How Sarah Palin became a brand

Other people have crossed the border from politics to media to very good effect — George Stephanopoulos, Patrick Buchanan and Chris Matthews, to name a few — but the transition was far more gradual. Ms. Palin turned on a dime and was a ratings sensation from the word go: her first paid appearance, as a commentator on “The O’Reilly Factor” on Jan. 12, was good for an extra million viewers…

Back in September 2008, when she was unveiled in St. Paul during the Republican convention, a longtime political reporter told me that her appeal would burn off over time. I wondered about that. I’m from Minnesota, which is sometimes considered the southernmost tip of Alaska, and her way of speaking in credulous golly-gee may have been off-putting to some, but there is a kind of authenticity there that no image handler could conjure.

In Ms. Palin’s America, everyone’s got bootstraps; they just need to have the gumption to find them. And her version is full of plain old folks spending a lot of time overcoming a great deal, including a government that she posits usually intends to do them harm. “America is exceptional! It’s not her politicians that make her so; it’s her everyday people and the values Americans hold so dear,” she said on her Facebook page, which, by the way, has 1.5 million fans.