In 'Going Rogue,' the quoted set the tone

John Timpane is an Inquirer staff writer

You are what you quote.

That might be the moral of Sarah Palin's new book, Going Rogue: An American Life. It brims past the scuppers with quotations from the living and the dead, from Aristotle ("Criticism is something we can avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing") to former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz ("I don't believe that God put us on earth to be ordinary").

If we are what we quote, what is Sarah Palin? She is a woman who wants you to like her, to find her smart, in touch, competent. She's a woman fighting back. A woman running for president.

Her quotations have, like almost everything Palin, become a big issue. Some are surprised at all the authors she quotes or mentions: Plato, Aristotle, Blaise Pascal, Thomas Paine, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pearl S. Buck. Some call it star-plugging, invoking prestigious names to look impressive. New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, among others, complains about Palin's "annoying tendency to drop the names of lots of writers and philosophers gratuitously." But Palin is only using quotations for the same reasons all writers use them.

Setting the tone. One reason we quote is to establish the tone of our book. Add up all the epigraphs, allusions, and quotations, and it's clear Going Rogue is meant to be optimistic, pumped, stoked. After all, the subtitle is An American Life. To be American is to be an optimist, a self-starter never shrinking, knowing the future is one's own to command.

Palin fans say they like that native energy of hers, the stick-to-it-ive, forward smile that slices through the as-usual like a glass cutter. Married to her stress on self-reliance, small government, and "commonsense conservatism," this attractive, almost reckless hopefulness is what's on sale in Going Rogue.

So this random bunch of quoted authorities, deep thinkers and motivational speakers - Karl Marx and basketball god John Wooden alike - are pretty much cheerleaders at a pep rally. Minister, radio host, and Insight for Living founder Charles Swindoll tells us that "I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it . . . and so it is with you. . . . we are in charge of our attitudes." Twain's stirring "Explore. Dream. Discover." quotation, taped to refrigerators and computers across the land, is here, too.

Most telling, almost a direct declaration of a 2012 run, is Palin's father, Chuck Heath Sr., who exclaims, all pumped up, that "Sarah's not retreating; she's reloading!"

Dressing to impress. All writers are anxious, but some are more anxious than others. Writers want readers to like them, welcome their ideas. Writers want to be taken seriously, to be thought intelligent, august, authoritative.

Sarah Palin might be more anxious than most writers, since, fairly or unfairly, questions of intelligence and competence have dogged her ever since she rose to national notice in August 2008. Some of that dogging is surely misogynist, condescending, but you have to say: It's still around. In a Nov. 16 CNN poll, seven in 10 respondents said she was unqualified to be president.

Understandable, then, if Palin and Lynn Vincent (thanked on page 410 for her "indispensable help in getting the words on paper") strive to show her as brainy, as connected with well-thought-of writers and cultural figures (her dad loved Jack London; her mother read to her from Ogden Nash and Robert Service, and treated her "like the new Emily Dickinson" when she won a poetry prize).

Know this, world: Sarah Palin is a smart person. She is canny, perceptive, shrewd, analytical, simpatica, original, and versatile - and she knows she must overcome her not-wholly-deserved reputation for being the opposite. So she is unusually anxious to ally herself with the great and wise. Not that she uses quotations poorly. No: They do what she hopes they will. Only that they misfire out of anxiety.

Palin writes that her mother sought an expanded faith to fill "what the French writer Blaise Pascal called 'the God-shaped vacuum' in every human heart." Beautiful phrase - but "French writer" clunks, like calling William Shakespeare "English writer." Did Pascal ever really occur spontaneously to Palin in connection with her mother, or was this phrase hunted down and stuck in? It's not a bad thing if it was. Many writers do it. But similar wrong notes run throughout Going Rogue.

When young Palin learns the lesson "that you help other people," Plato agrees with her: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." He is quoted, but she never says she ever thought of him. He's there to make her epiphany - the moment, really, she became a good person - seem elevated and serious. Which it was.

When her parents restrict TV, Palin turns to reading Steinbeck, Orwell, and C.S. Lewis. When she runs a lackluster campaign, she tells us she "didn't take to heart" the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to "set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do, and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it." But then, no one, or very few of us, think of this excellent saying when things are going badly. No, she did not take it to heart; in fact, it never occurred to her. Neither did Plato or Pascal.

The big fail comes with Abraham Lincoln, one of the most quotable in all quoting. When you use Abe, you're wheeling out the big guns. Attacked for saying that our soldiers were being sent "out on a task that is from God," Palin writes, "In reality I was invoking Abraham Lincoln's admonition that we should pray that we are on God's side - not that He is on ours."

Lincoln did indeed say that "my greatest concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right." Palin was speaking on her feet, extemporaneously, and it is unfair to treat on-the-fly words as if they were set-in-stone policy. But (a) how could anyone tell she was invoking Lincoln? Her remarks don't sound remotely like his. And (b) . . . I need to be gentle here . . . Palin gets Lincoln's meaning backward. He was warning us never to assume God is on our side; her remark makes that very assumption.

That, however, is the key to Palin and to Going Rogue. She does assume the United States is gloriously right, godly, destined for beautiful, better things. Thus the "up" tone and tempo of her book, and, indeed, of its author. She wants the world to believe she is astute, indomitable, and handy - a woman who sails the troubled waters of politics with a smile on her face. Thus she has her "friend John," her running mate Sen. John McCain, give the simple, hearty quote that dispels all the trouble: "Just have fun!"