By the time Palin arrived in St. Paul on Sunday night, August 31, there were plenty of queries. What foreign countries had she visited? Had she ever been to Iraq? Had she really killed the infamous Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, as she claimed? Did she worship at a Pentecostal church where people spoke in tongues? Had Todd been arrested for driving drunk? Had her son, Track, been busted for drugs? And, most incendiary of all, was her infant son, Trig, who had Down syndrome, really her baby—or was he Bristol’s?
As the media typhoon whipped through St. Paul on Sunday, the McCain operation was also dealing with a genuine meteorological event. Hurricane Gustav was about to hit the Gulf Coast, raising the specter of the Republican failure to handle Katrina. Davis decided to cancel the first day of the convention, relinquishing one night of precious airtime. But there happened to be a silver lining to that cloud. For months McCain and his aides had been dreading the prospect of Bush and Cheney onstage. Charlie Black had floated the idea of having Bush spend convention week in Africa, speaking to the delegates via satellite and restricting himself to the administration’s programs to combat AIDS and malaria. At the same time, Black tried to convince Cheney to decline his convention invitation; Black thought the VP had agreed, but then signals got crossed and Cheney accepted. Now, with Monday night scotched, Cheney’s appearance had been, too. And Bush would be relegated to delivering a short talk by video hookup from the White House.
On Monday, the embattlement of the McCain press shop reached code red. To stamp out the Trig rumors—whipped up by photos on the Internet showing a supposedly very pregnant Palin looking remarkably svelte—Sarah and Todd acknowledged that Bristol was expecting, and therefore couldn’t be the five-month-old baby’s mother. But now The National Enquirer was reporting that Palin had had an affair. Another story popped up claiming that she had once been a member of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party (AIP). And even more threatening politically, reporters were starting to turn their attention to Palin’s vetting. The press shop insisted the vet had been thorough, but journalists were skeptical, especially since McCainworld was having such difficulty nailing down simple facts about Palin.
Schmidt and Davis had a lot on the line here. The questions about the vet went to their performance and credibility, and to the core of McCain’s sense of responsibility about governance. McCain was seventy-two and had a history of cancer scares. How seriously had they really examined the woman who would be in line to replace him?
The next morning, Schmidt and the senior staff gathered in the communications bunker in the Minneapolis Hilton. When Schmidt asked if the campaign had figured out if Palin was ever a member of the AIP, he was told they still weren’t sure.
Schmidt exploded, pounding the table, hollering, ranting, and cursing. Goddamn it, he shouted, we are under attack! This is a fight for survival! We have to get our shit together!
A few days earlier the campaign had dispatched a SWAT team to Alaska to help deal with the Palin inquiries. Schmidt wanted to get them on the horn and have the history of her AIP registration checked immediately.
“But it’s two in the morning in Alaska,” someone said.
“The phones don’t work at fucking night there?” Schmidt bellowed. “Call them! And keep calling them until they pick up!”
Schmidt had been involved in two presidential campaigns, two Supreme Court fights, and any number of corporate crisis-management brouhahas, but never had he experienced anything so intense, so savage, or so crazy. Under fire, he shifted to a tactic he had turned into an art form: blaming the liberal media. From The New York Times to the lefty blogosphere, the press was trotting out “smear after smear after smear,” on a “mission to destroy” Palin, Schmidt charged.
Yet the truth was that Palin’s critics weren’t only on the left. The reaction to her selection in much of the GOP Establishment ranged from stupefaction to scorn. When Bush first caught the news of the pick on a basement television set in the West Wing, he thought at first he heard “Pawlenty.” (Interesting, he mused.) But then he realized that the name was Palin, and he was completely baffled. (Where did that come from?)
The current occupant of the VP’s chair had a harsher reaction. Palin was woefully unprepared, and McCain had made a “reckless choice,” Cheney told his friends.
Similar criticisms were pouring into the ears of reporters from GOP consultants and operatives galore. The former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan was caught on a live microphone on MSNBC saying of McCain’s decision, “I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives. Every time the Republicans do that—because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at—they blow it.” Mike Murphy, one of McCain’s key strategists in 2000, chimed in, “The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.”
McCain was upset about Murphy’s remark. “Why would he say that? Why would he say that?” he asked his aides lamentingly.
But McCain himself did Palin no favors in an interview with ABC News’s Charlie Gibson in St. Paul. “Can you look the country straight in the eye and say Sarah Palin has the qualities and has enough experience to be commander in chief?” Gibson asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” McCain said—and then cited Palin’s largely ceremonial role as commander of the Alaska National Guard, an argument his own campaign had rejected as ludicrous.
On the eve of Palin’s Wednesday night convention speech, her nomination was struggling to achieve liftoff. “This is the worst mishandling of a VP choice since McGovern tapped Eagleton,” a prominent GOP strategist said darkly to a reporter. “I’ll bet she is off the ticket inside of ten days.”
* * *
CLOISTERED IN A SUITE on the twenty-third floor of the Hilton, Sarah Palin barely noticed the storm raging outside. Not that the atmosphere of anarchy didn’t penetrate her quarters. Quite the contrary. The place was a freaking madhouse, a Grand Central rush hour of aides, kids, and minions. But Palin had to concentrate. There was so little time and so much to do, so much to learn, so much to change. She was having an Eliza Doolittle moment, and it was keeping her mighty busy.
Take that Tuesday afternoon. Palin was sitting there in her suite, getting ready to go shoot some footage that the admen could use in the new spots and videos they were cooking up now that she was on the ticket. Boxes of Manolo Blahniks were piled up four feet high and stretching twenty feet along one wall of the living room. Neiman Marcus bags were everywhere, along with several rolling garment racks loaded with suits and dresses—maybe sixty outfits, beautiful threads, purchased by a New York personal shopper whom Nicolle Wallace had found for her. A fleet of Hollywoodish stylists in tight black jeans and high heels were hovering and strutting. In the corner, an elderly African American seamstress was hunched over a sewing machine.
Palin was in her robe, seated at a desk. Wallace was there coaching her on the pronunciation of the proper names in the text of her address, repeating them over and over like a speech therapist. Every so often, they would pause so that Palin could model a new outfit. If they liked it, fine; if not, they would often suggest an alteration. Lose the lapel! It would be better sleeveless! And the seamstress would go to work.
When Fred Davis, McCain’s media guy, walked into the suite, a couple of the stylists were applying some kind of hot-iron contraption to Palin’s hair. There was steam coming off the top of her head that looked to Davis like smoke. For a moment he thought, Oh my God, her hair’s on fire!
Palin greeted Davis, whom she knew slightly from some work he had done on her gubernatorial race. She wanted his opinion on a matter of no small importance.
“My brand is hair up, isn’t it?” she asked.
Yes, it is, Davis said.
In the first forty-eight hours in St. Paul, Palin’s existence was a political version of Extreme Makeover—and the clothes were only part of it. To Schmidt’s way of thinking, Palin faced three big hurdles. The first was her convention speech on Wednesday night. The second was her inaugural national inter
view, which would take place ten days hence with Charlie Gibson. And the third was Palin’s debate in early October with Joe Biden. In Schmidt’s view, they had no time to waste. For Gibson (and other future interviews), and especially for Biden, Palin needed to get on top of international affairs.
The trouble was, the outside world kept intruding. The McCain people knew so little about Palin that every time a press controversy erupted, someone had to race to the suite and find out directly from her what was true and what was false. Palin had barely settled in on Sunday night before she had to deal with drafting the statement concerning Bristol’s pregnancy. Palin called her daughter in Alaska to tell her the revelation was coming—I love you, she reassured Bristol, you’re a good person—then turned to her fledgling team and said, all business, “Where were we?”
By and large, Palin’s reaction to the parade of controversies traipsing through her suite was a blend of equanimity, steely focus, and naivete. Watching cable, she would point to some famous personality spouting one of the stories about her and say, “Who is this person?” (Palin meant it both sarcastically and literally; she was green enough to the national scene that she couldn’t tell the players without a scorecard.) Of all the tales she rebutted that week, only one shattered her aplomb. After Schmidt told her about the Enquirers accusations of infidelity, she briefly lost her composure while rehearsing her speech.
It was amid this bedlam that Schmidt’s desired policy tutoring took place. Schooling Palin were Steve Biegun, a longtime Republican foreign-policy hand, and Randy Scheunemann, a McCain national security adviser. In the days since the pick, Schmidt had spent enough time with Palin to get a sense of how much instruction she would need. “You guys have a lot of work to do,” he warned Scheunemann. “She doesn’t know anything.”
Scheunemann and Biegun took Schmidt at his word. They sat Palin down at a table in the suite, spread out a map of the world, and proceeded to give her a potted history of foreign policy. They started with the Spanish Civil War, then moved on to World War I, World War II, the cold war, and what Scheunemann liked to call the “the three wars” of today—Iraq, Afghanistan, and the global war on terror. The tutorial took up most of Monday, starting early and going late. When the teachers suggested breaking for lunch or dinner, the student resisted. “No, no, no, no, let’s keep going,” Palin said. “This is awesome.”
Palin was particular about her study aids. Early on, she told her team that she absorbed information best from five-by-seven index cards. With Scheunemann and Biegun, she became obsessive, wanting to put every pertinent piece of information, including the names of world leaders, on separate cards. Soon enough, she had multiple towering stacks of cards, which she referred to constantly, sitting quietly and poring over them, lugging them back to her room to memorize late at night. It quickly became a running joke on Team Palin: Don’t get between Sarah and her cards!
Tuesday night and all of Wednesday were given over to Palin’s speech, which was written by Matthew Scully, a former Bush White House wordsmith. A speech coach was imported from New York to help Palin convey her personality through the text. Wallace taught her to say “NEW-clear,” not “NUKE-u-lar,” writing out the letters for good measure: N-E-W-C-L-E-A-R. Palin worked tirelessly on her address, pounding out more than a dozen run-throughs.
Tucker Eskew watched the rehearsals carefully. She was good, he could see, and she would be even better from the stage. She’s a red-light-on performer, he thought—kind of like Obama. But McCain aides were still nervous as the moment of truth arrived. Palin hadn’t spoken that often from TelePrompTers in her career, and she certainly had never experienced anything like this kind of pressure, a situation in which the stakes were so high, where everyone was watching. As Palin strode out onstage, the heebie-jeebies even overcame Eskew. What if it’s a bomb? he thought.
THE ROAR OF APPROVAL inside the hall was deafening. The faithful were resentful of a media they believed had treated the VP nominee unfairly, turning at one point toward the press seats and chanting, “Shame on you!” They wanted to be wowed by Palin. And they were.
In a shantung Valentino jacket and black skirt, Sarah was glamorous, homespun, spunky, and snarky. She bragged that when she became governor, she shed the office of its luxury jet: “I put it on eBay.” She said she “told the Congress ‘thanks, but no thanks,’ for that Bridge to Nowhere.” She described herself as “just your average hockey mom,” and threw in an ad lib that she’d used before but wasn’t in her text. “You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” she said. “Lipstick!”
What was less expected was the delight that Palin took in baring her fangs, and sinking them into Obama. “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities,” she quipped. She said, “We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.” She called Obama an elitist, an egotist, a taxer, a spender, an appeaser, and an accomplishment-free zone. By the end, it was clear why that barracuda moniker had stuck.
Watching on a television in a room backstage, McCain went from pacing fretfully, to murmuring, “She’s really good,” to enthusing, “She’s incredible,” to grabbing Wallace and exulting, “Oh, my God, great job, she did a great job!”
Then Wallace told McCain that Palin’s achievement was even greater than he knew: her prompter had been malfunctioning throughout the speech; the text hadn’t paused during periods of applause, so a couple of lines were always missing from the screen when she resumed.
“If that happens to me tomorrow night,” McCain replied, “we’re fucked.”
No one, besides maybe Salter, had high expectations for McCain’s speech. But for all its shortcomings, it reflected clearly the consensus in McCainworld that reviving the candidate’s independent, cross-partisan image was essential. The only time that McCain uttered the surname Bush was when he was referring to Laura. Only thrice did he use the word “Republican,” once in relation to Palin and twice in the context of decrying corruption.
But McCain’s speech didn’t matter; the only story line out of St. Paul was Palinmania. Some armchair GOP psychologists had surmised initially that the reason McCain picked Palin was that he didn’t want to be overshadowed by his running mate. But for the next week, as the two of them campaigned together across the country, they were greeted by massive, beaming crowds who were there mainly to see her—and McCain loved it. Everywhere they went, Palin described McCain as “the one great man in the race,” as he grinned from ear to ear. “Change is coming, my friends!” McCain crowed over and over.
Donations and volunteers spiked up. Cable and radio could talk of little else but Sarah. The Palin pick deprived Obama of his post-convention bump; the weekend after the GOP convention, McCain was trailing him by a trifling two points. And according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, McCain’s standing among white women had improved by a net twenty points (from 50–42 behind Obama to 53–41 ahead) in the blink of an eye.
On September 10, McCain and Palin appeared together in Fairfax, Virginia, a few miles from the campaign’s headquarters. Fifteen thousand people swarmed into Van Dyke Park—little girls wearing “STRONG WOMEN VOTE MCCAIN-PALIN” T-shirts, their mothers chanting, “Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!” Later that afternoon, Palin would board a flight to Alaska for her interview with Gibson. At the moment, though, she stood there on stage, perched atop a pair of ruby-red heels, looking less like Eliza Doolittle than Dorothy: the girl swept up in the cyclone, lifted out of her black-and-white world and deposited in a Technicolor Oz.
OBAMA AND HIS PEOPLE certainly felt as though a house had been dropped on their heads. Since the moment Palin’s selection was announced, they had been struggling to calibrate a response to her and the variables she injected into the campaign. In Palin, the Obamans were confronting something with which they had no experience, a phenomenon so new and fascinating to the press and public that it eclipsed even thei
r boss. For the first time, they understood how the Hillarylanders felt during much of the Democratic nomination fight—helpless, flummoxed, unable to break through.
In the hours after the announcement, Team Obama turned to Hillary herself for help, asking her to put out a tough statement criticizing the pick as a transparent ploy that female voters would see right through. Clinton not only declined to do that, but she did the opposite, calling Palin’s nomination “historic” and saying that Palin would “add an important new voice to the debate.”
Hillary had no intention of assisting in the trashing of Palin; she thought it would annoy her supporters. She also believed the pick might prove to be smart politics, and in this, she was seconded by her husband. When Democratic elites initially scoffed at Palin, ridiculing her outre tastes—the passion for weaponry, the hankering for moose-burgers—Bill Clinton went into Bubba mode, cautioning them not to underestimate her appeal. Don’t be so sure of yourselves, he said. Good old boys, they can relate to her.
The reaction of the Democratic Establishment to Palin was wildly schizophrenic. In the days just after she burst on the scene, she was discounted as just a pretty face, and McCain was mocked for having squandered his only argument against Obama—experience—and for disqualifying himself with a nakedly political pick. But as Palinmania built over the week following the Republican convention, panic spread through the Democratic ranks. The Obamans were swamped with phone calls and email from donors, operatives, and members of Congress demanding that Palin be taken down, slamming the campaign for being too soft and passive, urging them to do . . . something!
Team Obama was split over how to handle the Palin perplex. On one side were advisers convinced she would inevitably self-destruct. On the other were those who shared what Plouffe described as the “bed-wetting” tendencies of much of the Establishment. (One member of the campaign’s media team, Steve Murphy, referred to Palin as a Republican female Barack Obama.) In focus groups, voters were split roughly into thirds: those who dismissed her out of hand, those who weren’t sure what to think, and those who found her a breath of fresh air. “She is the change that Barack Obama talks about,” said one voter in the latter camp.
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