The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by McGinniss, Joe

  “I don’t wish anybody harm,” Beck interrupts, “but I think Todd deserves a medal for why he doesn’t go over there and punch that guy in the face. I mean, that is not the way to handle things, but as a man, and you are screwing with my wife and my children … it would take everything in me not to do that.”

  “Well, amen, yeah, but that’s what he wants. He so wants a reaction like that from Todd so he can jot it down or he can call the cops and jot that down as a chapter in his book.”

  It doesn’t matter that Alaskan mosquitoes pose more of a threat to Sarah’s children than I do. In Palinland, as in war, truth is the first casualty.

  I HEAD FOR Wasilla City Hall to have coffee with the mayor. In 2008, Verne Rupright succeeded the woman who succeeded Sarah in the office.

  A Vietnam vet, Verne grew up as a blue-collar brawler from the hard-nosed Saugus/Lynn/Revere area of Boston’s North Shore. He came to Alaska with the military in 1972. After returning to Massachusetts to acquire an associate of science degree in law enforcement management and administration from North Shore Community College, he came back to Alaska to stay. He received a bachelor of arts in justice from the University of Alaska Anchorage and embarked on a career as a state prison corrections officer. Ten years later he got a law degree from Creighton University in Nebraska. He worked as a criminal defense attorney in Wasilla until his election as mayor.

  He doesn’t mention it in his official biography, but Verne once served as recording secretary of the Alaska Independence Party, the secessionist group to which Todd Palin belonged before his wife’s career required him to change his voter registration to Republican.

  He’s a thrice-married pack-a-day smoker, and is seldom the first man to leave a saloon. His office uniform most days is blue jeans, running shoes, and a polo shirt.

  I met Verne last fall. I think the world of him and I’m glad to see him again. He’s a hall-of-fame bullshitter, but there’s something genuine behind the façade, which can’t be said of all recent mayors of Wasilla.

  “Do you want a gun?” is the first thing he asks me.

  “Do you think I need one?”

  He considers. “Mmmm, probably not. I think most of the threats are coming from Outside. People around here don’t give a shit about Sarah anymore. They’re burned out on all her drama. Do you have much experience with handguns?”

  “None at all.”

  “Then I think you’re better off without one. You’d be more likely to hurt yourself than anyone else. You’re probably not in serious danger, but I just hired a new police chief, brought him up from Texas, and I’ll talk to him this afternoon. I don’t care who you are, you move into my town, you’re entitled to feel safe, and you’re entitled to respect until you show you don’t deserve it. You pay your rent on time and you don’t violate any city ordinances, you have a right to live wherever you want.

  “Even so, you should put a chain across the end of that road so if somebody does shoot you, at least it won’t be a drive-by. And if you change your mind about a weapon, let me know.”

  I’M BACK AT the house when Nancy calls. Fox News is having a discussion about whether I can be criminally prosecuted for stalking and harassment. They show the picture of me talking on my cell phone while facing toward the woods and away from the Palin property.

  “Looks like he might have binoculars there,” one of Fox’s legal experts says.

  “He’ll be watching her children, watching her gardening, on and on it goes. She will have no privacy now,” says another.

  Regrettably, says a third, I cannot be arrested for stalking, because under Alaska law “stalking” means “to recklessly place another person in fear of death or personal injury,” and, as she concedes, “We’re probably not there yet.”

  But how about a civil suit for invasion of privacy? All that takes is evidence of “intentional intrusion on someone’s solitude, seclusion or private affairs,” to a degree that “a reasonable person would find highly offensive.”

  Even that is a stretch, one of the legal experts says, “unless he points those binoculars in her direction.”

  “Which he will.”

  “Well, we think he’s going to.”

  I have not held a pair of binoculars in my hands since I watched a horse race at Saratoga in 2004. But hysteria does much more for ratings than the unexciting truth.

  “She should go forward and say to a court, ‘I need an order of protection, this is getting absolutely insane.’ If they have pictures of him using the binoculars, peering into these children [sic], I think a court would take that extra step and say, yes, here’s an order of protection against him.”

  “The children add a whole new element to it,” says another.

  They sure do. Suppose I kidnap one? And who’s to say that’s not what I’m plotting? Once you’ve cut the cord that tethers you to reality, anything goes.

  Comments on right-wing websites show how far things already have gone:

  “I hope this ‘reporter’ understands that Palins are hunters by hobby and will use loaded weapons to defend themselves from harm to their family.”

  “Any bets that McGinniss disapears in the Alaskan wilderness?”

  “If I was Todd, I’d take my family on a hike and squirt fish oil and beaver castor on the thick brush after they pass through so that the stalker would pass through and get some fish oil on his trousers. Walk toward a salmon river when the salmon are running and the bears are fishing. Have a boat waiting, take off and leave him with the Grizzlies and smelling like a ripe salmon. To a Grizzly, a journalist that smells like fish oil and beaver castor is just dinner.”

  “Todd could also have a beaver carcass stored in a five gallon can and drag it on a rope so the ‘journalist’ walks over the scent. Grizzly attacks are nearly always fatal. A crime that is difficult to prove if the Grizzly eats all the evidence.”

  “I’d be looking for line of sight, fire lanes, etc. That guy would have trouble getting out of the house in the morning, being his tires were flat, engine full of sugar and some masked guy with a oak limb, whittled down for a hand grip, keeps beating him.”

  “You know the sound you hear when you rack a round into a shotgun? That’s what I am hearing right about now. Loudly & clearly. Make my day M.F. This dumbass obviously has no idea of gun law in Alaska and how it is almost obligatory to shoot first and ask questions later when threatened.”

  I have lunch with a friend at a Thai restaurant on the Parks Highway. (Note to self: don’t let anyone persuade you that a Thai restaurant in Wasilla is “really not that bad.”) After lunch, we go to Lowe’s and buy a chain to put across my driveway.

  Catherine Taylor calls to suggest I change the locks because Todd still has keys from when he rented the house.

  “I’m sure he’s a gentleman,” I say. “I’m sure he’d never use those keys now that there’s someone else living in the house.”

  “I’ve known him a long time,” Catherine says. “I’ve had dealings with him. Change the locks.”

  I GO OUT to the store in early evening. As I’m relocking the chain upon my return, my nearest neighbors from the other side come over to introduce themselves and to apologize for the way the Palins have treated me. They say they’re pleased that I’ll be living next door and that if there’s anything I need, all I have to do is ask. A very typical—and welcome—Alaskan gesture.

  I spend a pleasant evening on my deck. A few voices of sanity have emerged. In the Washington Post, Dave Weigel writes, in regard to Sarah’s Facebook post, “Can somebody explain to me how this isn’t a despicable thing to do?” He points out that “no one has ever challenged the facts” in my Portfolio piece about Palin’s AGIA initiative, adding, “not that this has prevented every other media outlet from typing up Palin’s Facebook post like some lost Gospel. But assuming he’s rented the house near the Palins for some period of time, assuming the Palins know he’s there and that he’s writing a book, then what, exactly, is wrong with this?”


  Weigel writes, “It’s incredibly irresponsible for [politicians] to sic their fans on journalists they don’t like. And that’s what Palin is doing here—she has already inspired Glenn Beck to accuse McGinniss of ‘stalking’ and issuing a threat to boycott his publisher … No one in the media should reward Palin for this irresponsible and pathetic bullying.”

  Also in the Post, Greg Sargent asks, “At what point do Sarah Palin’s attacks and smears become so vile and absurd that they no longer merit attention? Is there such a point?”

  In the Huffington Post, Alaska blogger and radio/TV personality Shannyn Moore points out that my house used to be an Oxford House. “The tenants were men recently released from prison, who were recovering addicts. What? No fence to protect sexy Sarah in her tank top? Dear God! Who was lurking in that house watching her children play?”

  And in Salon, Alex Pareene notes that I “wrote a critically respected book on Alaska 30 years ago” and that my “one reported story so far on Palin was factual and responsible. There’s nothing even remotely tabloidy about McGinniss’ Portfolio story on the years Palin wasted not getting a gas pipeline built.” Nonetheless, writes Pareene, Palin knows that “she can, through sheer force of will and the devotion of her cult, make this into the story of a creepy gotcha journalist stalking her, and threatening her children.”

  JUST OFFSHORE, a mother grebe is sitting on her nest. She and her mate are my summer neighbors, too. Grebes are fascinating, besides being noisy. With a bit of online research, I learn that they’re members of the Podicipedidae family of freshwater diving birds, notable for their floating nests, made of plant material, and for how the newborn chicks ride on the mother’s back before starting to swim on their own.

  Their chicks hatch in late spring. Right now, at 10:00 PM, I’ve got a mother grebe sitting on her eggs no more than ten feet offshore. I can’t quite tell how many eggs there are. If only I had a pair of binoculars.

  FOUR

  THERE HAS BEEN much speculation that Sarah was pregnant with Track when she and Todd married in 1988. “It was essentially a shotgun-type wedding,” a friend of Todd’s confirms.

  After briefly sharing Heather’s apartment in Anchorage, Todd and Sarah moved to a townhouse across from Wasilla High. Todd, taking advantage of the special status afforded him for being one-eighth Native, obtained a blue-collar job with BP on the North Slope. Sarah’s pregnancy proceeded uneventfully, though—in contrast to her 2007–2008 pregnancy with Trig—quite noticeably. “I’ve got pictures of Sarah being very, very, very, very pregnant with Track,” an old friend says.

  In either April of 1989 or March of 1990—Todd used different dates on separate voter registration and absentee ballot applications—they bought a starter home in the Mission Hill subdivision. Their address was 825 Arnold Palmer Street. They were surrounded by neighbors on such thoroughfares as Sam Snead Loop, Lee Trevino Avenue, Jack Nicklaus Drive, Ben Hogan Avenue, Tom Watson Place, and Byron Nelson Drive.

  Some say the marriage proved rocky from the start. “They don’t have a marriage,” Sarah’s brother, Chuckie, confided to a friend in Anchorage. “I don’t know how they live together.”

  “It’s never been a happy marriage,” someone who’s known Todd and Sarah since high school told me in 2010. Part of the problem was Sarah’s lack of domestic skills. “She can’t cook shit,” the old friend said. “She couldn’t do grilled cheese. She’d burn water.”

  Another sticking point was her lack of enthusiasm for child rearing, a trait she shared with her mother. “From the start,” a friend recalls, “Todd was the parent. When he was home, he changed the diapers. He fed the kids. Sarah never lifted a finger.”

  With her father providing financial help, Sarah and Todd bought a home on the western shore of Lake Wasilla, at 1018 Westpoint Drive. There were three children by then: Track, Bristol, and Willow. Sarah had not worked since her brief stint as a sports announcer for an Anchorage TV station before her marriage.

  IN 1987, Wasilla elected a new mayor: John Stein, a lifelong Alaskan, born in Sitka, and the holder of a degree in city planning from the University of Oregon.

  Stein had arrived as city planner in 1984. Given the appearance of the city today, the notion of a Wasilla city planner may seem oxymoronic, but Stein says things could have been worse. “Those old forty-acre homesteads were being subdivided into one-acre lots,” he told me when I visited him at his home in Sitka during the summer of 2010. “Anchorage was overflowing, and people were flocking to the Valley because it was cheap. And it was cheap: cheap, cheap, cheap. There were essentially no building codes and no minimum standard for borough roads.”

  Speaking of his first term in office, Stein says, “It was the first time they’d had a planner as mayor. I tried to bring things under control. It was the first time anybody there had ever heard the phrase ‘comprehensive plan for development.’ Until then, it was still the frontier. You could say I’m responsible for the commercial strip on the Parks Highway, and I’ll plead guilty. But by allowing that, I protected the city’s residential neighborhoods.”

  John Stein was reelected, uncontroversially, in 1990. By then Wasilla was a city in chaos, plagued by both substance and spousal abuse—the two not being entirely unrelated. Homeschooling was on the rise, and not only because parents feared exposing their children to the evils of secular education. A child who went to school could talk about how daddy had beaten up mommy the night before, or display his or her own bruises.

  Intact nuclear families were a minority. One year, a fourth-grade teacher attempted a genealogy project. The first step was for the students to list their grandparents. He had to abandon the project because many students literally did not know what a grandparent was. Indeed, many, while knowing the woman they lived with, were unsure if she was their birth mother; nor were they certain if the man in the house was their father.

  Young mother Sarah remained active in the Assembly of God and made a first gesture in the direction of politics by working to get a creationist majority elected to the Wasilla school board. It was also through her church affiliation that she found the cause that would inspire her for years to come: abortion.

  The Valley Hospital was the only one in Alaska in which doctors performed second-trimester abortions, which had been legal since Roe v. Wade. This did not sit well either with Catholics, such as hospital board chairman Clyde Boyer, or with the Valley’s exploding evangelical Christian population.

  The hospital was controlled by a fifteen-member governing board, which in turn appointed seven members to an operating board that made policy decisions. Members of the governing board were chosen by an annual vote of the membership of the hospital association. Membership was open to any Valley resident who filled out an application and paid a five-dollar fee.

  Until 1992 there had been only about four hundred members of the hospital association. But in the months leading up to the April 1992 election, in which five governing board seats were up for grabs, more than two thousand new members joined the association, almost all recruited by evangelical churches, foremost among them the Assembly of God.

  No one recruited more enthusiastically than Sarah. The two thousand new voters were given a slate of five antiabortion candidates to support. All five won, receiving more than twice as many votes as the leading pro-choice incumbent, Sarah’s stepmother-in-law Faye Palin. The five new members gave the antiabortionists a majority on the governing board, which quickly translated into a majority on the operating board, which quickly translated into a vote to prohibit all abortions at the hospital.

  Her contribution to the winning side whetted Sarah’s appetite for politics. “If it wasn’t for the abortion fight, she would never have run for any kind of office,” says Reverend Howard Bess, the only one of more than forty Valley ministers to oppose the antiabortionists.

  At the same time, Mayor Stein had come to believe that Wasilla could no longer rely on state troopers for law enforcement, but needed its own police dep
artment. Merchants were reporting appalling rates of theft and robbery, and residents of the city’s new senior housing project were under constant threat of break-in by youths, who stole painkillers and other prescription drugs.

  A police department, however, could be funded only by new taxes, and, as Stein recalls, Wasilla was populated largely by “libertarians who hate two things: cops and taxes.” Nonetheless, with the help of a city councilman named Nick Carney, a member of one of Wasilla’s oldest and largest families, Stein formed Watch on Wasilla, a group whose purposes were to educate the public about the need for a police department and to find a means to pay for it. Jim and Faye Palin joined, and Faye, having recently lost her seat on the hospital board, was named president.

  The city’s businesses were all for the creation of a police department, but Watch on Wasilla felt it also needed an advocate more attuned to the city’s growing number of young families—someone with the time and energy to run for and win a city council seat. They interviewed a number of potential candidates, including a young Wasilla Lake housewife named Sarah Palin.

  After their first choice said she wasn’t interested, Carney and Stein took a second look at Sarah. “She wasn’t the brightest star on the horizon by any means, but at least I’d known her all her life,” Carney says. “She’d even gone to school with my daughter.”

  Four years earlier, at the age of twenty-four, Sarah had joined a Wasilla prayer group led by a woman from Ketchikan named Mary Glazier. “God began to speak to her about entering politics,” Glazier told attendees at a religious conference in Everett, Washington, in June 2008. “We began to pray for Sarah. We felt she was the one God had selected.” Sarah viewed the invitation to run for city council as God’s answer to Mary Glazier’s prayers.

  At twenty-eight, Sarah had three children, she belonged to the Iditarod Elementary School PTA, she’d played basketball at Wasilla High, and she was Chuck Heath’s daughter. “She also told us she was a born-again Christian, a lifetime member of the NRA, and a ‘hockey mom,’ which was not a phrase I’d ever heard before,” Stein says.