Palin's Noxious Ghostwriter

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images How the failed GOP veep nominee turned to a gay-bashing ghostwriter and a blogger tied to white supremacist groups to craft her image and autobiography.

When rumors reverberated through the media about Sarah Palin’s supposed impending divorce from her husband Todd, she called one of her favored conservative bloggers, Robert Stacy McCain, to spike the story. McCain eagerly recorded Palin’s response and reported it on his blog almost as soon as he hung up. “Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd?” Palin confided to McCain. “I may be a renegade hockey mom, but I’m not blind!” This is the one McCain she’s happy to collaborate with.

In January, a writer for the American Conservative magazine named Clark Stooksbury joked that because of his unrelenting enthusiasm, Robert Stacy McCain would be the perfect ghostwriter for Palin’s forthcoming memoir, Going Rogue. McCain responded by recommending an old pal for the job. “Actually, I’d think my Donkey Cons co-author Lynn Vincent might be ideal for the job,” he wrote, “since she’s already co-authored the bestseller Same Kind of Different As Me.”

“The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM [caps in original], no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us," Robert Stacy McCain wrote.

Perhaps McCain was joking as well. Or perhaps he knew something no one else did. In May, just four months after McCain mentioned her name, Vincent was selected to be the official ghostwriter of Palin’s memoir. A staff writer for the conservative evangelical magazine, World, Vincent first encountered Palin at a speech the former Republican vice presidential nominee gave before an Indiana anti-abortion group in April. Describing herself as “an abortion survivor,” Vincent remarked in a blog post that Palin’s revelation that she considered aborting her son, Trig, who has Downs Syndrome, made her seem “very real, very human.”

Palin was consulting at the time with Washington superlawyer Robert Barnett on the publication of her memoirs. Palin and Barnett spent days sorting through the credentials of each of the thirty writers who had beseeched them for the privilege of ghost-authoring the autobiography. In the end, Palin settled on Vincent, who boasts a long resume of successful ghostwritten memoirs and shares Palin’s views on social issues. Thanks to Vincent’s diligence, Harper Collins was able to crash the 413-page Palin autobiography, Going Rogue, in near-record time and ship it to bookstores to meet its scheduled November 16 release date.

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• More Daily Beast contributors on Palin’s book tour. Vincent may have been an effective literary collaborator, but like Palin herself, she entered the project with considerable political baggage. Vincent’s commentaries for World are punctuated by inflammatory characterizations of gays, minorities and liberals that have already provided fodder for Palin’s critics. Among Vincent’s most strident statements were her description of homosexuality as a “deviant” mental disorder and labeling of President Barack Obama as the “face of the minority survivor” of abortion, which she dubbed the “Black Genocide.”

But it is Vincent’s association with Robert Stacy McCain that offers the clearest window into her far-right politics. Indeed, the only political book that Vincent has written in the first-person was done in collaboration with McCain. Published in 2005, Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime and Corruption in the Democratic Party was a compendium of misdeeds of and accusations against Democratic Party activists and leaders whipped up into an indictment of the party as irredeemably corrupt. Yet many of the authors’ charges proved false.