The Comedy Duo of Palin and Frank!
By JACKIE CALMES
Sarah Palin may have some ‘splainin’ to do with the conservative fans on her book tour as word spreads of her partying Saturday night with the elites of the dread Mainstream Media. In her featured “roast,” the media types even got off easier than her former associates on the McCain campaign.
Sometimes you’ve got “to trust your instincts,” she told the group. “And when you don’t, you end up in a place like this.”
The former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate stopped in Washington to be the Republican speaker at the annual black-tie winter dinner of the Gridiron Club, the 124-year-old assemblage of veteran Washington reporters. She gamely appeared opposite Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, one of the capital’s funniest people.
Ms. Palin effusively described the big crowds at her appearances around the country to sign her best-selling memoir, “Going Rogue.” On her luxe bus, she added, “the view is so much better from inside the bus than under it,” a laugh-getting allusion to the attacks from embittered McCain campaign advisers. Ms. Palin said she’d even thought that the Gridiron Club might drop its tradition of having a speaker from each party so the McCain campaign could offer a rebuttal.
Yet “on my far left,” as she aptly put it, was the liberal Democrat Mr. Frank. At the other end of the dais, he looked stoic or even pained much of the time. But when Ms. Palin noted how busy she has been — with five kids, a book tour, running a huge state — Mr. Frank suddenly started and looked quizzical, seemingly wondering at her last item since she unexpectedly quit as governor last summer.
She wondered at “what might have been” if she had been elected vice president. Then she would be the one helping to sign bailout checks and Democrat Joseph R. Biden Jr., the once nearly bald former senator, might be the one on the road hawking a book—“Going Rogaine,” she suggested.
Mr. Frank was the more partisan of the two, and mildly apologetic for it. He offered up an idea for a new reality TV show based on a house in his own Capitol Hill neighborhood — “The Desperate Housewives of 133 C Street.” That, of course, is the house that was home-away-from-home for several married Republican politicians lately caught in sex scandals.
Mr. Frank, who is openly gay and attended the dinner with his partner, noted the irony that the embarrassed Republicans are among those (including Ms. Palin, though he didn’t say so) who have opposed same-sex marriage in part because they say it would undercut the traditional institution of marriage.
Read more at The New York Times.
