Todd S. Purdum is an accomplished reporter with a long string of successes, and his feature on Sarah Palin in the August issue of Vanity Fair, “It Came From Wasilla,” certainly constitutes a bright new pelt on his pony. But deep in the article, well past the jump, there is a swampy passage that I’m afraid does not pass the smell test. “More than once in my travels in Alaska,” he writes, “people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy–and thought it fit her perfectly.”

Sorry, Todd–I’m just not buying it. The first sentence seems okay; even if it is highly doubtful that anyone actually used the words “extravagant self-regard,” people might well have said that Palin was conceited or full of herself or stuck-up, thus employing any of the useful colloquialisms that leap so readily to our lips. But the second sentence is unbelievable. Several people told him that they had so suspected Palin of a mental illness that they were driven to look up its technical definition, and look it up not on Wikipedia or Google or something by Doctor Phil, but in the standard professional reference book?

Ask yourself how often you’ve been motivated to take such a step. In my case, the answer is never.

The real clincher is the use of the flabby word “several.” Had this happened, Purdum would have been able to write a far weightier and more dramatic sentence by using the actual number. Consider: “Three separate people actually told me. . . ” The precision of the number packs a punch. Instead, he cloaks his amazing finding in the waffley “several.”

You know, there’s a fine old tradition of journalists sneaking some of their finer insights into the mouths of observers, and there’s not an editor who won’t nod and wink at that. And there’s another fine tradition of ascribing a common thought to an anonymous and convenient “several”–I feel confident, for example, that “several” people at the Staples Center yesterday wondered how long the Michael Jackson memorial service was going to go on, and I’m basing that strictly on logic and probability and my own assessment of the human attention span. But the key to making such a projection is plausibility. I’m sure a conscientious, thorough reporter would consult The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders before labeling a public figure a pathological narcissist, but unless Purdum was conducting his interviews in a psych ward, I’m just not buying that he tripped over three people in Alaska who did the same.

I’d never read the memoir of anyone I actually know until I read Closing Time, the account of my friend Joe Queenan of his upbringing in Philadelphia. Joe, for those of you who don’t know, is a very funny writer who contributed many wonderful articles to Spy and other magazines (including a hilarious piece for me at Playboy about driving across America eating only at Hooters) and who has also written many funny books (his book about Dan Quayle, Imperial Caddy, came out the same time as Mr. Stupid Goes to Washington) and a lot of smart book reviews. It’s not exactly a miracle that Joe ended up in this field, but it’s an unusual achievement in this era. Most writers I have met during my career have come from middle class backgrounds (or better), and have had, at least to the degree that I am aware, a solid upbringing by parents who cared about their development. But as I read in the often harrowing Closing Time, Joe grew up in poverty with an alcoholic father. His family lived in a housing project in Philadelphia and throughout his whole youth suffered real hardship, including a lack of food, when his father was out of work, which was common, or drank up what money was available, which happened frequently. Joe writes eloquently about his experiences:

“Poverty goes far beyond not having money for food. Poverty means that when you do have money and food, the money gets spent unwisely and the food is not nutritious. Poverty is not simply a matter of not being able to buy certain things; it’s about buying the wrong things, or the things nobody else wants. It’s about off-brand shoes, off-brand underwear, off-brand socks, off-brand ice cream, off-brand appliances, off-brand roach killer. It’s about sneakers that fall apart the third time you drive to the basket, shoes held together with adhesive tape, shirts that start off as XLs but that end up as Mediums the first time they’re laundered. . . .It’s about bad diets, bad teeth, bad feet, bad playgrounds, bad parents, bad housing, bad attitudes.’’

Joe’s father was mean drunk who frequently beat his kids, and it’s sobering (to say the least) to read Joe’s memories of these moments. But the book is not altogether grim. Joe’s memories of people who helped him over the years are rich and warm and gracious, and as you would hope and expect from a Joe Queenan book, often very funny. Joe, like me, and my wife, is a graduate of the Summer Program of the Fleer Bubble Gum Factory (that is to say, we all had summer jobs there), and I especially enjoyed reading about his experience at our shared alma mater. (Joe also almost went to La Salle College, which Ginny and I attended, but the school was in his neighborhood, and he preferred to go across town to the more exotic Jesuit college on the Main Line, St. Joseph’s.) The book’s great strength is that Joe manages to walk a very tricky line; he stares down his harsh, difficult past with an unsparing, unflinching eye, but he refuses to pity himself or act the victim. He manages to remember the boy who possessed enough spirit to overcome the obstacles in front of him, and to acknowledge those who helped him. Well done, Joe!

Writing in The New York Times today, Ross Douthat looks at Sarah Palin‘s weird resignation, mounts the germ of an idea, and rides like the wind:

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. . . .Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. . . .All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

Nonsense. What Douthat is ignoring is that Palin was demonstrably unfit for the job she was seeking. Voters have lots of experience in sorting through presidential candidates. The long electoral cycle is often painful, often trivial, and ridiculously expensive. But it exposes the candidates to the public, and the ones who survive earn a legitimacy just by enduring the process.

But vice presidential candidates are not democratically chosen. They are anointed, and when the candidate picks one who turns out to be unqualified, the public and the commentariate are merciless. Ask Dan Quayle. Had Quayle remained in the Senate, he would be like Orrin Hatch and John Warner and a bunch of other long-serving senators–a beloved elder statesman, a bastion of conservative midwestern values much admired for his amiability and his scratch golf game. But George H.W. Bush sold him as a brand new star. And the American people saw that Quayle wasn’t, and jealous of its prerogative to pick its president, responded viciously and with contempt. Do you think anybody would have written a book called Mr. Stupid Goes to Washington about a midwestern senator? Never!

The same is true of Palin. Not quite a year ago, the public responded open-mindedly to the attractive but untested governor, but quickly turned on her when she stumbled. When you’re an unknown quantity being pulled out of the atmosphere and being pushed to occupy the second highest office in the land, you better play the game all-but-flawlessly. Palin showed herself to be a promising but very flawed and unready candidate, and the public, resentful at political insiders who had so little respect for their intelligence, have made her pay the price.

It isn’t pretty, but if we were nice about rejecting this nincompoops, they’d keep coming around.