The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by Joe McGinniss

  At another point, Gustafson says, “She was talking about being a leader and using her influence to help Americans, and I said, ‘You’re out there for yourself. You’re not a leader, you’re a climber.’ ”

  “Obviously we’re not welcome here,” Sarah replied.

  “I haven’t asked you to leave and I haven’t told you you’re unwelcome. Have a seat at the picnic table. We’ll talk all day.”

  It wasn’t to be. Willow, apparently thinking that the word governor should have been spelled with an -er not -or at the end, interjected one more comment: “You’re a teacher; you should learn how to spell.” Then the whole TLC crew moved on, ending a wholly unnecessary incident caused by Sarah’s inability to ignore a sight that displeased her.

  I ask Gustafson if she’s received any hostile reactions from Sarah’s supporters. “I haven’t heard a single thing,” she says. “Nothing but love from Alaskans. And I came home one day and my husband had put up a banner that said ‘Best Wife Ever.’ ”

  AUGUST 24 IS primary day. Tea Party candidate Joe Miller, a lawyer from Fairbanks, is challenging incumbent Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate. Sarah has been seething about Murkowski ever since her father chose her over Sarah to fill his unexpired term in 2002. But Miller is loony enough on his own to appeal to Sarah and Todd.

  Marching alongside children in an Eagle River community parade on the Fourth of July, Miller supporters carried assault rifles. Later in the year, members of a private militia force that Miller employed as security guards handcuffed Tony Hopfinger of the Alaska Dispatch as he attempted to ask Miller a question. Miller himself declared that the way to stop illegal immigration was to “build a wall. If the East Germans can do it, so can we.”

  He is unmistakably Sarah’s kind of candidate for a U.S. Senate seat, and her pro-Miller Twitter barrage has been relentless:

  “Please check out this great all-Alaskana video by my friend Joe Miller who is the commonsense conservative running …”

  “Vote for our pro-Constitution, pro-life, pro-private sector candidate Joe Miller for U.S. Senate!”

  “Wow! What dfference betwn candidates’worldview! I’ll post KAKM Senate debate, you’ll see who’ll serve AK for right reasons&protect Constitutn”

  But it’s a sign of just how unpopular Sarah has become in her home state that she’s kept her enthusiasm for Miller confined to tweets. Despite campaigning for Tea Party candidates in southern and western states throughout the summer, she’s been afraid to present herself at even a single Miller campaign event in Alaska. What once was nectar now is poison. The less Alaskans see of Sarah, the more they like it.

  Miller wins the primary by just over a thousand votes, taking advantage of Murkowski treating the race as a minor nuisance best ignored. Immediately, Outside news outlets misinterpret the significance. The Huffington Post says, “The stunning result was a huge validation of the political power of Palin.”

  Actually, it was nothing of the sort, as became evident in November, when Murkowski defeated Miller through a write-in campaign. All the August primary showed was that any candidate supported by a vocal and zealous minority can defeat a lethargic incumbent content to rest on her insubstantial laurels.

  Riding high because she’s given credit for Miller’s primary triumph, Sarah jets off to Washington, D.C., where adoring crowds do await. On Saturday, August 28, at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, she speaks to a crowd variously estimated as being between eighty-five thousand and more than five hundred thousand. In any case, it’s the largest live audience she’s ever addressed. Her speech comes scarcely more than a year after her ignominious resignation as governor, when her flighty, rambling remarks had listeners wondering if she might be careening toward a full-fledged nervous breakdown.

  The day after Sarah’s speech at the Beck rally, I drive down to Chugiak for lunch with Walt Monegan and his wife, Terry. Throwing a curve, he cooks chicken, not salmon, on his grill. Terry makes a baked bean dish that’s the best bean dish I’ve ever had. If I were putting recipes in this book, I’d start with hers. These are the kind of people I’m going to miss when I have to head home to start writing.

  I mention the most highly publicized line from Sarah’s Washington speech: “Say what you want to say about me, but I raised a combat vet, and you can’t take that away from me.”

  “Is that the son that was given the choice by the judge of either joining the military or going to jail after the vandalism of those buses?” Monegan asks.

  “I wonder who that judge was.”

  “I’m sure they’ve got the case file sealed tight,” Monegan says.

  “What Todd and Sarah do,” adds Terry, herself a former police officer, “is they go over and talk to everybody involved, and the authorities, and then make a deal, like they did for Willow with the vandalism.”

  It seems to be the Palin way: do whatever you want and don’t worry about it because you can always escape the consequences. Sarah stood on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial and talked about “restoring honor” after having fired perhaps the most honorable man in Alaska for not doing her vengeful bidding.

  “I’ve had no contact with either Todd or Sarah since,” Monegan says, “but late last winter we went to this event called the Festival of Seafood. We had our youngest and her boyfriend with us and we got seated at a table and I’m going back to get a glass of wine and I hear, ‘Walt! Walt!’ I turn around and there’s Chuck Heath. He was sitting at a table with Sally and he gets up and he walks over and shakes my hand and gives me a hug and says, ‘Aah, it’s all politics. I still consider you a friend.’ ”

  Driving back to Wasilla in late afternoon, as the day’s clouds lift, I’m struck by the incursion that autumn has already made. Leaves that were green are now yellow. The brilliant magenta of roadside fireweed is suddenly part of my peripheral vision. It’s been a chilly, wet, and dismal summer, setting a new record for consecutive days of rain in Anchorage: thirty-one.

  Not that I’ve minded. For me, it’s been thrilling just to be back in Alaska. Nowhere else do I feel so at home. Were it not for the impossible distance from the ones I love, I could happily live the rest of my life here. Maybe even on Lake Lucille, despite the grouchy neighbors.

  EIGHTEEN

  SARAH KICKED OFF her year of destiny on January 4, 2008, by choosing a foreign company, TransCanada, based in Calgary, to partner with the state in building a natural gas pipeline from Prudhoe Bay.

  Unfortunately, TransCanada had neither gas to flow through the line nor access to any. AGIA was smoke and mirrors and pipe dreams, except for Alaska’s obligation to repay TransCanada for the first $500 million it committed to the project.

  During the third week of January, the Anchorage Daily News noted that “critics are questioning TransCanada’s bid and Palin’s optimism.” Her persistent nemesis Andrew Halcro, who ran against her for governor in 2006, said, “They’ve already admitted they can’t do the job, so why are we giving them $500 million and a state license?”

  But even as ferment at home increased, so did national interest in Alaska’s brash young woman governor. She was asked her views on the 2008 presidential election. In early February she said she’d like to support John McCain, but could not because of his opposition to opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to exploitation by oil companies.

  After meeting privately with McCain at the Willard Hotel in Washington in late February, Sarah stopped saying she could not support him. Back in Alaska, perhaps to prepare for making the biggest decision of her life, she called her spiritual mentor Mary Glazier. “She asked me to pray with her for wisdom and direction,” Glazier said. “I sensed a real heart of surrender to the will of God in her.”

  On March 5, Sarah brought all attention back to herself—and ensured that it would be uncritical—by announcing that even though she looked as slim and trim as ever, she was, in fact, seven months pregnant with her fifth child. Yes, it was a
surprise, she said, but “I’ve always been a believer that God’s not going to give us anything that we cannot handle.” She did not say the baby would be born with Down syndrome.

  The Anchorage Daily News wrote: “That the pregnancy is so advanced astonished all who heard the news. The governor … simply doesn’t look pregnant.” A few days later one of the newspaper’s columnists wrote, “I look more pregnant when I’m constipated than Palin looks two months before delivery.”

  In mid-March the Daily News published a story that said, “With Palin riding extraordinarily high popularity ratings, pundits have mentioned her as a potential vice presidential candidate. But she said she’s ‘not pursuing or perpetuating it,’ adding, ‘I have no desire to leave my job at all as governor.’ ”

  Less than a week later the newspaper reiterated that there was “an undeniable national buzz” surrounding Sarah. “The vice presidency may be far-fetched, but the hype has only helped Palin’s future political prospects.” The story also said, “Palin is quick to note that she has not spoken to McCain … about the prospect.” The reporter, of course, could not have known that her security chief, Gary Wheeler, had escorted Sarah to a private forty-five-minute meeting with McCain only two weeks earlier.

  In addition, her proposed AGIA partnership with TransCanada was losing favor fast. Its fatal flaw—that TransCanada had no gas to put into a pipeline—was reemphasized on April 8 when Conoco-Phillips and BP, two oil companies that did have access to North Slope natural gas, announced their own $600 million pipeline project.

  The Juneau Empire wrote that this new effort, called Denali—The Alaska Gas Pipeline, “reshaped the gas line debate. There’s every reason to think that the announcement will cause legislators to wonder about the wisdom of giving TransCanada the $500 million in state money that would go with the exclusive pipeline license.” The newspaper urged Sarah to support the Denali line.

  Dan Fagan went further, writing in the Daily News that the Denali plan “obviously means the death of AGIA,” which was fine, because AGIA “would have never led to a pipeline.”

  ON SATURDAY, April 19, the Daily News reported that Sarah had given birth to her fifth child, Trig Paxson Van Palin, at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Wasilla at 6:30 AM the previous day. “The sequence of events surrounding the labor was unclear,” the story said.

  Chuck Heath told reporters that Trig had been the name of an ancestor of his, while Paxson was a favored snowmobiling location in central Alaska. Sarah said that Van was in honor of Van Halen, which had been one of her favorite rock bands when she attended Wasilla High. She said she thought having a child named Van Palin would be cool.

  Questions about Trig’s birth—which occurred a month before Sarah’s announced due date—were raised immediately. Her spokespeople responded with a chronology of the events that led up to the birth. It was a simple, straightforward account.

  Sarah and Todd had flown to Dallas on April 16. Early the next morning, hours before she was to address the Republican Governors Conference, she noticed amniotic fluid leaking. Nonetheless, she proceeded with her lunchtime speech. After consulting with her Wasilla doctor, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, she and Todd flew home. She was having only minor contractions and was not showing signs of active labor.

  A spokesman for Alaska Airlines said, “Governor Palin was extremely pleasant to flight attendants and her stage of pregnancy was not apparent by observation.”

  In Going Rogue, Sarah writes that she’d told her four children about the new baby by e-mailing them a letter she wrote in the voice of God.

  I heard your heart when you hinted that another boy would fit best in the Palin family, to round it out and complete that starting five lineup … Then I put the idea in your hearts that his name should be Trig …

  Trig will be his dad’s little buddy and he’ll wear Carhartts while he learns to tinker in the garage … He’ll want to play goalie and he’ll steal his mom’s heart … I created him a bit different … Doctors call it “Down syndrome.”

  I know it will take time to grasp this … Remember though: “My ways are not your ways … for as the heavens are higher than the earth, my ways are higher than yours!” …

  Trig can’t wait to meet you. I’m giving you ONLY THE BEST!

  Love,

  Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father

  Sarah was back in her Anchorage office on Monday, April 21, where she and Todd confirmed that Trig had Down syndrome. She said that she and Todd felt “blessed and chosen by God.” She said that after noticing the amniotic fluid and feeling contractions, she called her doctor, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, at about 4:00 AM. In a telephone interview, the doctor told the Daily News, “Things were already settling down. I don’t think it was unreasonable for her to continue to travel back.” Another doctor, however, said Sarah should have gone to a Dallas hospital as soon as she noticed the leaking fluid, because of the risk of infection. Todd didn’t want her to do that. “You can’t have a fish picker from Texas,” he said.

  For the time being, that was that: baby born, story over.

  BY MID-MAY, Sarah’s charm was wearing thin. Dan Fagan, who less than a year earlier had written that she had a “heart of gold” and was “obsessed with integrity,” now said, “The governor has one filter in which she determines policy: How will this make me look?” He accused her of “spending most of her time acting as her own press secretary,” and wrote, “This governor does not like to be doubted, challenged or even questioned. And she has shown a propensity to hold a grudge, get even and never forget if you oppose her.”

  Fagan had not yet reached the point of calling Sarah “the Hugo Chavez of Alaska,” but for the first time someone had written in Alaska’s only newspaper with statewide circulation that the empress was wearing something less than a full suit of clothes.

  In early June, Sarah billed the state for her travel from Juneau to Wasilla for two evangelical events. On June 8 she and Lieutenant Governor Parnell were blessed by Assembly of God pastor Kalnins at the Wasilla sports complex in a ceremony attended by an estimated six thousand people. Kalnins was the minister who had brought Thomas Muthee to Wasilla in 2005 to launch Sarah’s campaign for governor.

  Kalnins once publicly stated that anyone who criticized President George W. Bush would go to hell. In addition, during the 2004 presidential campaign he said, “I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, but if you vote for this particular person [John Kerry] I question your salvation.”

  Sarah’s other June 8 event was a talk to the graduating class of the Master’s Commission program at the Assembly of God church on West Riley Avenue, a street named for the pastor who had baptized her.

  For eight thousand dollars a year (with no dating allowed during the first year), students in the three-year Master’s Commission program—open to men and women from ages eighteen to twenty-five—were taught “deference to authority, Biblical memorization, prophesy, and miracle healing.”

  After receiving an honorary diploma, Sarah read from the New Testament Book of Ephesians. Then she told the graduates, “It was so cool growing up in this church and getting saved here.” She said, “Just be amazed … the umbrella of this church here, where God is going to send you from this church. Believe me, I know what I am saying, where God has sent me from underneath the umbrella of this church.” Her sincerity more than made up for her lack of coherence as she spoke of “a spirit of prophecy … a spirit of revelation” that, she said, would “bubble over.”

  This talk came in the midst of the legislative debate about AGIA, and Sarah urged the new graduates to pray for passage of her proposal. “Having grown up here, and having little kids grow up here also,” she said, “this is such a special, special place. What comes from this church, I think, has great destiny. What I need to do is strike a deal with you guys as you go out throughout Alaska—I can do my part in doing things like working really, really hard to get a natural gas pipeline. Pray about that. I think God’s will has to be done
in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that … We can work together to make sure God’s will be done here.”

  She then turned her attention to the war in Iraq. “Pray for this country, that our leaders are sending our military men and women out on a task that is from God,” she said. “That’s what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

  In closing, Sarah recalled the blessing she’d received from Thomas Muthee three years earlier: “You know how he speaks,” she said, “and he’s so bold. And he was prayin’, ‘Lord make a way, Lord make a way.’ And I’m thinkin’, ‘This guy’s really bold. He doesn’t even know what I’m gonna do, he doesn’t know what my plans are.’ And he’s prayin’ not ‘Oh Lord if it be your will may she become governor.’ No, he just prayed for it. He said, ‘Lord make a way and let her do this next step.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”

  SARAH’S NEXT STEP, on July 11, 2008, was to fire Walt Monegan. All hell broke loose. At the time, Alaskans knew nothing of Todd and Sarah’s years-long attempt to take away Mike Wooten’s badge.

  Monegan said his dismissal “came out of the blue. If the governor was upset with me for one thing or another, it had never been communicated to me.” At first, even he could not believe that Sarah would fire him because he’d said he couldn’t fire Wooten.

  Sarah’s spokespeople offered some mumbo-jumbo about wanting to move the department of public safety “in a new direction,” but were unable to say what direction.

  On July 17, Halcro reported on his blog what Alaska newspapers had not: that Sarah had axed Monegan because he would not fire a trooper who “was being maliciously hounded by Palin’s family. Walt Monegan got fired because he had the audacity to tell Governor Palin no, when apparently nobody is allowed to say no to Governor Palin.”