The Agenda

At 8:19am, the self-deposed Queen of Alaska drinks her coffee while staring at the White House from her bay windows at the Mayflower Hotel. She is feeling invincible standing there towering over the city, planning her attack, like a helicopter fly over a day before a wolf hunt. But by 11am, her mood has deflated. A firm reprimand to her oldest daughter about not having an ounce of “god damned discretion” after spending all night in the hotel’s hot tub with various boys from Georgetown’s Young Republicans Club turned into a hallway screaming match. It has left Mrs. Palin feeling uneasy and reflective. She wants to return to this morning when her perky assistant announced that the producers of the Today Show and Oprah were both begging for her appearance on the same Tuesday and a Britney Spears level of paparazzi jostled outside with each other over prime sidewalk spots.

Now the curtains are closed and Sarah is lounging alone in a leather armchair, fervently filing her French manicured nails, trying to focus her attention on the rhythmic scratching of the pad against the nail. But instead, she is thinking of her daughter’s final look as she flipped Sarah off and stomped off back to the pool. It’s a look she’s seen on many people. Its disgust that has become so commonplace that it now registers as everyday, bored disdain. It was in John McCain’s weary face last Wednesday night on Fox when Sean Hannity asked if he supported her hypothetical 2012 campaign. But her husband, Todd, switched the channel, told her she was reading into McCain’s normally strained, POW caused, slanted smile. But Sarah told him to flip the channel back and began chewing on the inside of her cheek as she watched McCain deliver his party line. She nervously wonders, will one of this days McCain actually stop being gracious and attack her enthusiasm on the campaign trail as he privately saw it, as off message and overshadowing him?

She aimlessly flips the nail file towards the wall and checks her watch. It’s 12:37pm. She could go relieve the nanny, but she doesn’t want her infant son and nephew trying to climb all over her suit with their faces wet with mashed cookies and fruit. She spent all of yesterday morning building block towers, zooming fire trucks around the carpet, and feeding them sweet potatoes. She furrows her brow, when was the last time her daughter spent time with her own son? Is that why she resents me? Is it more than being a teenager, is it because I pressured her into having that baby, does she think it was all political?

Sarah sighs. She could sit in with her speech writers. But they are in a three hour brainstorming session about her health care remarks for Meet the Press and she doesn’t feel like dealing with their subtle condescending glances to one another when she doesn’t know all the PPO, HMO, HBO statistics right off the bat. She decides to leave the hotel. Go have a spa day. Bring along her book ghostwriter Jeanine and talk about energy independence while having her hands massaged and cucumbers placed on her eyes. Vacate this hotel brimming with needy babies, smug speech writers, and ungrateful children who pose as adults. Let them spiral around in activity without her, she going places, big places, places too powerful to let them populate her mind like they do her life.