Palin Inc.

Though Palin may not like it, she makes money for Democrats and Republicans alike. Across the political spectrum, Palin is a ratings magnet. Whenever she appears on Fox News, ratings tick up by 10 to 15 percent. At MSNBC, she’s also a ratings phenomenon, albeit with opposite adjectives. Tina Fey’s reprisal of her Palin character in early April juiced Saturday Night Live’s ratings, beating prime-time programming, a rare feat. Online, right-wing sites like the Drudge Report frequently plug Palin headlines, while Palin’s presence at liberal outlets like the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo routinely sparks hundreds of reader comments. During the campaign, people said she could be another Oprah, but now, in many ways, she’s bigger than Oprah, an empath for people who feel, rightly or wrongly, that America has forgotten them. “People are drawn to her,” says Fox News programming chief Bill Shine. “People look at her and say, ‘She has a bunch of the same troubles I do, there’s a mom who’s there changing diapers.’ ”

And she’s a canny—and completely modern—promoter of her product. Last year, Bristol introduced her mom to Facebook, and Palin began speaking to her audience of 1.5 million fans directly with frequent status updates and tweets, which consist of conservative boilerplate (“Man-Made Global Warming=Snow Job”) interspersed with chirpy reports about goings-on in Wasilla (“Family is getting ready for Todd’s IronDog race tomorrow; I’m watching @GlennBeck on TV now giving #CPAC speech, while racers are in garage)…

But it’s not yet been shown that Palin needs any specifically political organization, or that she has to kowtow to any gatekeeper to get where she wants to go. In fact, she and her new network have themselves become the gatekeepers. It’s very hard to get anywhere in Republican politics without going past them. And the gate also happens to be a tollbooth.