Priscilla Shanks Tried to Teach Palin to Say Nuclear

In the upcoming Sunday Times Magazine, Robert Draper tells the McCain campaign story as series of attempted narratives. I'm partial to the term narrative, because I believe that an important part of how humans think is through stories. They simplify getting all the facts. You get enough to figure out which narrative to pin on a politician or anyone or any situation.. Campaign managers work hard to get the best possible narrative pinned onto their candidates and the worst ones on their opponents. .

The narratives Draper says the McCain campaign struggled through are:
NARRATIVE 1: The Heroic Fighter vs. the Quitters
NARRATIVE 2: Country-First Deal Maker vs. Nonpartisan Pretender
NARRATIVE 3: Leader vs. Celebrity
NARRATIVE 4: Team of Mavericks vs. Old-Style Washington
NARRATIVE 5: John McCain vs. John McCain
NARRATIVE 6: The Fighter (Again) vs. the Tax-and-Spend Liberal

Narrative 4 - Team of Mavericks is where we get the background on how Sarah Palin got picked. Ultimately, it seems anti-climatic. Given this is a nine page article, there's not a lot of particularly interesting meat. All of it is just filling in details, documenting a story that isn't particularly remarkable. However, the one part confirmed something Alaskans have been wondering about is this part on Palin's voice coach:

While all of this was going on, an elegant middle-aged woman sat alone at the far end of the bar. She wore beige slacks and a red sweater, and she picked at a salad while talking incessantly on her cellphone. But for the McCain/Palin button affixed to her collar and the brief moment that Tucker Eskew, Palin’s new counselor, spoke into her ear, she seemed acutely disconnected from the jubilation swelling around her.

In fact, the woman was here for a reason. Her name was Priscilla Shanks, a New York-based stage and screen actress of middling success who had found a lucrative second career as a voice coach. Shanks’s work with Sarah Palin was as evident as it was unseen. Gone, by the evening of her convention speech, was the squeaky register of Palin’s exclamations. Gone (at least for the moment) was the Bushian pronunciation of “nuclear” as “nook-you-ler.” Present for the first time was a leisurely, even playful cadence that signaled Sarah Palin’s inevitability on this grand stage.

So who is Priscilla Shanks? There are a lot of hits for her on Google, but most of them are empty. Her Linkedin profile says this:

Priscilla Shanks’s Summary

12 years independent public speaking and media consultant in on-air broadcast training to broadcast journalists and those making the transition from print to broadcast journalistm

10 years experience as adjunct professor at New School for Social Research teacihng [sic] Public Speaking for Professionals

Currently in private practice preparing professionals and authors for media appearnaces, training executives, doctors, CEO's and business leaders in profit and non-profit organizations for their range of public speaking engagements.

On retainer to ABC Network News and CBS Network News and in private practice to broadcast journalists.