The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by Joe McGinniss

  Haycox’s conclusion: “If Gov. Palin is ‘puttin’ on the style,’ she’s doing a terrific job.”

  Which she was. Allowed to cavort across the stage on her own terms, Sarah both dazzled and flourished.

  She scored another publicity coup on September 11, 2007, when Track enlisted in the army. The Daily News reported that “the reasons why he enlisted and why he signed his military contract on the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were unavailable … The governor declined to comment. The Palin family wants to keep private some aspects of his decision.”

  With Track safely off to basic training—no longer a short-term PR risk—Sarah turned her attention back to the circumstance that had helped propel her into the governor’s office in the first place: the ever-expanding federal investigation of corruption among Alaskan politicians.

  The day after the Associated Press reported that Bill Allen, founder of the oil services company Veco, which had been implicated in the federal investigation of Alaskan political corruption, had secretly recorded phone calls with U.S. senator Ted Stevens, Sarah said she was frustrated that Stevens had not given assurances that he’d done nothing wrong. “Alaskans are getting more anxious to hear any information he can provide regarding his innocence,” she said.

  On September 25, Pete Kott, a Republican from Eagle River and former speaker of the house, was convicted by an Anchorage jury of conspiring with Veco to work for lowering taxes on Alaskan oil companies. Once again, timing worked in Sarah’s favor. She’d already called a special session of the legislature to deal with the oil tax question.

  She announced details of her tax proposal, called Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share (ACES), on October 2. The highlight was an increase in the state tax rate on net profits from 22.5 to 25 percent.

  Big Oil had been so entrenched in Alaska for so long and the Alaskan economy had grown so dependent on oil company revenues that Sarah’s plan to raise taxes actually met with opposition. For the first time, legislators were willing to go on record with critical remarks.

  Representative Jay “Chicken Man” Ramras claimed that Sarah had introduced “a new era of McCarthyism” in Alaska. He accused her of “getting out her red can of paint and playing Joseph McCarthy with the legislative branch” by suggesting that opponents of ACES might be tainted by the same corruption that had already led to the indictment of six legislators for accepting bribes from Bill Allen.

  The oil tax structure then in place had been created the previous year with the help of at least four legislators accused of accepting Veco bribes. Thus, an outside expert told a legislative hearing as the special session began on October 18, a “cloud of corruption” hung over existing tax rates.

  Debate raged. Exxon said taxes were already too high, but Exxon was the one oil giant unpopular in Alaska since 1989, when the Exxon Valdez spilled almost eleven million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. With the price of oil at ninety-five dollars a barrel and rising, it was hard for even the expert lobbyists and public relations crews hired by Big Oil to cry poverty convincingly.

  By the end of October, with her approval rating still at 83 percent (“quite unprecedented in the recent history of Alaska politics—only Ted Stevens in his heyday could really match this kind of public approval,” Anchorage pollster Ivan Moore said), Sarah took a break from the debate to cut the ribbon at the grand opening of the new Wal-Mart Supercenter in Wasilla.

  “There’s something about Wal-Mart in the Valley that is always an event,” she said, recalling 2002, when the original Wasilla Wal-Mart sold more duct tape than any other Wal-Mart in the world.

  She also took time to oppose the listing of polar bears as an endangered species. “The polar bear has become a metaphor in the highly charged climate debate,” she said. Her stance on that issue was clear: only “snake oil science” suggested that man-made carbon emissions were responsible for global warming, not that she believed in global warming. In Sarah’s mind, God managed the earth’s climate and he’d done a pretty darned good job up to now.

  In early November a Johns Hopkins University study classified seven Alaska high schools, including Wasilla High, as “dropout factories”: those in which fewer than 60 percent of freshmen advanced to senior year. Without mentioning that Track had failed to graduate, Sarah said she wanted to help. “I’d remind the kids that no matter where they are in life … there is no circumstance that would necessitate them just giving up.”

  On November 16, in a combined senate-house vote of 40–18, the legislature approved an even stronger version of Sarah’s ACES proposal. The net effect was to guarantee that oil companies would pay at least $1 billion more in state taxes than they’d paid under the previous “cloud of corruption” law.

  Juneau economist Gregg Erickson wrote, “It was as if Gov. Sarah Palin asked the legislature for a nice sensible winter jacket and they sent her a full-length mink parka with a wolverine ruff, seal skin trim, and a catalytic hand warmer in each pocket.”

  Calling the passage “a major victory” for Sarah, the Daily News said, “Palin’s high public approval ratings clearly helped get the tax through … Many lawmakers are reluctant to pick a fight with such a popular governor.”

  Sarah’s only setback of the fall was a state supreme court decision that said underage teenagers did not need parental consent for abortions. She said she’d seek yet another constitutional amendment to overrule the decision.

  For someone who so incessantly preached reverence for the U.S. Constitution, Sarah was awfully quick to advocate changes to Alaska’s constitution that would bring it more into line with her religious beliefs.

  As Christmas approached, Sarah did a Vogue photo shoot at her Lake Lucille house. The AP wrote, “She’s well suited for the magazine, attractive as she is accomplished. The forty-three-year-old Palin’s high cheekbones could rival any runway model’s; she’s well dressed, and often wears her brown hair with gold highlights fashionably swept up.”

  Sarah said, “Yes, it’s humbling, but it’s also a responsibility we’ve taken on: changing Alaska’s image.”

  Posing for Vogue seemed a fitting climax to her first full year in office, a year in which she’d been interviewed by CNBC, MSNBC, Newsweek, and Charlie Rose. A Daily News columnist said Sarah deserved “a big smooch under the Christmas mistletoe.” The newspaper said she’d “emerged as a national figure and a media darling.” This was before the media became “lamestream” for no longer considering her a darling.

  An AP story quoted a political scientist from conservative Claremont-McKenna College in California as saying Sarah “could be an ideal presidential running mate next year.” Even Rush Limbaugh offered a tentative embrace on his radio show, describing her as “a babe.”

  Sarah repeated that she had no plans to do anything other than serve out her term, which would extend until 2010. “My role as governor is where I can be most helpful right now unless something drastic happens.”

  The possibility of something drastic happening was not one that Phil Munger thought likely. “National attention has come Palin’s way,” he wrote on his Progressive Alaska blog. “Although blogs like Wonkette and magazines such as Vogue see Palin as a babe, Palin sees herself more as an athlete or mom. There is too much cognitive dissonance between what outsiders want of her and what she feels is important right now for her popularity to snowball nationally.”

  What Munger, an unpaid blogger, could not know—and what none of the paid members of the Alaskan media ever discovered—was that what they assumed Sarah felt was “important right now” could not have been further from her real priorities.

  As Jane Mayer first disclosed in the New Yorker during the 2008 presidential campaign, Sarah learned in the spring of 2007 that two conservative magazines, the Weekly Standard and the National Review, were planning cruises to Alaska that would stop in Juneau.

  Overcoming her distaste for life in the Governor’s Mansion, Sarah arranged to be there to meet both.
On June 18, as the Weekly Standard cruise ship docked, Sarah invited editors William Kristol and Fred Barnes and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson (former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush) to lunch.

  She made sure her Christian lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell, and her Christian attorney general, Talis Colberg, were present. Then she simply floored her guests by saying a pre-meal grace. A Palin assistant told Mayer, “There are not many politicians who will say grace with the conviction of faith she has.”

  She filled in the picture postcard by having seven-year-old Piper perform a cameo role in which she asked people what they wanted for dessert. After the meal, Sarah further dazzled her guests by taking them on a helicopter ride (for which she billed the state $4,000).

  The payoff was immediate. Barnes scarcely waited for the cruise to end before writing in the Weekly Standard that Sarah was “a Republican star” and “a politician of eye-popping integrity.” He quoted Anchorage radio host and occasional Daily News columnist Dan Fagan as saying, “She’s as Alaskan as you can get. She’s a hockey mom, she lives on a lake, she ice fishes, she snowmobiles, she hunts, she’s an NRA member, she has a floatplane, and her husband works for BP on the North Slope.”

  Barnes also quoted Sarah: “In my own personal life, if I dedicate back to my Creator what I’m trying to create for the good … everything will turn out fine.”

  She returned to Juneau on August 1 to host a National Review cruise group that included publisher Jack Fowler, editor Rich Lowry, rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and political consultant and Fox News pundit Dick Morris.

  “This lady is something special,” Fowler said later. “She connects. She’s genuine.” Another guest said, “She has that aura that Clinton, Reagan and Jack Kennedy had.” Another National Review editor later effused that she was “a former beauty pageant contestant, and a real honey, too.” Morris told her that someday she could become a vice-presidential nominee.

  Basking in the adulation of these older men and glorying in her ability to seduce them, Sarah asked, “Hey, does anyone want to stay for dinner? We can eat right now.” When they declined, she invited them to come back the next day. “All you have to do is knock. Yell upstairs, I’ll be right down.” She did everything but say, “Or come on up.”

  As 2008 would demonstrate, it worked.

  As for Alaska? Its poor, benighted residents, who continued to give her approval ratings of 85 percent, had no idea that she’d already discarded them, as she’d earlier rid herself of Laura Chase, John Cooper, Irl Stambaugh, John Cramer, John Bitney, Walt Monegan, and everyone else for whom she no longer had any need.

  SEVENTEEN

  I FLY BACK to Alaska on August 10. I land at Ted Stevens International Airport on the evening of the day when Stevens is killed in the crash of a small plane just outside Todd’s home town of Dillingham, in western Alaska.

  The pilot of Stevens’s plane was an Alaska Airlines veteran with more than thirty thousand hours to his credit, but that didn’t stop him from flying into a mountain in the fog. Stevens was on a fishing vacation, paid for by one of the Alaska corporations whose interests he served for so long, even as, with the help of Bill Allen, he served his own.

  Stevens survived a 1978 crash in Anchorage that killed his first wife, but he is not among the three survivors of this one. Many Alaskans, including friends of mine, will forever remember him as the saintly “Uncle Ted,” because for so many years he went to Washington and scooped up hundreds of millions of federal dollars that he sent back to the state, keeping only a small portion for himself.

  Flying in a small plane in Alaska in good weather can be among the most transcendent of experiences available to those of us who don’t climb to mountain summits. Flying in a small plane in Alaska in bad weather is a bitch. Also, it can kill you.

  When I was here in the 1970s, almost everyone I met who’d lived in Alaska for more than a couple of years knew someone who had been killed in a plane crash. This doesn’t seem as true now, but it’s been a notably ugly year in Alaska’s skies. Since January 1, twenty-three people have died in eleven different crashes. Undoubtedly, the relentlessly pissy weather this summer is a factor. It was chilly and wet when I left, and it’s chilly and wet when I return, and I’m told it rained every day I was gone.

  The first thing I do is catch up on Sarah’s tweets. In one, she stakes out her claim to the job of Cheerleader in Chief: “Watching Blue Angels about to fly at the Alaska Air Show, Elmendorf AF Base. No better place to be! USA! USA!” She did not mention that on July 28 four air force crew members were killed in a crash at Elmendorf as they practiced for the show.

  In another tweet, she squeezes all her scientific knowledge into 140 characters: “Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions; will cont 2 c chnges. R duty2responsbly devlop resorse4humandkind/not pollute&destroy; but cant alter naturl chng.”

  Other than pointing out that “ions” are not “eons,” what can you possibly say to that except to bemoan the existence of Twitter?

  Sarah’s newest campaign is on behalf of Laura Schlessinger, a right-wing radio personality who recently berated an African American woman who’d called in to her program. In the course of her diatribe, Schlessinger used the word nigger thirteen times. Afterward, she promptly resigned, a choice that, though voluntary, struck Sarah as a violation of Schlessinger’s First Amendment rights:

  “Dr.Laura:don’t retreat … reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence isn’t American, not fair)”

  “Dr.Laura=even more powerful & effective w/out the shackles, so watch out Constitutional obstructionists. And b thankful 4 her voice, America!”

  Neither at Wasilla High nor at any of her five colleges, apparently, did Sarah learn that the First Amendment protects individuals against government interference with their right to free speech. Schlessinger’s vile expression of racist sentiment during a commercial broadcast and her decision to quit before she was fired have nothing to do with any constitutional amendment.

  Next, I catch up on the soap opera episodes I’ve missed. Apparently Bristol and Levi are splitsville again. As soon as the check from US Weekly cleared, Bristol bared her heart to People, picking up another check in the process. Whatever skills the Palins may lack in other areas, they are grandmasters of the art of gaming the glossy magazines.

  Bristol is upset because Levi might be the father of Lanesia’s baby. (Lanesia is a new character with only a bit part in the series.) But “the final straw,” she says, “was him flying to Hollywood … He’s just obsessed with the limelight.” Bristol doesn’t mention that she’ll soon be flying to Hollywood herself to appear on Dancing with the Stars.

  Levi’s sister, Mercede, is not surprised by the breakup. “I could not help but have serious doubts that Levi and Bristol would make it to the altar,” she blogs. Nonetheless, Mercede is irked. “There is no way Bristol didn’t know about the rumors circulating about Lanesia! Especially because of how much attention Bristol still pays to Lanesia out of leftover middle school jealousy.”

  Levi denies that he’s the father of Lanesia’s about-to-be-born baby. Lanesia, herself no raw recruit to the tabloid wars—in 2008, she spilled to the UK’s News of the World that she was “distraught for a year” after Bristol stole Levi from her—tells US Weekly “exclusively”: “It’s not true … We haven’t hung out since eighth or ninth grade.”

  But hold the line! E! News reports that the real cause of the breakup is not Lanesia, but another of Levi’s exes, Briana Plum, who either dissed Bristol in an interview somewhere and/or was seen with Levi in a picture posted on Facebook.

  Whatever the truth, Mercede remains displeased. She blogs that Bristol once called her mother, Sherry, and “exploded in anger, screaming and saying, ‘How dare you allow Lanesia to stop by your house!’ … She then claimed that we had a chaotic f**cked up family and then went on to compare Lanesia to the woman my father had cheated on my mother with.”

  Bold
ly, Levi tries to reclaim the high ground by announcing that he’ll run for mayor of Wasilla in 2011. He’ll do it only because a “reality” show will pay him to, but that doesn’t mean he won’t mount a vigorous campaign against Verne Rupright. To those who doubt Levi’s commitment, his spokesman, Tank Jones, points out, “People questioned Jesus Christ.”

  Rupright is not exactly shaken by the news. Taking note of Levi’s lack of education and his posing nude for Playgirl in 2009, he says, “I think it would be wise for him to get a high school diploma and keep his clothes on.”

  God, it’s great to be back.

  I’M STOPPED at a red light next to a guy in a pickup truck. The bed of the truck has been fitted with a large cage. Inside the cage are at least half a dozen pit bulls. A sign on the cage reads YOUR PICK—$200.

  I’m tempted, but I don’t want to scare the neighbor’s children.

  There’s a big new sign on the Parks Highway side of Catherine Taylor’s property, urging support for Dianne Woodruff in her bid to retain her seat on the Wasilla City Council. Dewey Taylor called Catherine to ask her permission to put up the sign, and Catherine was glad to oblige.

  Dewey tells me that a couple of days before I got back he parked his truck on the Nevada right-of-way that cuts across Catherine’s property to the Palins’ driveway, hauled the sign out of the back, and was in the process of putting it up when three vehicles turned on to the dirt road and surrounded him.

  Track jumped out of one. He told Dewey to take down the sign and get out. “You can’t put that there,” Track said.

  As he demonstrated when someone shot out his truck window in retaliation for his bringing me a couple of chairs, Dewey is not a man who responds well to what he perceives as belligerence. He told Track that he was on Catherine Taylor’s property and that she’d given permission for the sign to be put there and that he was going to put it there. Period.