The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by McGinniss, Joe

  The investigator also found that while Monegan’s refusal to fire Wooten was clearly a factor in his dismissal, Sarah did have the authority to act as she did because, like Irl Stambaugh in Wasilla, Monegan was an “at will” employee.

  Sarah’s lawyer denounced the report as a partisan attempt to “smear the governor by innuendo”—despite the fact that the investigation had been ordered by a bipartisan legislative committee.

  The next day, extraordinarily, Sarah tried to claim that the Branchflower report had exonerated her. “I’m very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of any kind of unethical activity,” she said, stopping short of adding that black was white and up was down. She said she’d fired Monegan because he’d displayed a “rogue mentality.” Sarah apparently felt that “going rogue” was acceptable only when she did it herself.

  In the Daily News, columnist Elise Patkotak wrote, “The legislative report comes out concluding Palin broke the state ethics law and she calls that an exoneration. The only thing missing from this circus is a bunch of clowns exiting a small car in the center ring … Alaska is in danger of becoming one big national joke, the Dan Quayle of states. Someone should tell our governor that we deserve better than that. Someone should give our governor her brain back.”

  Alaskans were also incensed to learn that Sarah was not the ethical Snow White she’d pretended to be. On September 9 the Washington Post reported that she’d billed Alaskan taxpayers sixty dollars a day for meal money while spending more than three hundred nights at home during her first year and a half as governor. Ex-governor Tony Knowles said, “When you’re living at home, you don’t pay yourself for living at home … it’s not right.” The paper also disclosed that she’d charged the state more than $30,000 for airfares—as well as billing for meals and hotels—for family members who accompanied her on official trips.

  Taking stock of national Republican efforts to sell Sarah as someone she was not, Daily News columnist Carey wrote the next day that the GOP, “Like con men in the Old West … used a few nuggets to salt a gold mine. Then they went out to sell the mine to gullible suckers who didn’t know the difference between a gold mine and a hole in the ground.”

  As Sarah continued her barnstorming, revival tent, rock star tour of red-state America, Alaskan bloggers such as Andrew Halcro, Shannyn Moore, Jeanne Devon, Phil Munger, and Jesse Griffin—people Sarah would later refer to in an Esquire interview as “bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie”—stepped up their campaign to inform America that Sarah was certainly not a gold mine.

  Not only bloggers, but published authors such as Nick Jans and Seth Kantner put out informed and trenchant commentary. Jans, a Juneau-based magazine writer, member of the USA Today board of contributors, and author of several books about Alaska, wrote in Salon:

  Palin is a genuine Alaskan—of a kind. The kind that flowed north in the wake of the ’70s oil boom, Bible Belt politics and attitudes under arm, and transformed this state from a free-thinking, independent bastion of genuine libertarianism and individuality into a reactionary fundamentalist enclave with dollar signs in its eyes and an all-for-me mentality.

  Author and journalist Seth Kantner wrote from Kotzebue, fifty miles above the Arctic Circle:

  By now the world knows our Gov. Palin is an expert at swishing around in color coordinated this and that, with her makeup, fake Minnesota accent, and her mooseburger and mean-spirited commentary. We can only hope people realize … she’s a pretty atypical Alaskan, one who is simply skimming the gravy off our hard-earned Alaskan mystique to mix with her varnished nonsense.

  As the campaign wore on, McCain advisors lost patience with Sarah’s impulsiveness, unbridled egotism, and volatile temper. CNN reported on October 25 that “They have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin ‘going rogue.’ A source said, ‘She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone. She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else. Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party.’ ”

  McCain staffers were particularly outraged by what Newsweek termed “Palin’s shopping spree at high-end department stores.” It was reported that she’d billed the Republican Party more than $150,000 for new clothes for Todd and herself. One aide angrily complained to Newsweek about “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”

  Sarah later denied the accounts of extravagant shopping, but to Alaskan ears they rang true. “You know that’s true,” one friend told me in 2010. “I know somebody who was over there. They’ve got the clothes. They’re there. They got them. They joke about it. Sarah’s a compulsive spender—for herself. When she had that job with the oil and gas commission down in Anchorage, Todd would be like, ‘Fuckin’-A, man, all she does is go to Nordstrom’s every goddamned day and buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of shit.’ ”

  THREE DAYS before the election, Sarah was pranked by a Canadian radio host who had her thinking she was talking to French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

  “I see you as a president one day, too,” the fake Sarkozy said.

  “Maybe in eight years,” Sarah replied.

  She refrained from saying that if McCain lost it could be four.

  In Phoenix, on election night, Sarah demanded that she be allowed to give her own concession speech. She was furious when denied permission. A week later, she said to Matt Lauer on the Today show, “I thought, even if it was unprecedented, so what, you know?”

  SARAH’S VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN made her a national star, but it destroyed her forever in Alaska. Her shrill partisanship (accusing Barack Obama of “pallin’ around with terrorists”), her twisting of the truth, her mutation into a grotesque caricature of the woman Alaskans thought they knew, had created an indelible stain.

  When she returned, in defeat, in November 2008, succor was in short supply; rancor was not. While Sarah saw herself as on a mission from God, in the minds of many Alaskans, she had made a deal with the devil, trading what she might—or might not—have become as their governor for a garish new identity as the patron saint of the right-wing extremists who would soon coalesce into the Tea Party.

  NINETEEN

  SEPTEMBER ARRIVES. It’s almost time to go home and start writing. I’ve been the good neighbor I told Todd I would be. I haven’t intruded on the Palins’ lives in any way. If Sarah hadn’t made an issue of it, only the few people I told would have known I’d been living next door since late May. My rent is paid through the middle of September and my trash pickup paid through November. I’ve talked to the people I wanted to talk to, except for those who were either too loyal or too scared of Todd and Sarah to talk.

  The one unanswered question is Trig. Is he really Sarah’s child? That question has come up again and again throughout the spring and summer, and usually not because I asked it. Nothing has surprised me more than finding that so many people, even some who like and admire Sarah, have doubts.

  At first it seemed outlandish, even indecent, to suppose that Trig might not be Sarah’s child. I did not, and I don’t. And yet … and yet … the circumstances surrounding both Sarah’s pregnancy and her fifth child’s premature birth are very difficult for anyone—especially anyone who has ever become a parent—to understand.

  On his Atlantic Monthly Daily Dish blog on June 28, 2010, Andrew Sullivan, author, columnist, one-time editor of the New Republic, and former Harvard professor, had a long post about why it matters whether Sarah actually gave birth to Trig. Sullivan has been ridiculed, not least in the liberal press, for continuing to care about this, but he makes some cogent points, especially about mainstream media, which—despite Palin’s incessant ridiculing of it as “lamestream”—has served as her great enabler, reacting to her every subwoof and tweet as if she were already the influential world leader that their fetishizing of her may someday allow her to become.

  Sullivan wrote:

  If her giving birth to a Down Syndrome ch
ild is a complete hoax, then she’s simply psychotic … If the scenario is merely a function of deep irresponsibility, an unconscious desire to miscarry her child by extreme recklessness, then the same applies …

  My real frustration here is with the media who have never questioned, let alone seriously investigated, the story, and who have actually gone further and vouched for its truthfulness and accuracy without any independent confirmation …

  What’s their excuse for not investigating or even asking? Their first is Palin’s alleged family privacy. But there is no family privacy once you have deliberately forced an infant with special needs into the bewildering public space … and used him as the central prop in the construction of a political identity.

  Their second reason for not investigating is that it doesn’t really matter. As I am often told by the Beltway crowd, she’s never going to be president, she’s just a flash-in-the-pan, leave it be, she’ll go away soon enough. Well, she hasn’t yet, has she? … Trig’s political salience is obvious, and critical to Palin’s brand—in fact, the only thing, apart from her amazingly good looks, that keeps her in the game …

  If Palin has lied about this, it’s the most staggering, appalling deception in the history of American politics. Not knowing which is true for real—and allowing this person to continue to dominate one half of the political divide—is something I think is intolerable. In the end, this story is not about Palin. It’s about the collapse of the press and the corrupt cynicism of a political system that foisted this farce upon us without performing any minimal due diligence.

  And only Joe McGinniss seems to give a damn.

  That was a heavy mantle to have placed upon me. To write about “the collapse of the press and the corrupt cynicism of a political system” was not what I set out to do. Despite Sullivan’s conviction that the “story is not about Palin,” it is the story of Palin that I am telling.

  Having said that, the longer I spend in Wasilla and environs, the more skepticism I encounter about the accounts Sarah has given of her 2007–2008 pregnancy and Trig’s birth.

  Some people simply accept Sarah’s version on faith, the way they believe in heaven and hell. Others are so certain it’s a fabrication that they would not accept that Trig was her baby even if she produced a birth certificate and a videotape of the delivery.

  Why has there ever been a question? And why do the questions continue? Because:

  Through her seventh month, not even those who saw Sarah up close every day saw any signs of pregnancy.

  Her story of having her water break in Dallas on April 17 and giving birth to Trig in Wasilla twenty-nine and a half hours later stretches credulity to the breaking point.

  She has steadfastly refused to provide the birth certificate or medical records that would document her account.

  The first public suggestion that Trig was not Sarah’s baby was made by an anonymous poster on the Daily Kos blog on August 29, 2008, the day after McCain named Sarah as his running mate. Two days later, the Anchorage Daily News described the post as “a version of a rumor—long simmering in Alaska—that Palin’s daughter Bristol was pregnant and the governor somehow covered it up by pretending to have the baby (Trig) herself.” The newspaper said, “Palin baby speculation is inescapable at this point.”

  Sarah’s Alaskan spokesman said the rumor wasn’t true. How did he know? “The governor’s not a liar,” he said. By the end of August 2008, however, that was an opinion many Alaskans no longer shared. When it was suggested that making Trig’s birth certificate available would put the rumors to rest, the spokesman was appalled. “What a thing to request—prove that this is your baby. I mean, my God, that’s horrifying to think that she would have to do that.”

  She did not. And in Alaska, birth certificates are not public record, so the rumors continued to swirl, fed by publication of numerous photographs that showed Sarah looking distinctly unpregnant only weeks before giving birth to a six-pound, two-ounce infant.

  Sullivan, a conservative, posed the following questions on August 31, 2008:

  Why would a 43 year old woman, on her fifth pregnancy, with a Down Syndrome child, after her amniotic fluid has started to leak, not go to the nearest hospital immediately, even if she was in Texas for a speech?

  Why would she not only not go to the hospital in Texas, but take an eight-hour plane flight to Seattle and then Anchorage?

  Why would she choose to deliver the baby not in the nearest major facility in Anchorage but at a much smaller hospital near her home-town?

  Why did the flight attendants on the trip home say she bore no signs of being pregnant?

  Sullivan then wrote, “It strikes me as likely that there are reasonable answers to these questions … and the rumors buzzing across the Internets and the press corps are unfounded and unseemly … So please give us these answers—and provide medical records for Sarah Palin’s pregnancy—and put this to rest.”

  But neither answers nor records were forthcoming, from either Sarah or the McCain campaign. Instead, they tried to put the story to rest by announcing that Bristol was pregnant. This proved, they claimed, that Trig could not have been Bristol’s child.

  Bristol was going to be an unwed teenage mother and, by God, Todd and Sarah were going to parade her around the country as such, because it showed how all-American they were, facing up to difficulties caused by randy teenagers just like any other New Apostolic Reformationist mother and Alaskan Independence Party father.

  The media spotlight quickly swung to Bristol and Levi. Because it was only just barely mathematically and anatomically possible that Bristol could have become pregnant with a second child so soon after having given birth to a first, she clearly could not be Trig’s mother, which meant that Sarah must be. From that point forward, people such as Andrew Sullivan and various bloggers both inside Alaska and Outside who continued to seek answers to their questions about Trig’s birth were exposing themselves as unspeakable boors.

  Indeed, as was revealed in the summer of 2010, the predominantly liberal membership of the Washington insider group JournoList quickly circled its wagons to protect Sarah, fearing that a full-scale inquiry into the circumstances of Trig’s birth would lead to a right-wing backlash.

  “By all accounts she’s a wonderful mother … Leave this be,” cautioned one. Another warned, “Leave the kid alone,” as if questions about his birth constituted an invasion of the privacy of Sarah’s infant son, rather than a measurement of her credibility.

  The majority of the invited subscribers to JournoList favored the election of Barack Obama and therefore evaluated the merits of even asking the question in terms of its presumed effect on his campaign, rather than its journalistic validity.

  This was a significant first step toward what Sullivan referred to in the summer of 2010 as “the collapse of the press,” a dereliction of duty so absolute—a lamestreaming of itself that occurred long before Sarah coined the term—as to constitute a mad dash toward its own immolation on a pyre of irrelevance.

  “This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen,” Sullivan wrote on July 26, “totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever. And people wonder how this farce of a candidate now controls one major political party and could well be our next president.”

  Legitimate questions were not asked during the 2008 campaign for fear that middle America might perceive them as offensive. But because Sarah refused to release her medical records as the other three candidates had done, the questions did not disappear.

  Less than two weeks before the 2008 election, NBC’s Brian Williams asked Sarah if she would make the records public. “My life has been an open book,” she said. “And my life is an open book today.” In typically garbled syntax, she continued: “The medical records—so be it. If that will allow some curiosity seekers, perhaps, to have, oh, one more thing that they can either check the box off that they can find something to criticize, perhaps, or find somethi
ng to rest them assured over, fine.”

  But she never released them. Instead, on election eve, the McCain campaign presented a one-and-a-half-page letter from Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, Sarah’s doctor, longtime friend, and fervent evangelical. Baldwin-Johnson wrote, “Routine prenatal testing early in the second trimester showed evidence of Trisomy 21 … there was no significant congenital heart disease or other condition of the baby that would preclude delivery at her home community hospital. This child, Trig, was born at 35 weeks in good health …” The doctor did not confirm either that she had delivered Trig or that Sarah had given birth to him.

  In the months that followed the 2008 election, Baldwin-Johnson’s refusal to speak to the media and Sarah’s refusal to provide simple documentary proof that Trig was her biological child not only kept the rumors alive but led to a network of arcane conspiracy theories reminiscent of the years that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

  But one does not have to wear a tinfoil hat to wonder.

  As her former security chief and many others have said, Sarah displayed no signs of being pregnant when she traveled to Washington for the National Governors Association meeting February 23–25, 2008. After posing for a group photo on the White House steps and meeting privately with John McCain at the Willard Hotel, she flew back to Alaska, wearing jeans.

  Within days of her return, she phoned Mary Glazier and prayed with her for “wisdom and direction.”

  On March 4, McCain won the Republican nomination. The very next day, Sarah announced that she was seven months pregnant. The child would be born with Down syndrome. Giving birth to such a child would make Sarah the patron saint of the antiabortion movement and would spark fervent enthusiasm within a Christian conservative base that was notably cool toward McCain.