina Fey’s reprisal of her Palin character in early April juiced Saturday Night Live’s ratings, beating prime-time programming, a rare feat. Online, right-wing sites like the Drudge Report frequently plug Palin headlines, while Palin’s presence at liberal outlets like the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo routinely sparks hundreds of reader comments. During the campaign, people said she could be another Oprah, but now, in many ways, she’s bigger than Oprah, an empath for people who feel, rightly or wrongly, that America has forgotten them. “People are drawn to her,” says Fox News programming chief Bill Shine. “People look at her and say, ‘She has a bunch of the same troubles I do, there’s a mom who’s there changing diapers.’ ”
Emphasis mine and the reason I call it the genius of Sarah Palin.
She is a ratings magnet. Her book sold more than 2.2 million copies already and is still selling strong.
When Palin came onto the national stage she was attacked, viciously, from the left. They attacked her family, they questioned the parentage of her child, they went after her daughters, her husband and Sarah herself.
Between then and now, her critics, her attackers, her haters, have made her a household name and instead of cringing, hiding or crying out at the unfairness of being attacked as she was and is, she capitalized on the left, she used them as stepping stones and the more ink they dedicated to her, the higher they lifted her up and the more money they made her.
It isn't the amount of money she is accruing or the amount of name recognition she is obtaining that makes her a genius, it is her use of those that would tear her down, turning the tables on them and standing on their shoulders to lift her up even higher.
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