Sarah Palin’s Shamelessness Earned her 12 Million Dollars Last Year

Original Link: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/04/26/sarah-palins-shamelessness-earned-her-12-millions-dollars-last-year/

By Tana Ganeva

Here’s an inspiring success story: post election, Sarah Palin barely survived on her $125,000 Governor’s salary. On top of that, other people refused to pay the bills she racked up fighting the ethics complaints brought against her!

Palin escaped her tragic circumstances by quitting her job so she could spend more time propagating crazy right-wing lies and playing the media. Now she has what’s rightfully hers — Lear Jets, a $100,000 speaking fee, reality shows, book deals, and 12 million bucks last year, according to this New York Magazine feature:

Before:

“Her life was terrible,” one adviser says. “She was never home, her [Juneau] office was four hours from her house. You gotta drive an hour from Wasilla to Anchorage. And she was going broke.”

Her sky-high approval ratings in Alaska—which had topped 80 percent before John McCain picked her—had withered to the low fifties. She faced a hostile legislature, a barrage of ethics complaints, and frothing local bloggers who reveled in her misfortune. All this for a salary of only $125,000? The worst was that she had racked up $500,000 in legal bills to fend off the trooper scandal and other investigations. She needed money and worried about it constantly. “You have to keep in mind,” Bill McAllister, her then–press secretary, told me, “she and Todd were middle class. They’re rich now, but not then.”

After:

Less than a year later, Sarah Palin is a singular national industry.

[...]

The numbers are staggering. Over the past year, Palin has amassed a $12 million fortune and shows no sign of slowing down. Her memoir has so far sold more than 2.2 million copies, and Palin is planning a second book with HarperCollins. This January, she signed a three-year contributor deal with Fox News worth $1 million a year, according to people familiar with the deal. In March, Palin and Burnett sold her cable show to TLC for a reported $1 million per episode, of which Palin is said to take in about $250,000 for each of the eight installments.

The best part is, most polls show that no one even really likes her very much.