Visible & vocal,Palin positioned for variety of roles

Without leaving home,Sarah Palin will be able to reach much of her political base,courtesy of a soon-to-be be built television...

Without leaving home,Sarah Palin will be able to reach much of her political base,courtesy of a soon-to-be be built television studio in her living room paid for by her newest media patron,Fox News. From her house in Wasilla,Alaska,Palin also sends missives to 1.3 million Facebook fans,writes newspaper columns,tweets and signs copies of her book for donors.

She reads daily e-mail briefings on domestic and foreign policy from a small group of advisors who remained loyal after her tumultuous vice-presidential campaign in 2008. And though she has fashioned an image as an anti-establishment conservative,Palin also speaks regularly to a bipartisan nobility of Washington insiders who have helped enrich her financially and position her on the national political stage.

Palin is becoming increasingly vocal and visible,with a series of events scheduled this weekend delivering a paid speech to the Salina,Kansas,Chamber of Commerce on Friday night,headlining a national Tea Party convention in Nashville on Saturday and appearing on behalf of the re-election campaign of Governor Rick Perry of Texas in Houston on Sunday.

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This latest foray Outside (Alaskan slang for the Lower 48) culminates a week in which she achieved a typical run of multimedia ubiquity: She e-mailed a high-profile endorsement of Dr Rand Paul in a Republican Senate primary in Kentucky. She called via Facebook for the resignation of the White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for using the term retarded and announced via a column in USA Today that she would attend a Tea Party gathering next month in Searchlight,Nevada,the hometown of the Senate Democratic leader,Harry Reid.

Palin represents a new breed of unelected public official operating in an environment in which politics,news media and celebrity sometimes seem to fuse. Whether she ever runs for anything else,Palin has already achieved the status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit,a staff to guide her,an enormous income and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office.

Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has, said one of her Washington-based advisors,the lawyer Robert Barnett (who negotiated Palins lucrative deal with Fox News,an arrangement with the Washington Speakers Bureau that pays her a reported $100,000 a pop,and a deal with Harper Collins to write her memoir,Going Rogue,which has already earned her upwards of eight figures).

Beyond what her Fox-watchers and Facebookers can see,Palin is quietly assembling the infrastructure of an expanding political operation. Her current operations chief,Jason Recher,was a loyal lieutenant on Palins campaign plane loyal to a point where McCain aides believed he was encouraging Palins rogue behaviour.