The Palin Effect : Money, Sex and Class in the New American Politics

The US presidential election is, quite simply, the greatest show on Earth. With a cast of seeming grotesques on either side, apparently motivated by a mixture of anxiety, intimidation, greed, class warfare, sex and most of all, money, it sometimes seems more like a soap opera than a competition to occupy the most important executive position in the world's most powerful country. The Palin Effect is an extraordinary expose of the political depravities and media-proliferated inequalities of the entire electoral process. Former Fox and BBC journalist Shana Pearlman looks at what motivates the protagonists in the 2012 election - the media, the people, the candidates themselves - and reveals what we can expect from the race to the White House. She begins by looking at the treatment meted out to one of the most vilified characters in recent American politics and discovers that truth is the first casualty in the struggle to the summit. Beneath the extraordinary media and public reaction to Sarah Palin, Pearlman detects an iniquity that penetrates deep into the modern American psyche, and comes to the dramatic conclusion that the "land of the free" is nowhere near as free as it thinks itself. The Palin Effect demonstrates how the declining fortunes of the middle-class in America have coincided with the rise of the new right and looks at the deep anxiety that both occurrences have provoked in the cultural elites. Shana Pearlman shows how sex, money and class are vitally linked in the hysterical circus that is the United States presidential election.

SHANA PEARLMAN has worked in political journalism at Fox News and the BBC. She works on digital initiatives for major UK newspapers. She lives in London with her husband.