COMMENTARY | A person who is described as an “investigative reporter” named Howard Decker has written one of the most extraordinary novels I have ever seen the cover for, based on one of the most unlikely premises in the history of fiction.
The setting is Honolulu in the early 1980s. A young student from Alaska named Sarah meets and falls in love with a local fellow named Barry. There are also Russian spies; a runaway unmanned drone with a nuclear bomb; a wild boar hunt with knives; “exotic poisons;” and, of course, secrets.
As alternate history — or perhaps hidden history — the idea of “Palin and Obama – Lovers When We Met” has the virtue of being audacious beyond belief. The only thing that comes close is the novel within the novel of “A Fall of Moondust” by Arthur C. Clarke called “The Apple and the Orange,” in which Isaac Newton and Nell Gwyn have a fling in 18th century England.
As someone who has written alternate history, I can suggest that one rule one should follow when dealing with historical personages is they need to behave as they would in real life or there has to be some kind of life-changing experience that explains their different behavior. Noting that, one has to say that a Palin/Obama romance is very unlikely.
Sarah Palin was and is a fairly straight-laced, religious, high-spirited country girl who, by the way, was still very much enamored of her high school sweetheart, Todd Palin, at the time in question. Barack Obama was and is a moody, cold Marxist with a lot of racial and abandonment issues who at the time was a drug abuser with pretensions of intellectualism.
In other words, a romantic relationship between the two people at any time would not happen in the physical universe we all occupy.
One suspects the charm of this work of fiction will be it is so bad as to be entertaining. Obama and Palin have met before, in the Archie comics and in a graphic novel as barbarian antagonists in a Conan milieu. Oddly this example is the least plausible, though maybe a lot of fun.
Source: Were Sarah Palin and Barack Obama Lovers? PRWeb, Sept, 12, 2011
Palin and Obama– Lovers When We Met, Howard Decker, Amazon Digital Services, 2011