Republicans get scribbling

Sarah Palin’s book tour got her a lot of publicity, but other Republican hopefuls for the 2012 presidential nomination have been bashing away on their laptops too.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is about to publish No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. He plans to use the book tour to reinvent himself as the Republican centrist—which is odd, considering his 2008 campaign was based on him being a conservative. But the new Romney has shunned the populists of the tea party movement and appears to see same-sex marriage and gays in the military as a done deal, with social mores changing too fast for Republicans to reverse the tide.

The Christian evangelical candidate and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee published his book, A Simple Christmas: Twelve Stories That Celebrate the True Holiday Spirit, last year. The soggily sentimental tome reached number three in the New York Times bestseller list. And like Sarah Palin, Huckabee appears on television for the Fox network. His radio show, The Huckabee Report, is the fastest growing radio programme of the past decade.

But all their hopes of winning the New Hampshire primary have just been dented by the emergence of an unexpected New England rival. Scott Brown, the new Republican senator from Massachusetts (and former Cosmopolitan nude model) is writing “an inspirational book” and has hired super-lawyer Robert Barnett as his agent.

The pre-campaign will soon start to get dirty. Expect to hear a lot about the 3,000 emails of Palin’s husband Todd, known as “first dude,” recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act inquiry. Particularly the one about how the Palins coached her staff to disguise the amount of electrical work needed at the Alaska governor’s mansion to hook up her tanning bed.

This article originally appeared in the March 2010 issue of Prospect