The oldest Palin child, Track (named for Todd and Sarah’s mutual love of track and field), was reputed to be a troublemaking party animal who enlisted in the National Guard to avoid expulsion from high school. In 2005, the progressive Alaska radio station 1080 KUDO reported that Track Palin was among four teenage boys arrested for seriously vandalizing 110 school buses, deflating their tires and unplugging their engine block heaters. Because 1080 only cited an unnamed judicial source and three of the boys were juveniles, only two of the culprits’ identities were revealed. However, a local resident told me Track was among the vandals. “The Palin kids really acted out, but that’s because their mother’s always at work, never around, and their father’s up on the North Slope doing business,” the local gossiped. “It’s actually very sad.” (Track Palin joined the National Guard soon after the incident occurred.)
A former classmate of Levi Johnston told me Johnston was expelled from Wasilla High for vandalizing a local liquor store and cutting the brake lines on the school’s fleet of buses. Rumors also swirled throughout town about Johnston’s mother, Sherry, a reputed dealer in “Hillbilly Heroin,” who met her customers in parking lots under cover of darkness. That rumor was confirmed after the campaign was over, although state troopers were prepared to arrest Sherry Johnston much earlier. According to an affidavit signed by a state trooper, they delayed Johnston’s arrest and allowed her to continue dealing for several months in order to prevent another embarrassing story from emerging while Palin, the hometown girl, campaigned for vice president.
While Sarah Palin denounced the media’s scrutiny of her daughter’s pregnancy, she proudly cradled her new son, Trig, in the national press corps limelight. Named by Todd Palin for what he believed was a Norse word for “strength,” though no such word exists (“Trygg” means “safe” or “reliable” in Norwegian), the baby was born with Down syndrome. After learning through a sonogram that her child would have Down syndrome, Palin bravely chose to carry him to term.
Her decision excited James Dobson, and he wrote her a letter congratulating her for having what he called “that little Downs Syndrome baby.” “What a way to emphasize your pro-life leanings there,” Dobson declared on a September 2 radio broadcast. Tony Perkins, who phoned in from the Family Research Council office in Washington, DC, echoed Dobson: “It’s one thing to support the policy. It’s another to live it out.”
Finally, Dobson announced that he was reversing his vow to oppose McCain. “If I went into the polling booth now, I’d pull the lever for John McCain.” McCain had suffered torture in a North Vietnamese prison camp and given over thirty years of his life to public service, but he earned James Dobson’s vote only for selecting a running mate who decided not to abort her disabled child.
Hours before Palin’s debut speech at St. Paul’s Excel Center, a Christian-right group called Republican Women for Life gathered at a nearby hotel for a pep rally called “The Life of the Party.” The octogenarian anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly had founded Republican Women for Life during a successful battle she initiated with pro-choice moderate Republicans over the 1992 convention plank. Having brought the party’s position on abortion squarely in line with that of the movement, Schlafly’s group cheered the selection of one of its own, and of a new generation, as an apotheosis.
“You are not welcome here,” a young woman working the table at the event’s media check-in repeated to me over and over without explanation. She rose and attempted to drag me by my right arm toward an exit, summoning security guards to remove me from the hotel. Visceral hostility to the media instantly became one of Palin’s themes.
I learned after my unceremonious ejection that “The Life of the Party” was headlined by Laura Ingraham, a right-wing radio talk show host with a mean-girl shtick, known for her blonde coif, occasional leopard print miniskirt, and anti-elitist harangues. After hailing Palin as the representative of “a new kind of feminism,” Ingraham homed in on her favorite target. “But the liberal elites and the media are trashing Sarah Palin. They have all these stamps on their passports because they’re so much smarter than we are.”
Todd Palin and his children filed into the front row of the arena’s VIP booth moments before Sarah’s prime-time acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention on September 3. Behind a swarm of photographers and cameramen, Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston huddled together, holding hands and whispering asides. Rudy Giuliani and his third wife, Judith, were seated directly behind them. While press photographers swarmed around the Palins, seven-year-old Piper Palin (“It’s a cool name,” explained her father) cradled the newborn Trig, licked her palm, and smoothed his hair.
John McDonnell, an evangelical blogger for the far-right online community Free Republic, claimed holy significance for Trig’s spit-shine: “When Piper Palin spat on her hand to wipe down the hair of her brother Trig Palin, it was a touching scene for millions of viewers. I have since discovered some connections between that scene and the story of the blind man in the Gospel of John, chapter 9.” McDonnell combined scorn for liberals with scriptural citation. “The ugly suggestion by liberals that Sarah Palin sinned in not having aborted Trig, the spit that Piper wiped across Trig’s hair, and the use of ‘palon’ in the Greek text of John 9, combine in a way that I find interesting.”
Palin reveled in the movement’s affinity for her family and calibrated her speech to capture its populist spirit. “A writer observed, ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’” Palin remarked, “and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I grew up with those people.”
After highlighting her background as “an average hockey mom,” Palin turned on the liberal media. “I’ve learned quickly these last few days that, if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.” The crowd erupted in boos and chanting: “NBC! NBC!”
The unnamed “author” whom Palin quoted was Westbrook Pegler, a prominent mid-century columnist and demagogue who became one of the godfathers of right-wing populism. Pegler identified himself in a column defending a lynching in rural California: “I claim authority to speak for the rabble because I am a member of the rabble in good standing.” He was a sworn enemy of FDR’s New Deal and the Democratic Party’s alliance with labor unions, which he portrayed as an international Communist conspiracy designed to undermine the freedom of average working Americans. Pegler loathed FDR so intensely that when an assassin killed the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, in an attempt on FDR’s life in early 1933, he lamented that the killer “got the wrong man.” During the latter phase of his career, Pegler morphed into a fanatical anti-Semite and open fascist, a curious development considering that he had married a Jew. His screeds grew so extreme even the John Birch Society barred him from the pages of its newsletter. “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter [Robert F. Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies,” Pegler wishfully predicted in 1965. Pegler died a year after RFK’s assassination.
Had Pegler lived to witness Palin’s rise, he probably would have conferred authority upon her to speak for “the rabble.” Indeed, her rise to national prominence was remarkable, considering her humble beginnings in southeastern Alaska, where her schoolteacher parents moved from rural Idaho when she was an infant. During hunting season, Palin (born Sarah Heath) learned to fish, shoot, and field dress a moose, then made mooseburgers throughout the winter from the meat her family stored. A star basketball player for Wasilla High, Palin earned the nickname “Sarah Barracuda” for her aggressive playing style. After high school, she zigzagged from Hawaii to Idaho to Alaska and back to Idaho, enrolling in five small colleges before earning her bachelor’s degree in journalism.
In 1984, during a break between semesters, Palin won Wasilla’s “Miss Congeniality” contest and then gained statewide recognition as runner-up for Miss Alas
ka, losing to the state’s first African American crown winner. Soon after, she eloped with her high school sweetheart, Todd Palin, a part Yu’pik Eskimo and locally famous snowmobile enthusiast. Todd promptly went to earn his fortune in the oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope, while in his spare time winning four contests of the Iron Dog, the world’s longest and most grueling snowmobile race.
In 2006, Palin scored a stunning victory in the Republican gubernatorial primary, defeating incumbent Governor Frank Murkowski, the corruption-plagued patriarch of one of the state’s most powerful families (his daughter Lisa was Alaska’s junior senator). Upon inauguration, Palin began referring to her husband as Alaska’s “First Dude,” a nickname that lent to the couple’s populist and distinctly Alaskan charm. She went on to assail the state GOP for its ethical lapses, leading an investigation against party chairman Randy Reudrich for using his position as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission Pipeline for partisan purposes. Reudrich was forced to resign and pay a $12,000 fine, an outcome that helped Palin consolidate her cutthroat, nonpartisan image. In a state exhausted by corrupt leadership, voters found her style refreshing.
Although she touted herself as a strict fiscal conservative standing against the rising tide of socialism, Palin instituted some relatively liberal fiscal policies. She authorized a 28 percent spending increase in the state budget, doling out checks for $3,269 to every man, woman, and child in Alaska from the Permanent Fund Dividend, a stipend from the state’s massive oil investment account. The checks represented a record $1,200 increase from the year before. Alaskans immediately voiced approval for Palin’s leadership, giving her a whopping 85 percent approval rating. Her detractors nicknamed her “Moose-o-lini,” however, mocking her leveraging of free money into record popularity. Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes omitted mention of the PFD checks in his puff-piece “The Most Popular Governor,” which he authored after his magazine’s cruise to Alaska.
Within the movement, the personal details of Palin’s background—hockey mom, hunter, mother—resonated deeply. She was the antithesis of her running mate, the son and grandson of four-star admirals, whose ancestor served on General George Washington’s staff. Beyond her Everywoman image, Palin was a product of the culture of personal crisis and therefore an authentic representative of the movement’s true ethos.
“So many families deal with the same issues Sarah Palin is dealing with, so we really can relate to what she is going through,” said Grace Van Diest, a Republican delegate from Alaska whom I interviewed on the convention floor. Van Diest, a kindly, middle-aged mother of two from the Mat-Su Valley, Alaska’s Bible Belt, was typical of many members I spoke with from her delegation.
“I think that abstinence should be a priority,” Van Diest told me. “We have taught our daughters—we have three daughters and a son—and we’ve taught our daughters to not even date until they’re more ready to be married. . . . [All] of our daughters have gone out on a date with their dad and talked about keeping themselves pure until marriage. They each wear a promise ring, a little tiny diamond that they wear constantly to remind them they will keep pure.”
In the Last Frontier, where many families live in “the bush,” far from roads and public services, sexual trauma is unusually common. The state’s rape rate is 2.5 times the national average; it also posted the nation’s largest spike in teen birth rates from 2005 to 2006, the year Palin became governor. In addition, Alaskans have America’s highest illicit drug use rate and are among the country’s leaders in binge drinking. In this harrowing environment, Van Diest and many of her neighbors had turned to the Christian right’s crisis industry for relief.
SEASON OF THE WITCH
Prior to her nomination, Palin listed her home phone number in Alaska’s yellow pages. She was known to spend hours in her local Wal-mart chatting with constituents. When I traveled to Alaska’s Mat-Su Valley, nearly every politically active resident I spoke to had met the governor on at least one occasion. But many of Palin’s acquaintances, admirers and critics alike, described her in a dramatically different light from that in which she presented herself to the American public. To those who knew Palin, both her allies and her enemies, she was no ordinary hockey mom, but rather an evangelical foot soldier who spearheaded the movement’s takeover of the local government in the Mat-Su Valley. Her power base was the Wasilla Assembly of God, a Pentecostal mega-church where she was baptized and spent over twenty years as a member.
Most Pentecostal congregations are socially conservative, particularly those that are predominantly white, but Wasilla Assembly of God was in thrall to a radical Pentecostal trend once denounced by church authorities as heresy. Ted Haggard’s former congregation, New Life Church, was a bastion of this same extreme theology. So was the church that Matthew Murray’s parents attended, which the young mass killer described as a hothouse of “charismatic/‘fanatical evangelical’ insanity.”
Called the Third Wave, the theology that informed Wasilla Assembly of God members was rooted in an explicitly anti-intellectual creation myth. According to the Third Wave’s founding father, William Branham, a rural Canadian preacher, Satan had sex with Eve and gave birth to Cain—the so-called “Serpent Seed.” “Through Cain came all the smart, educated people down to the antediluvian flood—the intellectuals, bible colleges,” Branham wrote. “They know all their creeds but know nothing about God.”
Despite opposition from inside the Assembly of God’s hierarchy, Third Wave congregations won droves of adherents by emphasizing charismatic displays of ecstatic release, including practices such as holy laughter (hysterical giggling that supposedly represents the spirit of God flowing through the bodies of believers) and drunkenness in the spirit, where worshippers emulate the experience of intoxication so melodramatically that Charles Bukowski would reel in embarrassment. Faith healing is also central to Third Wave theology; Todd Bentley, an influential Florida-based Third Wave pastor known for his tattoos, body piercings, and pseudo-punk attitude, once attempted to “explode” a man’s tumors by drop-kicking him in the chest. He also kicked an old woman in the face because, he said, “The Holy Spirit spoke to me.” One of Bentley’s mottoes is “Some people snort cocaine, others snort religion.”
Behind the Third Wave’s histrionics lies an aggressive brand of Dominionism focused on purging “demon influence” from entire geographic areas through prayer or more forceful means if necessary. Becky Fischer, a Third Wave youth pastor who gained fame as the anti-hero of the 2006 award-winning documentary Jesus Camp, urged pastors to indoctrinate an army of spiritual suicide bombers to seize control of the country. “I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam,” Fischer said in the documentary during an unguarded moment. “I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have . . . excuse me, but we have the truth!”
The Third Wave arrived in Alaska through a “spiritual warfare network” founded by an Anchorage-based Haida Indian named Mary Glazier, who claimed to have converted sixty members of her family, including her formerly alcohol-abusing parents. Seeking a “battle strategy” against the rising tide of sin that consumed her son, who committed suicide in 1990, Glazier tried to gain access to the state’s prison system, a pit of desperation. A young female prison chaplain opposed Glazier’s Dominionist, evangelizing intentions. Glazier responded by branding the woman a witch and began to utter imprecatory prayers. “As we continued to pray against the spirit of witchcraft,” Glazier recalled with glee, “her incense altar caught on fire, her car engine blew up, she went blind in her left eye, and she was diagnosed with cancer.”
Sarah Palin was one of the first members of Glazier’s spiritual warfare prayer circle in Wasilla. According to Glazier, while Palin prayed with her during the early 1990s, “God began to speak to [her] about entering politics.” With Glazier’s encour
agement, Palin joined other members of the Wasilla Assembly of God in a takeover of Wasilla’s government. In 1994, Palin won election to the Wasilla City Council and the local hospital board, a victory that resulted in the ousting of her mother-in-law, Faye Palin. During the first meeting of the new Dominionist-dominated hospital board, Palin and her allies passed a resolution (later overturned by the state Supreme Court) banning abortion in all circumstances, including when the life of the mother was in mortal danger.
While Palin served on the Wasilla city council, a Democrat named Nick Carney befriended her and showed her the ropes. However. when Palin announced her 1996 bid for mayor against Carney, she launched a vicious campaign against her former friend, spewing character attacks utterly foreign to the Mayberry Junction-like atmosphere of Wasilla. “I watched that campaign unfold, bringing a level of slime our community hadn’t seen until then,” recalled Phil Munger, a local music teacher who counted himself as a close friend of Stein.
Palin supporters from Wasilla Assembly of God touted her sweeping opposition to abortion, distributing fliers hailing her as “The Christian Candidate,” a slogan that supporters of Stein, a Lutheran with a Jewish-sounding last name, considered a subtle anti-Semitic ploy. Palin’s friend Mark Chryson, then chairman of the Alaskan Independence Party, a secessionist party with close links to anti-government militia groups across the country, claimed that Stein and his wife were not legally married. “So we literally had to produce a marriage certificate,” Stein said. “And as I recall, they said, ‘Well, you could have forged that.’” Palin easily vanquished Stein.
In 2000, while serving as mayor, Palin asked her pastor at Wasilla Assembly of God for a copy of a video circulating among members called “Transformation,” produced by George Otis, an evangelical author who once raised money for former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver after the latter’s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. (Cleaver went on to found the syncretic pseudo-religion of “Christlam” and to design men’s jeans with special codpieces—“Cleaver sleeves,” he called them—that prominently displayed the wearer’s genitals.) In the video, Otis documented the heroism of a Pentecostal pastor named Bishop Thomas Muthee, who supposedly saved the city of Kiambu, Kenya, from an evil witch named Mama Jane, who supposedly used her otherworldly powers to manipulate top government officials and ordered one death per month by car crash in front of her “divination house.” “Mama Jane either gets saved and serves the Lord, or she leaves town!” Muthee proclaimed. “There is no longer room in Kiambu for both of us!”
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