Rebecca Mansour is the rare fan whose tribute site actually got her a gig with the object of her affection: Sarah Palin. After the 2008 presidential campaign, Mansour launched Conservatives4Palin.com, which featured searing takedowns of the "worthless mushheads" who were attacking the Alaska governor. Six months later, Mansour met with Palin in Del Mar, California, and the two got along well. Now she serves as Palin's social media guru, enforcer, and advisor. Though Mansour usually shies away from the press, Robin Abcarain was able to profile the aide for the Los Angeles Times. The profile offers a few new points about Mansour.

Interesting match: wordy multicultural ex-Harvard employee  Mansour's manifesto on the Conservatives4Palin website says "We are ordinary citizens. We have dedicated our spare time to rectifying the great wrong committed against an honest and honorable leader during the 2008 election." But in many ways, as the Los Angeles Times profile reveals, Mansour seems like an unlikely match for Palin: she's a 36-year-old Detroit native of Lebanese ancestry who worked as a fundraiser for Harvard. Take a look at this section:

The erudite Mansour, who calls herself a member of "the great unwashed," doesn't mind sounding elite; her vocabulary includes real words like "hebetudinous" (mentally lethargic) and made-up ones like "anti-dentite" (a dentist hater, from Seinfeld). She loves Victorian poetry, William Faulkner and David Lean films. She is especially fond of 'Why I Am a Liberal,' Robert Browning's 1886 sonnet on liberty.

Mansour now uses that big vocabulary to attack Palin's foes. An example: She called Politico reporters "puppy-kicking chain smokers" and "anti-dentite porn producers."

Started out with screenplays: Mansour says she grew up talking about Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman at the dinner table. Still, the few who dared to speak on the record about her expressed surprise that she'd work for Palin. Her former English professor at Detroit Mercy says, "She was brilliant; she was a wonderful writer. We all just loved her. We thought she'd be writing screenplays, she was so funny."

Her teacher at the American Film Institute, where she went to write screenplays, says, "She had an open, critical mind... She was always willing to give a movie a chance, even if she didn't like the subject matter. I would certainly not have pegged her as somebody who was really political." 

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Elspeth Reeve