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.