What Bill Clinton and Sarah Palin Have in Common

Do you really see Todd Purdum's work as caricature, Bonnie? I'm a fan of the TP oeuvre myself, and was particularly eager to see what he'd come up re: Sarah P. because I'd also watched her work her magic at that pro-life dinner in Evansville, Indiana, from the little press pen described in his piece on Gov. Palin in the new Vanity Fair. (Truly Guilty Disclosure: My mom was attending the dinner, too, however, as she does every year, so only I got slipped a yummy piece of velvet cake; sorry, boys!)

To me, Jill, the most provocative thing in the piece wasn't the iffy reference to the supposed double-edged bind of the governor's hothot looks. (Of course he succumbed to the lure of working in a mention of the "red Naughty Monkey Double Dare pumps'' Palin wasn't wearing that night; the whole peep-toe persona is undeniably part of the package. Though yes, Ria, I'll grant you that calling her "the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs'' was different in the Evansville sense of that word. "Well, that's different,'' you might say, for example, in response to the news that your husband had taken up with a stripper, or that convicted felons had moved in next door.)

Anyway, what grabbed me in the piece was Purdum's reporting that the feeling back in Alaska is that Palin has some of the symptoms associated with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, like grandiosity, erratic behavior, and off-and-on relationships with friends and facts. "More than once in my travels in Alaska,'' he wrote, "people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin's extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of "narcissistic personality disorder" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy" and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig's condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God's, and signed it "Trig's Creator, Your Heavenly Father." Oh.

People with NPD must, alas, suffer the gross incompetence of virtually all of those around them, but are never even tangentially responsible for anything that has gone wrong for them ever; it's all about the umbrage. In fact, if you've ever heard the suspected narcissist in your life convincingly utter the words, "Gosh, I'm sorry,'' chances are good that he or she does not have NPD. Bonnie wrote that this piece was no softer or better sourced than Purdum's earlier takedown of Bill Clinton, but that's not the commonality I see; after covering and writing about Clinton for so long, maybe he just knows from narcissists, in or out of peep-toe pumps.