State Paid For Palin's PR Consultant

National Media Blitz Powered By Gas

Did you wonder why Sarah Palin was suddenly in the national spotlight just before John McCain started casting around for a VP?

Give the credit to Marcia Brier, a Massachusetts based public relations expert hired by the state of Alaska to promote the Governor. The state paid $31,000 to Brier, who pushed Palin in prepackaged stories like "Big Oil Under Siege", which painted Palin as a firebrand maverick who singlehandedly defeated the oil companies and drove through the gas pipeline package.

In a story linked below, Washington Post reporter Kimberly Kindy reveals the Alaska Department of Natural Resources hired Brier to sell Palin so she could in turn sell the gas pipeline. Brier hammered the media with prewritten stories, or "pitches" that characterized Palin as the single driving force who backed down the oil companies, tamed the Alaska Legislature and gave birth to the gasline all alone in the Wasilla wilderness.

This would no doubt come as a surprise to the many Alaska statesmen who drew a line in the tundra and refused to buckle down to the old guard and their oily masters--Berkowitz, LeDoux, Ramras, French...it is Alaska's Legislature who has the dirt of the pipeline under its fingernails, and deserves most of the credit. Meanwhile "Where's Sarah?" buttons became common in Juneau as the Guv became increasingly obsessed with courting the media. She had already shown a distinct distaste for the capitol, preferring to rule from Wasilla and collect a per diem for working away from J-town. And for the time she spent meeting privately with executives of ExxonMobil and Marathon Oil in early 2007.

After the Legislature passed the gas pipeline incentive plan the media campaign really took off. Suddenly Brier had takers for her Palin stories. But the media pieces had much less to do with gas than with the selling of Sarah. Stories in People and Fortune magazines, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News, 60 Minutes and the Wall Street Journal all focused on Palin's person, not the pipeline.

And the minute she was picked as VP candidate the contract with Brier was terminated.
"We'd achieved our objective with getting the national attention," said Palin staffer Kurt Gibson said. "There was no need anymore to use state money to achieve that."

Uh-Huh. What was that objective again?






http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/09/AR2008100903429_3.html?sid=ST2008100903556&s_pos=

http://news.spreadit.org/sarah-palin-vogue-magazinesarah-palin-vogue-picture-interview/


http://voices.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/09/palin_per_diem_travel_expenses.html