Sarah Palin Jokes With the Media at the Gridiron Club

By John A. Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

The nation's No. 1 best-selling nonfiction author spent Saturday night in Washington, D.C., at the Gridiron Club's winter dinner. Sarah Palin thanked the assembled journalists for the invitation.

"Who would have guessed I'd be palling around with this group?" she asked, and surely there are Sarah fans wondering why she was there going vogue, instead of rogue. Well, a gal's gotta make her millions, and the media helps sell books. Besides, being anti-everything can wear a person down. "The view is so much better from inside the bus than under it," she noted.

The only mousse was for dessert (rim shot, maestro please), but Palin did some field-dressing of her egotistical audience. It was fun to be among the capital's "leading journalists and intellectuals," she said. "Or as I like to call it, a death panel."

She noted that the journalists may have missed out on the policy prescriptions in her memoir, Going Rogue, when focusing instead, as they are apt to do, on how many times she mentioned their names. What a group of heavy thinkers, Palin said: "You read a book in its entirety—from the first page of the index to the last."

The former governor was graceful, lovely, and surprisingly petite; the ol' high school point guard is shorter than expected—even with a boost from her five-inch heels. Representing the Democrats was Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who thought Palin's best line was this one: "If the election turned out differently, I could be the one overseeing the signing of bailout checks and Vice President Biden could be on the road selling his book, Going Rogaine."

Frank noted that the Democrats face a difficult challenge in the 2010 campaign. It is hard to get re-elected, he said, with the campaign slogan: "Things would have sucked worse without me."

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