Palin Profiler Matt Continetti Gets Profiled

The author of “The Persecution of Sarah Palin” gets a friendly profile in Doublethink, the in-house magazine of the libertarian America’s Future Foundation. (Disclosure: I’m a member and am speaking at an AFF event tonight.) If there’s a revelation, it’s that Palin’s biggest defender inside the beltway is less an ideologue, more a reporter who thinks — accurately — that he’s stumbled onto a colorful story.

Sitting in a coffee shop, this 28-year-old associate editor of the Weekly Standard explains that despite the highly politicized subjects of his books and articles, writing—not politics—is his real passion. Political journalism was simply “a way to get paid writing.”

… He got assigned his first piece for the magazine—a profile of General Wesley Clark during the 2003 presidential primaries—when the editor who had previously covered the general “didn’t feel like writing about him again.” And the contract for The K Street Gang fell into his lap after another Standard writer, Andrew Ferguson, passed it up: “Andy had already signed papers to write his book on Lincoln [Land of Lincoln]…At that point, I was 23, and again, had no clue what I was doing.”