Saradise Lost - Book 5 - Chapter 46: Palin No More Popular in Alaska Than in Madison

Dave Dittman's recent poll on the popularity, and inferring the relative popularity of Alaska's most notable politicians, suggests another sampling. I have a hunch that if Alaskans were polled on whether or not they would like Palin to leave Alaska for good, more than half would want her to go; and that if people in the lower 48 were polled on whether or not they would like Palin to leave there and return to the frozen North forever, they would wish her back upon us permanently.

In three years, Palin has inexorably slid from perhaps the most popular politician in Alaska history to one of the least. Gauging from the number of my friends who used to be ardent Palin supporters who now despise her, she has done much to earn her current position.

She had help: Eddie Burke, John Zeigler, Glenn Beck, her increasingly weird dad, and our favorite in the Alaska left blogosphere - the indefatigable Rebecca Mansour, or RAM, Palin's preeminent ghost voice.

Here's Amanda Coyne on the poll:

Some of the results on Palin:

• 61 percent of Alaskans had an "unfavorable" view
• 39 percent of those had a "very unfavorable" view
• 13 percent had a "very favorable" view

The former governor's numbers had fallen since an April 2010 Dittman poll, when 46 percent responded favorably and 52 percent of respondents viewed her unfavorably.

And that 2010 poll was down considerably from her post-2008 bribe (called the "energy rebate") numbers, which were somewhere around 110%.

RAM was pissed that not enough people paid attention to Palin's Saturday speech in Madison, Wisconsin. The way Mansour went about it pissed even more people off - she tweeted away at all sorts of media:

Of all the complaints Sarah Palin has made about the media, here's a new one: One of her advisers is apparently upset about a lack of press coverage.

As Slate's Dave Weigel noted this morning, Rebecca Mansour, a top Palin aide, posted several messages on Twitter Monday directed at news organizations including ABC News and CNN, implying the media had not adequately covered a speech Palin gave at a Wisconsin tea party rally on Saturday.

"Hi @CNN did you cover @SarahPalinUSA's Madison speech? Did it upset you that she made Obama look bad by saying the stuff you gloss over?" Mansour wrote.

She directed similar messages to the Huffington Post, MSNBC, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, the Washington Post and CBS.

What's odd is that Palin's speech actually did receive a lot of coverage--though perhaps not as much coverage as the former Alaska governor is used to. ABC ran a story on its website. The Huffington Post and Washington Post linked to the Associated Press's coverage of the event.

MSNBC played video excerpts of Palin's speech several times Monday, highlighting the former governor's call for the GOP to "fight like a girl" and questioning if it was her comeback. Meanwhile CNN covered the event on air and on its blog—which Mansour later acknowledged in a follow-up Tweet.

After Weigel noted the the Palin aide's messages in a blog post this morning, Mansour lambasted the item on, you guessed it, Twitter, insisting the Slate writer has a "zero sense of humor."

"Just to be clear: I wasn't demanding media attention," Mansour said in a message directed at Weigel. "I was mocking the media about which Palin stories they choose to cover."

Palin will do just about anything to stay in the news. She's perhaps the most cynical politician in American history in terms of exploiting any and all her kids. Any screw up in the way the media treats her brood and - WHAM!!! - her usually inept publicity machine turns into a well-oiled mechanism:

I'm certainly not defending Wonkette. The humor site lost much of its bite when its founder, Ana Marie Cox, left in early 2006. That's over five years ago, before Palin was even elected governor of Alaska.

I'd like to see a poll comparing Palin's favorables right now to such figures as Vic Kohring, Pete Kott, Bill Allen, Bill Weimar, Frank Murkowski or - Robert Hanson - just to make it interesting.

Paraphrasing Julia O'Malley from a week ago: Sarah - Make. It. Stop!