Archive for January 23rd, 2009

I was linked to a bit around the conservative blogosphere back in November when I gave my advice to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin about what to include in her memoirs (and, I must say, my interest — as a veteran ghost — in writing the book). Apparently, she has now enlisted an agent, Robert Barnett, and is shopping her book concept around.

I hope she will resist the temptation to pen a short term payback book about the campaign and its iniquities. They are many. But a leader doesn’t dwell on these things, and I believe that Palin wants to be a leader for many years to come. Such my-side-of-the-story style narratives also give books a shorter shelf life than a carton of milk. Palin should write a book that still reads fresh in 2012 or even 2016, because that’s when people will be turning to it as they make up their minds about which candidate to support in the next presidential election.

So what should such a memoir include — beyond her own colorful Alaskan story of fishing, beauty pagents, and the joys and rough patches of authentic family life? I, of course, would love to see a little bit on how this ultimate Core Competency Mom does it (Alaska gov is not a part-time job!). But beyond that, she needs to spell out her conservative philosophy: that society should enable and reward hard work, entrepreneurship and strong families. That there is an intellectual case to be made for deferring to traditions of faith and self-reliance. And that the Republican party has often neither made this case nor, it seems, believed it.

I think Palin does believe it. And I think she’s a lot smarter than her many critics will allow themselves to see. Hopefully this book will help establish that truth.

My review of Barbara Flanagan’s Smart Home ran the other day at Culture11.com as “Home, Sweet Minimalist Home.” Flanagan insists that you only need 98 household objects to live well. I disagree with her on a few of them, but it is a fascinating thesis, and my favorite part is that she stubbornly insists on only naming 98. No adding two more objects to get a round 100!

My review of Megan Basham’s Beside Every Successful Man ran at the American’s website the other day under the title “What Women Want.”

An excerpt: “Basham’s advice to women reveals a blind spot. She praises women who bake cookies for their husbands’ clients, women who do their husbands’ accounting or write their reports, and women who take everything off their husbands’ plates at home so these men can devote themselves fully to achieving professional success. Yet she also devotes a full chapter to lamenting the “work-worship in America these days,” including the rise of the extreme worker, “people characterized by seventy-hour-or-more workweeks, constant availability to address work issues, and little downtime.”

“It never seems to occur to her that one of the reasons corporations demand so much of their workers is that the men who run their offices often have stay-at-home wives clearing their schedules to maximize productivity, in Basham’s words. Because these executives are available 24/7 for work, they expect their people to be available, too. Studies have found that a big reason professional women drop out of the workforce is not that they don’t want to work, but rather that there is insufficient flexibility in their jobs—partly because their male colleagues and bosses have such “supportive” wives that they don’t need flexibility. In other words, the two-people-one-paycheck model Basham extols makes life harder, not only on working moms, but also on men who want to have a balanced life and spend more time with their children.”