Keller @ Large: Sarah Palin Was Just Another Scammer
BOSTON (CBS) - The Washington Post reports that Sarah Palin's political career, after years of slow but relentless disintegration, has come to what seems like the end with the official shutdown of her political action committee.
What a ride it's been.
Almost nobody had heard of Palin, then governor of Alaska, when John McCain made her his running mate in the 2008 presidential race. And she briefly caused a stir with her punchy one-liners about not messing with a hockey mom, and her outsider atmospherics.
In a way, she was Trump before Trump, a media sensation the audience couldn't get enough of.
But Palin was also a flash in the pan.
By the end of the 2008 she was a major liability for McCain, with higher negatives than any vice-presidential candidate in modern times.
Her governorship was consumed with controversy, and she bailed on it more than a year before the end of her term, then became a hybrid politician/celebrity, creating an ill-fated reality TV show and forming her PAC to support candidates.
Or rather, to fund her own self-promotion.
In the 2016 election, reports the Post, the Sarah PAC "spent $830,000 on consultants and just $82,500 in donations to other candidates, less than half of what she spent on travel expenses. That was a repeat of her behavior during the 2010 cycle, at the height of her presumed political clout, when she only spent 12-percent of the dough she raised on promoting political causes.
Sarah Palin may have seemed an interesting political phenomenon, but she turned out to be just another scammer, using politics as an excuse to line her own pockets.
If this is the end for Palin, Inc, then good riddance.
Listen to Jon's commentary:
