Q&A: Sarah Palin on Hillary and Bucking the GOP | Newsweek Politics: Conventions

CHAPTER 7
The Final Days
11/7/2008 12:00:00 AM
VII.The Obama campaign ran the biggest, best-financed get-out-the-vote campaign in the history of American politics. It wanted to turn out minorities and the young, groups that traditionally stay away from the polls. For the cautious, self-consciously virtuous Obamaites, this worthy goal posed some special challenges.
POLITICS
McCain’s Mrs. Right
Evan Thomas 8/30/2008 12:00:00 AM
Sarah Palin posed for a photo spread in Vogue, but that's about as far as the glamour goes. She piles her hair up in a librarian's bun and wears what she calls "schoolmarm" glasses (one blogger compared her to "Tina Fey's sexier sister"). She was at one time a beauty queen, Miss Wasilla 1984, in her hometown, population: 7,000 or so. "We were really surprised when she wanted to do it," her father, Chuck, told the Vogue reporter. "That wasn't her thing." Basketball and hunting were more like it. Palin regretted the whole beauty pageant experience. "They made us line up in bathing suits and turn our backs so the male judges could look at our butts. I couldn't believe it!" she told Vogue.
POLITICS
Pageants and Politics
Samantha Henig 8/29/2008 12:00:00 AM
In the months leading up to November's election, John McCain will be campaigning with two former beauty queens at his side: his wife, Cindy, who was the Junior Rodeo Queen of Arizona in 1968, and his newly tapped vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who won her local pageant and was the runner-up for Miss Alaska in 1984. So what do pageants and politics have in common? Bonnie Faulk, the executive director of the Miss Alaska Scholarship Pageant, spoke with NEWSWEEK's Samantha Henig about how the pageant world prepares young women for politics; which politicians could stand for some pageantry coaching; and why looking at fit bodies needn't be about pleasure.
Reality Show
Richard Wolffe 4/26/2007 12:00:00 AM
There She Was. There She Goes.
Anna Quindlen
Strange Bedfellows

But in the spring of 1995, Bill Clinton and his aides were busy turning the White House into the biggest fund-raising attraction this side of the Jerry Lewis telethon. There had already been six "coffees" on the premises (one was scheduled for the day after the memo was distributed). There would be 92 more by Election Day. Plans were also underway to turn the Lincoln Bedroom, where the gregarious Clintons were already housing celebrities and old friends, into a door prize for big donors (chart).