Palin's Potemkin book tour

I'm a book-tour veteran. Let me tell you, those things were grueling. Today Minneapolis, tomorrow Corte Madera, the next day San Diego. Even when I was traveling by train -- my preference over airlines -- the going was tough, full of wrinkles and weariness and road-food gas.

But when the going gets tough, Sarah Palin gets jetting.

She's on a big bus tour, her book publicists claim, to get closer to the small-town voters who are her base. She travels the way they do, says the meme; she knows how Joe and Julie Six-pack feel, because she's one of them.

Yeah? The veteran investigative journalist and author Joe McGinniss (The Selling of the President, 1969) now gives us The Selling of Sarah Palin 2009 in an article revealing that far from traveling by bus, she flies in a $4,000 an hour private Gulfstream from place to place.

Palin then boards her bus at the airport for the short trip to a triumphant arrival at the target bookstore or lecture venue -- completely pressed and fresh, unlike her weary publisher's publicist, who looks as if she'd been dragged coast-to-coast on Greyhound. Because she was.

Palin's fans are completely in the dark.

Ah, dear Sarah, you paragon of grassroots authenticity.