Sarah Palin’s Emails Reveal Her Efforts to Control Her Public Image

According to the BBC, in emails released yesterday details of thousands of messages written by Sarah Palin during her years as governor of Alaska have begun to come into the light. Aside from day-to-day politics, the correspondence reveals her frustration about rumors spread about her family and marriage issues.

Alaska has revealed 24,199 printed pages of electronic messages that span the first 21 months of Palin’s term as governor. This period stretches from 2006 until she accepted John McCain’s proposal to be his running mate on the Republican ticket in the last presidential election.

The messages reveal, in the folksy language that characterizes her, her irritation over the so-called “Troopergate.” The scandal has to do with the firing of the Alaskan chief of police, which was seen as personal revenge against her sister’s ex-husband, who was a police officer at that time. “I do apologize if I sound frustrated w [sic] this one. I guess I am. It’s killing me to realize how misinformed leggies [legislators], reporter [sic] and others are on this issue,” she wrote to her colleagues. Alaska state investigators revealed that Palin had abused her power in firing the official who had refused to expell her ex-brother-in-law.

In another email, Palin monologues about the energy policy of the then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, asking her assistants to write a press release saying that “I’m right.”

Other emails show examples of how she made a great deal of effort to control her public image, at all cost.

Palin explained on Fox News this past Sunday that “A lot of those emails obviously weren’t meant for public consumption.” She added that some correspondence could be “taken out of context.”

The petition for the emails was presented by various news media organizations a short while after Palin was named the vice-presidential candidate. Once the petition was revised by state authorities, only 2,000 pages were kept secret due to their private nature which is protected by law. The rest of the material was delivered exclusively in paper copies and in the far-away capital of Juneau, Alaska, where dozens of journalists had moved to start as soon as possible the complicated selection process.