“Look,” Lieberman said kindly, “you gotta be saying to yourself, ‘What am I doing here? How did this happen?’ This is your moment to make it really count for something.”
Palin seemed touched. “Joe,” she said. “I can’t figure any other reason I’m here except that I was meant to be here.”
Palin’s immediate rendezvous with destiny was in Ohio the next day, where she stopped on the way to Sedona to join McCain for a rally and to tape the final parts of her interview with Couric. Palin wanted to blow off Katie, but the campaign felt that doing so would be a PR nightmare. Palin acquiesced, but not entirely. Rather than prepping for Couric, she allowed herself to become consumed by a different media opportunity: a questionnaire from the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, the local Wasilla newspaper, which she insisted on filling out herself. Hours before she was scheduled to meet Couric, Palin emailed several members of her team, “How ‘bout I do the Katie interview after I get the Frontiersman interview questions and reply to them? It’s been my priority.”
The irony was rich, therefore, when the question of Couric’s that tripped up Palin that day was one about her reading habits: What newspapers and magazines did she read to stay abreast of the world? “Most of them,” Palin said. Specifically? “All of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.” Can you name a few? “I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too,” Palin said. “Alaska isn’t a foreign country.”
Debate camp commenced that night in Sedona with an outdoor buffet hosted by Cindy. Palin was thrilled to see her family and spent much of the time cradling Trig, but beyond that, she was subdued. To prevent leaks about the ongoing crisis, Schmidt had drastically narrowed the circle around Palin, cutting out much of her staff and foregoing the idea of a professional politician to stand in for Biden. (Randy Scheunemann, one of her foreign policy tutors from St. Paul, was assigned the job.) Davis had pleaded with Mark McKinnon, who had decided to sit out the general election because he wanted no part of flaying Obama, to ride to their rescue; he agreed, but just for that one night.
After dinner, they all retreated to a small room tightly packed with two lecterns and a camera, in one of the McCain compound’s guest buildings. A run-through was attempted, in which Palin kept getting lost fifteen seconds into her answers, stopping suddenly and saying, No, no, wait, let me start over, or, Shoot, I don’t know this.
The session ended after an hour. Schmidt, Mark Wallace, and McKinnon stepped outside into the cool desert air, the night pitch black around them.
“What do you think?” Wallace asked McKinnon.
“Oh. My. God.”
The next day, Schmidt decreed the banishment of Palin’s hundreds of index cards. Instead, she was given twenty-five or thirty containing full-blown questions and answers, based on her team’s best guesses at what the debate queries would be, along with scripted pivots out of dangerous territory and onto safer ground. There was no time for Palin to learn enough to be turned into Jeane Kirkpatrick in the next forty-eight hours. But after seeing her handle the prompter malfunction at the convention, Team McCain knew that she had an impressive capacity for learning by rote.
They moved the lecterns outside and set them up by the creek for daytime rehearsals. Between sessions, Palin, dressed in a hockey jersey and soccer shorts, would go off by herself, sit on the porch or on a swing under a tree, and study up on her preset questions, committing the answers to memory.
The change of venue and routine seemed to have an effect. That night, Palin made it all the way through her formal run-through. When she finished, the room broke into applause. Priscilla Shanks, the speech coach who had worked with Palin at the convention, shouted out, “She’s back! She’s back!”
Schmidt and Wallace took a dimmer, more angst-ridden view. Outside Sedona, the stakes around the debate had continued to rise. On October 1, the night before the showdown, CBS ran the last, and arguably the worst, of the Couric clips: the one featuring Palin’s muffed Supreme Court answer. The previous Saturday, Tina Fey had unleashed her second stab at Palin on SAL, in a sketch spoofing the initial Couric sit-down, using nearly identical language to what the nominee had said about the bailout bill; a devastating mash-up juxtaposing the reality with the parody was zooming around the Web. And while Palin’s performance in prep had improved markedly, she was still committing howlers that, if let loose during the debate, would be cataclysmic events.
She also continued to stumble over an unavoidable element: her rival’s name. Over and over, Palin referred to Obama’s running mate as “Senator Obiden”—or was it “O’Biden”?—and the corrections from her team weren’t sticking. Finally, three staffers, practically in unison, suggested, Why don’t you just call him Joe?
Palin stared at them quizzically and said, “But I’ve never met him.”
IN FAR-OFF DELAWARE, things were running more smoothly, at least on the surface. At the Sheraton Suites Hotel in Wilmington, the opposing side had taken over the second floor and transformed it into a down-to-the-millimeter replica of the debate stage in St. Louis. The height of the lecterns. The distance between them. The lighting. The color scheme. All of it was identical to the real thing. And then the Obamans and Bidenettes saw the press pictures of Palin rehearsing in her gym shorts by a tree. They had to laugh.
But only for a second. Then they went back to being tied up in knots with fear that Joe would botch his big moment.
It wasn’t hard to imagine how it could happen. The expectations for Palin were subterranean, while the bar for Biden was set around Jupiter. There wasn’t much to win here, in other words, but there was plenty to lose—and there were at least two obvious ways that Biden could do it. He might be condescending to Palin because he thought she was an ignoramus. Or he might be patronizing to her as a woman, which, given Joe’s old-school Sinatraesque tendencies, was just as likely.
The Obamans were pushing a simple strategy: Ignore Palin. Don’t engage her. Whatever happens, don’t let her lure you down any rabbit holes with her crazy syntax and run-on sentences.
But Joe couldn’t resist—not at first. A week or two before the three days of formal debate camp started on September 29, the campaign put him through his paces in a mock run-through against Anita Dunn. She played the part by reading from a script assembled almost entirely out of verbatim Palin quotes. That’s too incoherent, Biden exclaimed. Is that really what she says? No, that can’t be her answer. But, I mean, she’s not saying anything. How am I supposed to respond to that, folks?
And into the rabbit hole he went.
It only got worse once they brought in the actual stand-in for Palin, the governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm. Lithe and alluring like Palin, Granholm came with talking points and a strategy, having glutted herself on YouTube videos of Palin’s Alaska debates. Pushing the readiness regimen past the point of absurdity, the Obamans ran Granholm through her own pre-prep prep against a fake Biden. The result was a perfect Palin: charming, folksy, disciplined, flirty—and mean.
Biden’s first sessions with Granholm were bad enough to put a scare into Axelrod and Plouffe. Biden was in Meet the Press mode, ponderous and long-winded. Granholm, aware that family was Biden’s soft spot, made cracks about his son Hunter’s lobbying history, and Joe turned defensive. When Granholm dangled bait by playing dumb, he turned scornful and chauvinistic.
But Biden worked diligently with Michael Sheehan, who trained him using what Sheehan—with due generational aptness—dubbed an “Arthur Murray pattern.” Describe the situation; explain how it will be worse under McCain; describe how it’ll be better under us. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Biden quickly got the hang of it.
He also figured out other means of avoiding rabbit holes. In one session, Granholm was tossing in non sequiturs—explanations that started nowhere and ended up even farther off the map—when she tried to entice Joe into hole-diving with an answer on race that concluded with a wayward reference to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinn
er.
Biden paused. “I really have nothing to add to that.”
By the night of the debate, the Obamans were expressing confidence, but their doubts weren’t far beneath the surface.
“You feel like he’s ready?” Obama asked Dunn an hour before the debate.
“He’s totally ready,” Dunn assured him (and herself).
“You know,” Obama said, “I think I’m just going to watch this by myself.”
The debate began with its best-known moment: Palin striding onstage in a fitted black suit, extending a hand to Biden, and saying, “Hey, can I call you Joe?” From there, the next ninety minutes unfolded as almost no one expected they would. Neither Palin nor Biden gaffed. Neither said anything egregiously stupid. Neither went for the other’s throat, as both aimed their shots at the top of the opposite ticket.
When it was over, the Obamans exhaled and Biden was triumphal. Coming off the stage, he said to his aides, “You guys owe me. You don’t know how much restraint that took.”
McCainworld was ecstatic. Five days earlier, many of them had feared that Palin’s psychological fragility might lead to a fiasco. Palin had not only survived, but fought Biden to something like a draw. In their suite at the Four Seasons, the Palins stayed up past midnight celebrating, drinking champagne, talking about what came next. More rallies. More rope lines. And more attacks on Obama.
Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, Palin said. Let’s get out there and win this election!
THE DEBATE PROPELLED HER back onto the trail with a fresh head of steam, a renewed sense of confidence, and an appetite for Obama’s jugular. On October 4, The New York Times provided Palin an opportunity to capitalize on all three when it published a front-page article about the topic that Hillary Clinton always believed would come back to bite Obama: former Weather Underground subversive William Ayers.
Though the story concluded that Obama and Ayers “do not appear to have been close,” the next day McCainworld instructed Palin by email to lay into the Democratic nominee as “someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.” Palin eagerly agreed, and, with a few syntactical tweaks, delivered the message as written.
For McCainworld, it would be one of the precious few times in the election’s final month that Palin stuck to the script. With the debate-related tumult behind them and any possibility gone that Palin would be a game changer, McCain’s strategists hoped that she would continue to be useful in firing up the base and not create too many disruptions or distractions. But it wasn’t long before the signs appeared that Palin was going rogue.
The most widely publicized example was an interview she gave to the Times’s in-house conservative columnist, William Kristol, on October 5, the same day she thrashed Obama for “palling around with terrorists.” When Kristol asked why, if Ayers was on the table, Reverend Wright was not, Palin said that Obama’s pastor should be fair game and implicitly criticized McCain for not leading the charge. McCain was rarely bothered when Palin scampered off message, mainly because he did the same so often himself. But this was an exception. He’d drawn a hard line around Wright and couldn’t understand why his running mate would have crossed it.
At the same time, Palin was waging a persistent internal crusade to reverse one of the campaign’s major strategic decisions. On the day of the VP debate, McCainworld let it be known that it was pulling its resources out of Michigan, a key battleground state that it had determined was out of reach in the wake of the financial crisis. Palin had visited there more than once, thought she connected with its blue-collar voters and could put the state back in play, and lobbied to be allowed to return. When her traveling chief of staff, Andrew Smith, pointed out to her that McCain, Schmidt, and Davis had reached their conclusion on the basis of complex calculations involving the polls and the budget, Palin simply shrugged and uttered one of her signature phrases: “I know what I know what I know.”
Regardless of what Palin thought she knew, Schmidt and Davis turned her down flat about venturing back into Michigan. But Palin refused to give in, sending email after email suggesting ways that she could squeeze a visit to the Wolverine State into her schedule. “It’s a cheap four hour drive from [Wisconsin], I’ll pay for the gas,” Palin wrote to the senior staff on October 8. “I’d just be sleeping at that midnight drivetime anyway.”
She was emerging as a big-time control freak. With her family now accompanying her most everywhere, making air-travel logistics a pain, she directed the campaign to “schedule bus transportation instead of flights wherever possible, even if that means late night drives in the bus.” She became maniacal about monitoring her media coverage; she was constantly channel-surfing and blogosphere mining, and when she came across any mention that was less than flattering, she insisted that her staff try to have it corrected. Palin also showed an unusual wariness about the politicians and donors brought aboard her campaign plane and bus, insisting that she prescreen them before their seats were confirmed. “I want to google them myself so I can know my comfort level,” she emailed her team on October 9. “Photos, etc with them may come back to haunt me if I can’t vet these folks myself.”
Palin’s concern with such appearances was seen by some as an indication that she already had her sights set on 2012. But in truth, she and Todd continued to be far more preoccupied by her status in Alaska than just about anything else. Any issue related to the state put them on high alert, and incited some of their worst propensities toward parsimoniousness with the truth. On October 10, when the Alaska legislature issued a report on Troopergate stating that Palin had abused her powers but not broken the law, Palin proclaimed to reporters that she’d been cleared of all wrongdoing. When her staff told her she would have to walk back her statement because it wasn’t true, she said, “Well, why was I told otherwise?”—neglecting the fact that her talking points had made the results of the report quite plain.
A few days later, Palin got into a fight with Schmidt when she insisted that the campaign put out a statement denying Todd’s involvement in the Alaskan Independence Party. Palin contended that Todd had mistakenly registered with the party and rectified the error; she also claimed the party had nothing to do with secession. Schmidt curtly informed her that secession was the party’s reason for existence and that, according to the campaign’s records, Todd had been a member for seven years.
For Schmidt and Davis, Palin was a time sink the size of the Lake Eyre Basin. She pestered them with complaints that her schedules were so tight that she didn’t have time to get in a daily run. She never took no for answer; she just kept asking different senior staffers until she found someone who told her what she wanted to hear. Every media opportunity put before her produced a conniption.
In mid-October, Palin was considering an offer to do a guest spot on Saturday Aight Live. Schmidt was in favor, saying it would show the country that she could laugh at herself. After watching some clips, Palin was chary. “I had no idea how gross ‘celebrities’ could get,” she wrote in an email to HQ. “These folks are whack.”
Palin eventually came around and did the program on October 18. The moment that everyone was waiting for was fleeting. She and Tina Fey crossed paths briefly on-screen but spoke not a word to each other. Even so, the charge from it was electric, and rightly so.
For all the emphasis McCainworld had placed on Palin’s big three image-making challenges, none of them had done as much to shape public perception of her as Fey—and Couric. Pop culture has always been a part of presidential contests, but never before had there been anything quite like the Fey-Couric double act: two uptown New York ladies working independently but in tandem, one engaged in eviscerating satire, the other in even-handed journalism. The composite portrait they drew of Palin was viral and omnipresent. The sparkle of celebrity made it irresistible, and devastating. Faced with the footage of Reverend Wright, Obama was able to slay the dragon with his words. Faced with Fey-Couric, Palin was powerless. Eve
rything she did or said only fed the beast. By the time she went on SAL, the definitional war over her had ended. She retained the ardor and loyalty of her fans, who continued to turn out for her, root for her, and defend her. But in the eyes of the broader public—and even more so those of the national media and political Establishments—any traces of her image as a maverick reformer had been erased. For them, Palin had been reduced to nothing more than a hick on a high wire.
ROGUE AS SARAH PALIN may have gone that October, she didn’t have a monopoly on the practice, even among running mates. The debate aside, Biden had basically been coloring outside the lines since the Democratic convention. With the Palin tornado making so much noise and kicking up so much debris, it just wasn’t nearly as noticeable—until, one day, it was.
In an effort to demonstrate his commitment to being a team player, Biden told Obama when he accepted the VP slot, “I’ll do anything you want me to do, but there are two things I won’t do: I won’t wear a funny hat and I won’t mess with my brand.”
The Biden brand meant a great deal to Joe, almost as much as the Biden name. To him, the brand was about substance, about truth-telling, about making hard choices even if they were politically awkward or painful. Biden thought of it as a Democratic version of the McCain brand—the old McCain brand, that is.
But what Biden quickly discovered was that Obama’s policies were awfully thin, not terribly specific, more rhetoric than substance. Right after the convention, at a prep session at his house in Wilmington for an appearance on Meet the Press, Biden listened to a bunch of the Obamans talk him through the Democratic ticket’s position on taxes. “That’s our policy? That’s our policy?” he said incredulously. “Well, it’s your campaign. I’ll say what you want me to say. But after Election Day, all bets are off.”
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