The meanness and shallowness of Sarah Palin, detailed

Anybody in the center or farther left of American voters who honestly listens to Sarah Palin, aka The Quitter with a Twitter™, knows she's not that smart. But, not all of said people may yet realize how pretentious she is. How emotionally and psychologically, as well as intellectually, shallow she is. How "entitled" she can be, including in how she treats the "ordinarly people" she claims to represent.

Well now, thanks to Vanity Fair, you need be ignorant no longer.

Pettiness:

A onetime gubernatorial aide to Palin says, "The people who have worked for her--they're broken, used, stepped on, down in the dust."

Cheapness and meanness toward the ordinary people:

Palin does not always treat those ordinary people well, however—it depends on who is watching. Of the many famous people who have stayed at the Hyatt in Wichita (Cher, Reba McEntire, Neil Young), Sarah Palin ranks as the all-time worst tipper: $5 for seven bags. But the bellhops had it good in Kansas, compared with the bellman at another midwestern hotel who waited up until past midnight for Palin and her entourage to check in—and then got no tip at all for 10 bags. He was stiffed again at checkout time. The same went for the maids who cleaned Palin’s rooms in both places—no tip whatsoever. The only time I heard of Palin giving a generous tip was in St. Joseph, Michigan, after the owner of Kilwin’s chocolate shop, on State Street, sent a CARE package to Palin’s suite, and Palin walked to the store to say thank you. She also wanted to buy more boxes of candy to take home. When the owner would not accept her money, Palin, encircled by the crowd that had jammed the store to get a glimpse of her, pressed a hundred-dollar bill into the woman’s hand, saying, “This is for the staff.” That Ben Franklin was the talk of State Street the whole rest of the day.

Facebook, ghostwriting, etc.:

Palin’s most unconventional hire is a novice media consultant, Rebecca Mansour, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident who has been identified in news stories as a screenwriter. Mansour has said that she volunteered for Obama early in the 2008 campaign and then became disillusioned. Not long after the election, with Joseph Russo, a then 23-year-old college student from New Jersey, who would also go to work for Palin, she co-founded the most popular pro-Palin blog, Conservatives4Palin, known informally as C4P (and not to be confused with the “adult swingers” Web site of that name). C4P functions as a hybrid news service, discussion board, and field headquarters for a virtual army of Palin supporters, who pride themselves on brute devotion. ...

As late as April 2009, Palin’s press spokesperson contended that C4P was “not affiliated in any way with the governor.” Mansour’s reaction to that statement suggested otherwise. The next day on C4P, she wrote, “Some readers have wondered if I felt tire tracks on my back this morning,” and went on to say, “I understand” why Palin’s spokesperson denied any connection, adding, “I’m not hurt … much.” Twelve days later she told a reporter for a McClatchy newspaper a different story: Sarah Palin, Mansour said, “has nothing at all, whatsoever, to do with any of what we’re doing here.” In early July, Mansour made a trip to Alaska to meet with Palin, according to a source in Anchorage. By mid-August, her byline, long the most prominent one on C4P, had vanished from the site.

But her voice, or at least a voice that sounds much like hers, was about to turn up in another venue.

When it was first set up, in January 2009, Palin’s Facebook page might as well have been a file cabinet for official press releases written mostly in a stiff, third-person form. The same was true of her Twitter feed, which went live in April.

After Mansour’s voice disappeared on C4P, however, Palin’s voice on Facebook and Twitter started sounding increasingly provocative and irascible.