Frank Bailey joined Sarah Palin’s campaign for governor of Alaska in its earliest days, showing up at her shabby headquarters in Anchorage with a paintbrush, toilet bowl cleaner and hammer in November 2005 and becoming part of her “Rag Tag Team,” as she fondly dubbed her original inner circle.
He’d grown up poor in Kodiak and worked as an airline baggage handler and middle manager. In Palin, he found a leader who elegantly fused faith and politics. She exuded charm, energy and idealism, and, most important, she inspired trust. Bailey was politically smitten: “In my mind, God had chosen her, and this was His will.”
But God had his own plan for Frank Bailey. The political novice spent nearly four years at Palin’s side only to wind up disillusioned by his “Ronald Reagan in high heels.” In “Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin,” his political kiss-and-tell based on more than 50,000 Yahoo account e-mails that he wrote or received as a campaign and administration staffer,
Bailey paints a portrait of an erratic, vindictive, unethical politician. Palin emerges as a woman far more interested in power, fame and fortune than in the day-to-day grind of governing.
