Former aide's book claims Palin breached election laws

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, told a top aide that she hated "this damn job" not long before she resigned from office barely halfway through her elected term, according to a leaked draft of an unauthorised biography that also accuses her of breaking state election laws.

The revelations in the book, written by a former aide and confidant and tentatively called In Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: A Memoir of Our Tumultuous Years, threaten to sully the former governor's image as she ponders whether to seek the presidency.

The manuscript, which is still in search of a publisher, was written by Frank Bailey, who joined Ms Palin's campaign for governorship in 2005. With the help of two co-authors, Mr Bailey has crafted a manuscript based in part on 60,000 emails that Ms Palin exchanged with her officials, including during her run in the Republican 2008 ticket with John McCain.

According to Gawker, one of the news organisations to have received leaked copies of the Bailey manuscript, one is an eruption of indignation after Ms Palin gets the (incorrect) impression that the McCain camp intends charging her for the costs of vetting her before announcing her as the running mate.

"Ridiculous," it says. "Paying for the damn McCain campaign's attorneys to vet me!!! Unflippinbelievable. The campaign was so disingenuous, who in the heck has to pay for themselves to be vetted when they didn't ask for it??? I didn't hire any attorney – they did! They ran up a bill and left me with it – just like they did with the damn clothes issue. Paying out of my family's pocket for the Flippin' privileged of jumping on the pirate ship." ("Unflippinbelievable" is used repeatedly throughout her emails, Gawker reports.)

Oddly, one of those people circulating copies of the book to the media – without the permission of the authors – has been Joe McGinniss, a journalist who is compiling his own unauthorised book about Ms Palin, whose ire he provoked last year by moving into a house right next door to hers in Wasilla, near Anchorage.

The diversion of unauthorised accounts of her career will be entirely infuriating to Ms Palin. The notion of her launching a 2012 presidential bid has already started to look a bit threadbare.

The Bailey tome could hurt her not least with the allegation that she flouted state election laws by allowing herself to be filmed on the streets of Anchorage by a film crew working for the national Republican Governors Association to make a television advertisement supporting her candidacy.

More damaging, however, may be the assertions in the new book that Ms Palin, together with her husband, Todd, often became consumed by petty insults from people she considered foes and rivals, which nearly always prompted attempts at retaliation. "We set our sights and went after opponents in co-ordinated attacks," he writes, according to the Anchorage Daily News, which has also seen a copy of the book.

Then there is the email Ms Palin allegedly sent to aides shortly before she resigned as governor in 2009 in which she says: "I hate this damn job!"

Few in Alaska will be surprised, but it may nonetheless rekindle the sense of anger in Alaska about her abandoning the job she was elected to that has helped to ensure that her poll ratings in her home state today are worse than almost anywhere else in America.