Palin's semi-secret weapon in Hollywood

Rebecca Mansour doesn't represent Hollywood, she just lives there (though she did graduate with an MFA from American Film Institute.) For Sarah Palin, she's the message crafter and social media defender, a role she started filling on her own when she launched the Conservatives4Palin website in 2009. At the time Mansour was working for Harvard's West Cost development office, says a profile by Robin Abcarian in the L.A. Times. Now Mansour's Aries Petra Consulting gets about $8,000 a month from Palin's PAC for grass-roots and communication consulting, speechwriting and Internet messaging.

As Palin considers whether to run for president in 2012, Mansour, 36, has become part of the inner circle that includes Palin's husband, Todd; her Anchorage-based attorney, Thomas Van Flein; her Washington-based treasurer, Tim Crawford; and a newly hired chief of staff, Michael Glassner.

Mansour is a "jack-of-all-trades" with "an important role … not only from a communications standpoint, but a policy standpoint," said a Palin aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not have Palin's permission to be interviewed. (Palin did not respond to requests for comment.)

But unlike other key Palin players, Mansour is neither a rough-hewn Alaskan nor a seasoned Washington operative. She is a political neophyte, a Republican daughter of Democrat-friendly Detroit....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 tweets here but doesn't do much media. She has appeared, though, with friendly conservative podcaster Tammy Bruce.