Sarah Palin: Cynical Master Manipulator

What do Sarah Palin, the right-wing Republican quitter; Bernard Madoff, the engineer of a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions, and Charles Cullen, a nurse who murdered a slew of hospital patients, have in common?

At first blush, the answer would seem to be nothing. But look a little closer and a pathology emerges: All three were and are cynical master manipulators.

Cullen, a former registered nurse, manipulated the very people who should have stopped him. Madoff, a former financier, manipulated investors and regulators. Palin, an about-to-be former governor, manipulates her political peers, the people of Alaska, the news media and even her own family while blaming anyone within moose-gun range when she doesn't get her way or acts stupidly.

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Cullen, an RN at hospitals in Northern New Jersey and Northeastern Pennsylvania, told prosecutors he killed about 40 people with intentional drug overdoses. Like Madoff, he did not fit the cliché about psychopaths who commit crime after crime. Hardly anyone suspected anything, although some people found his behavior to be unusual and even suspicious but failed to act on that.

In a 2004 New York Times profile, reporters Richard Perez-Pena, David Kocieniewski and Jason George document how Cullen was able to continue victimizing patients:

"It was his guile, in part, that allowed him to elude capture all those years. Mr. Cullen is suspected of choosing jobs and drugs that made it possible to kill without drawing much attention.

" . . . Mr. Cullen was able to continue mostly because of systemic failures, and his career reveals gaping holes in hospital and government systems for weeding out people who harm patients.

"Supervisors and government officials who were looking over his shoulder also failed. . . . Employers did not report him to one another, to oversight agencies, or to law enforcement, often because they were not required to. Some even brushed off allegations by victims' families or his co-workers."

Then in 2008, Times reporters Julie Cresswell and Landon Thomas Jr. profiled Madoff, writing that it is obvious that he was a greedy manipulator, but:

"[S]ome analysts say that a more complex and layered observation of his actions involves linking the world of white-collar finance to the world of serial criminals.

"They wonder whether good old Bernie Madoff might have stolen simply for the fun of it, exploiting every relationship in his life for decades while studiously manipulating financial regulators.

" 'Some of the characteristics you see in psychopaths are lying, manipulation, the ability to deceive, feelings of grandiosity and callousness toward their victims,' says Gregg O. McCrary, a former special agent with the FBI who spent years constructing criminal behavioral profiles."

No one would accuse Palin of being a psychopath like Cullen and Madoff, but she is reliably incoherent and a serial prevaricator who lies constantly, including lying about things that there would seem to be no need to lie about. She never plays anything straight, especially when it concerns herself. As Todd Purdum notes in a recent Vanity Fair profile:

"Palin is a cipher by choice. When she chooses to reveal herself, what she reveals is not always the same thing as the truth. Her singular refusal to have in-depth conversations with the national media -- even Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney, among the most saturnine political figures in modern American history, each submitted to countless detailed interviews over the years—has compounded the challenge of understanding who she really is. . . .

"More than once in my travels in Alaska, 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. When {son] Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God's, and signed it 'Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.' "

While Cullen and Madoff have not revealed what drove them to commit their crimes and candor is certainly not part of Palin's kit bag, I'm going to suggest that all three did what they did and do what they do simply for the narcissistic thrill of it, all the while cynically exploiting and manipulating relationships through deceptive behavior and allowing nothing to stand in the way of their own ambitions.

If Palin is different, it is because of her relentless victimhood. And that her own cynicism as a No Nothing (as opposed to the Know Nothings of the mid-19th century) was more than matched by the cynicism of John McCain, who chose a person he knew was unprepared for higher office.

Both Cullen and Madoff are behind bars for life. By quitting her day job, Palin has shot her political wad in grand style and probably couldn't be elected dogcatcher of Wasilla, let alone president of the United States. For that we can be thankful.

Top photo by Paul J. Richards/Getty Images via Vanity Fair