At the church he “planted” in Kiambu, known as The Prayer Cave, and in the basement of a local grocery story, Muthee organized several weeks of imprecatory prayer against Mama Jane. He led his followers in “spiritual mapping,” a technique popularized at Ted Haggard’s World Prayer Center that consists of praying around buildings and city blocks occupied by demonic spirits. While cries for Mama Jane’s stoning intensified, the local police arrested the evil witch and ordered her never to return to Kiambu. Almost overnight, a golden era of Christian morality descended on the town, churches sprouted in suddenly vacant bars, and criminal activity evaporated like magic. Or so the story goes.
When a reporter from Women’s eNews traveled to Kiambu to investigate the story, she discovered that Muthee was a fraud. The reporter found Mama Jane still living in the compound from which Muthee claimed to have had her ousted. A forty-six-year-old woman whose real name was Jane Njenga, Mama Jane is revered by locals for adopting forty abandoned children, including the mechanic who fixed Muthee’s car. According to Mama Jane, Muthee paraded around town demanding through a megaphone that locals pray for her death, but nothing happened to her. She concluded that Muthee was a con man. “If I am bad, why haven’t people attacked me?” Mama Jane said. “Why haven’t they burnt this building down? That is what people here do to witches.”
Partly inspired by Muthee’s tall tales, Palin initiated her own spiritual battle in Wasilla. Her target was the Reverend Howard Bess, a local Baptist pastor who had opened the doors of his Covenant of the Covenant to openly gay Christians. Bess, an affable eighty-year-old born-again evangelical, had sought refuge in the Mat-Su Valley after infuriating church officials in Anchorage and Santa Barbara, California, with his advocacy for gay rights. Bess’s activism culminated in 1995 with the publication of his book-length plea for acceptance of gays in the church, Pastor, I Am Gay.
Palin’s allies from Wasilla Assembly of God crusaded to ban the book throughout the valley, ensuring that no bookstore—including the national chain Waldenbooks—dared carry it. Palin personally visited the Wasilla public library twice to request that the librarian remove Bess’s book from her shelves. When I visited the library, a librarian told me the book had been “moved” to another library out of space concerns. Shelf space, however, was ample enough to accommodate the entire Left Behind series.
“Sarah Palin is a true believer,” Bess told me over coffee at Vagabond Blues, a café twenty miles from Wasilla in the town of Palmer. “She has a dualistic worldview that divides the world into black and white. She sees it as her mission to destroy evil, whether it is gay people, a foreign government she perceives as an enemy, or a political opponent like Obama.” Bess estimated that the Christian right’s sabotage cost his ministry at least $200,000. In 2002, while Palin served as mayor, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman published a cartoon depicting a deranged, drooling child molester rushing into Bess’s church to join the homosexuals already inside.
In 2005, with Palin gearing up for a tough campaign for governor against former Democratic Governor Tony Knowles, Muthee paid a special visit to Wasilla Assembly of God to confer his blessing on her candidacy. With Palin seated in the front row, Muthee suggested that Christians like Palin should “invade” government in order to seize the reins of the world’s economy from the Jews, to whom he cryptically but clearly referred as “Israelites.” “It’s high time that we have top Christian businessmen, businesswomen, bankers, you know, who are men and women of integrity running the economics of our nations,” Muthee said. “That’s what we are waiting for. That’s part and parcel of transformation. If you look at the—you know—if you look at the Israelites, that’s how they work. And that’s how they are, even today.”
With that, Muthee summoned Palin to the altar for an anointing. Flanked by Ed Kalnins, the new pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God, and another local Third Wave preacher, Phil Markwardt, Palin bowed her head and closed her eyes. “We are asking you in the name of this Valley, make a way for Sah-rah, even in the political arena!” Muthee exclaimed in his raspy, thickly accented voice. While Kalnins and Markwardt gripped Palin’s shoulders, tongue-talking loudly rose from the pews. “Bring finances her way even for the campaign in the name of Jesus!” Muthee shouted, his left palm on Palin’s head. “Oh father, use her to turn this nation around . . . so that the curse can be broken. . . . We come against every hindrance of the enemy standing in her way today in the name of Jesus! Every form of witchcraft is what you rebuke in the name of Jesus!”
The experience had a lasting impact on Palin. When she returned to Wasilla Assembly of God in June 2008 to address the graduation ceremony of the Master’s Commission, an indoctrination program for the church’s college-age members, Palin linked Muthee’s anointing to her election as governor. “As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he’s so bold. And he was praying, ‘Lord make a way, Lord make a way,’” Palin said, imitating Muthee’s raspy, thickly accented intonations. “And I’m thinking, this guy’s really bold, he doesn’t even know what I’m going to do, he doesn’t know what my plans are. And he’s praying not, ‘oh, lord if it be your will may she become governor.’ No, he just prayed for it. He said, ‘Lord make a way and let her do this next step.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
While Palin barnstormed the country in late September, Muthee returned to the Mat-Su Valley. I was there to observe his activities. Muthee delivered his first sermon at a small house belonging to the Wasilla Assembly of God. When I arrived, members were already in deep prayer, swaying in a trance to a quintet’s lilting pop-rock sounds and speaking in tongues. Muthee appeared at the podium half an hour later.
The Kenyan preacher explained the current relevance of Queen Esther, a Jewish beauty queen who married the king of Assyria and then used her seductive wiles to persuade him to save her people from the evil Haman. The resonance was clear: Palin, the former beauty pageant contestant who had chosen Esther as her biblical role model when she first entered politics, would topple the secular tyrants to lead her people, the true Christians, into the kingdom.
Building toward his climax, Muthee summoned the flock to spiritual warfare, invoking Branham’s “serpent seed” doctrine. “How do you kill a python?” Muthee asked an adolescent boy in the front row. “Step on its neck!” the boy responded almost instantly. “Right,” Muthee replied. “You have to step on the necks of the pythons to crush the enemy.” Then Muthee drew the worshippers to their feet for a prayer:
We come against that python spirit. We come against that spirit of witchcraft as the body of Christ. Right now in the name of Jesus! Ooooh-raba-saka-ta-la. Come on, pray, pray! Raba-sandalalala-bebebebekalabebe. Shanda-la-bebebeka-lelebebe. . . . That’s why we come against all forms of witchcraft. All the python spirits that are released against the body of Christ . . . and bring this nation into the Kingdom.
When Muthee finished, a Russian pastor emerged from the pews and took hold of the microphone. In his thick accent, the pastor boomed, “Right now we exercise our power and we put our feet against the heads of the Enemy in the name of Jesus!”
REAL AMERICANS
By the time I returned from Alaska to the lower forty-eight, in early October, Palin’s once radiant image had suffered severe damage. Her wounds were mostly self-inflicted. In an interview with Katie Couric, the NBC anchor known for her softball style, Palin proved unable to answer even a basic question about what magazines she read. “All of them,” she replied. Palin’s insistence to ABC’s Charlie Gibson that she was qualified to set national security policy because she could see Russia from her home state (visible from an island called Little Diomede that Palin had never visited) provided weeks of material for late-night TV comedians.
Palin’s performance in wide-ranging interviews highlighted not only the gaps in her basic knowledge but also the importance of the Wasilla Assembly of God in the formation of her worldview. She had assimilated her values, philosophy
, and outlook not from rigorous study (she attended five colleges in Idaho before earning her communications degree) or from international travel (she had left America only once and did not have a passport) but from the hermetically sealed Third Wave subculture of her church. She was too parochial to withstand heavy media scrutiny and too extreme to cultivate support from anyone other than “the rabble.”
Key members of the conservative intelligensia suddenly recoiled at Palin’s presence. New York Times columnist David Brooks, a neocon who had written glowingly of McCain, said Palin “represented a fatal cancer on the Republican Party.” In an interview with the Dartmouth Review, former National Review editor Jeffrey Hart called Palin “extremely ignorant” and “a religious crackpot.” Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and a conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal, blasted Palin as “a dope and unqualified from the start.” Lincoln Chafee, the liberal Republican senator whose defeat in 2006 signaled the GOP’s death knell in the Northeast, described Palin as a “cocky wacko” and said her selection had “thrown this firestorm” into the campaign.
Although Palin’s disastrous interviews damaged her credibility, they also obscured her radical religious beliefs. Those were never really investigated. But while the mainstream press generally overlooked details such as Palin’s apparent belief in witchcraft, the movement’s adulation intensified. For them she had received “the anointing,” as former Christian Broadcasting Network director Jim Bramlett said. “I believe Sarah Palin could not have gotten to where she is without God’s backing,” a twenty-something male picketer outside an Anchorage abortion clinic remarked to me. “And for whatever reason, God appoints leaders.” “I do believe she’s anointed for this position,” said another protester, a middle-aged woman. The woman added that because Alaska is shaped like a crown, “I really do believe that Alaska’s called to a key position to cry out for our nation and to lead our nation.”
Instead of the suburban hockey moms the GOP hoped to attract by selecting Palin, those who filled swing-state fairgrounds and arenas to cheer the VP candidate were focused obsessively on social issues and were sometimes openly racist. Not only was this not the portrait of a winning coalition—it was not much of a coalition at all—it became politically combustible. A few words of incitement were all it would take to turn the party base into a virtual lynch mob.
Palin did not hold anything back. Declaring that “the gloves are off,” she accused Barack Obama of “pallin’ around with terrorists” such as former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers, who once served on a Chicago nonprofit’s board of directors with Obama. “This is a man who launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist,” Palin told a crowd in Clearwater, Florida. “This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” With these two lines, uttered apparently without the permission of McCain or his top aides, Palin opened up a deep abyss. “Kill him!” a man shouted when Palin linked Obama to terrorism, according to Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank.
When Palin mentioned Obama again, another man cried, “Terrorist!” “Treason!” someone else yelled when Palin attacked Obama for supposedly criticizing the U.S. military. “He’s a nigger!” a woman screamed during a Des Moines, Iowa, Palin rally. “Go back to Kenya!” a man waiting in line outside a Johnstown, Pennsylvania, rally told Obama supporters across the street. Another man joined the taunting: “Born in Kenya, citizen of Indonesia!” he barked about Obama. And to Obama’s supporters, he shouted, “Kill some more babies, you bastards!” “Yeah, you babykillers!” echoed a middle-aged woman. Nearby, a portly old man held a stuffed Curious George monkey with an Obama sticker on its head. “This is little Hussein,” he said with a wry smile, using Obama’s Muslim middle name for effect. “Little Hussein wanted to see truth and good Americans.”
As word spread about the growing atmosphere at Palin’s rallies, activists from the right’s farthest shores perceived fresh opportunities to recruit new bodies. Outside a Palin rally on October 13 in Virginia Beach, a producer from the anti-Semitic, black-bashing, and avowedly “pro-white” radio show Political Cesspool, greeted McCain-Palin supporters with a sign advertising his broadcasts. Just feet away, Randall Terry, the former leader of Operation Rescue, a group responsible at least indirectly for numerous bombings of women’s health clinics and for assassinations of abortion doctors in the late 1980s and 1990s, solicited volunteers to canvas for McCain. “We must do whatever it takes to stop Obama!” Terry shouted through a megaphone, inviting cheers from passersby filing into the arena. (Asked by NBC’s Brian Williams whether abortion clinic bombers were terrorists, Palin replied, “I don’t know.”)
Some McCain-Palin supporters unleashed their violent anger against anything they could find. In late October, maintenance workers at Western Carolina University discovered a dead bear cub riddled with bullets in the middle of campus. “It looked like it had been shot in the head as best we can tell,” a university spokesman said. “A couple of Obama campaign signs had been stapled together and stuck over its head.” Days before the killing of the bear cub, Obama received a report from the Secret Service documenting a dramatic rise in the number of threats against him since Palin linked him to terrorists. “Why would they try to make people hate us?” Michelle Obama plaintively asked her friend and close advisor, Valerie Jarrett.
Under Palin, the self-destructive trend that fueled the movement subsumed the party once and for all. Republican voters could not be restrained from prostrating themselves before Palin’s red Naughty Monkey heels, even as the rest of the American public rejected her. They eagerly followed her toward catastrophic defeat with the comforting notion that her repudiation was a form of anti-Christian persecution. To them, she was more than a politician; she was their magic helper, the God-fearing glamour girl who parachuted into their backwater towns to lift them from the drudgery of their lives, assuring them that they were the “good people.”
“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation,” Palin told an audience in Greensboro, North Carolina.
And what about the non-pro-America (read: anti-American) areas of the country? Where was the fake America located? Palin seemed to pinpoint these areas in the coastal cities where transnational elites such as Obama and his latte liberal entourage were grown. To the Palin followers, Obama was a multicolored piñata stuffed with all the movement’s most evildoing hobgoblins. But no matter how hard Palin swung, she could not even graze him. Obama remained calmly above the fray, repeating his unifying message—“In times of need there are no red states or blue states”—frustrating and inciting the movement.
WHACKO
In the years since he ended his rancorous tenure as the Bush administration’s secretary of state in 2005, General Colin Powell studiously avoided any confrontation with the right-wing forces that had sought to sabotage him. But when Palin’s rhetoric reached its demagogic apogee, Powell, the quintessential good soldier and self-described “Rockefeller Republican,” finally broke his monk-like vow of silence, endorsing Obama during an October 19 appearance on Meet the Press.
The endorsement stung McCain, who counted Powell as a close friend—so close that Powell had prefaced a phone call delivering McCain the bad news by telling him, “I love you.” But Powell’s endorsement was not designed to spite McCain. Rather, it was motivated by the general’s belief that there was no longer a place for him in a Republican Party run according to the movement’s sectarian agenda. Powell was a casualty of the movement’s machinations, having had his nascent presidential ambitions dashed in 1996 by James Dobson, then having watched while Bush sided with Dobson against his own push to promote reproductive health internationally in 2002. Now that Dobson and his minions spoke through Palin, it was an even more disturbing prospect for Powell.<
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In explaining his endorsement, Powell singled Palin out. “I don’t believe she’s ready to be president of the United States, which is the job of the vice president,” he said. “And so that raised some question in my mind as to the judgment that Senator McCain made.” Calling the McCain campaign’s approach “narrower and narrower,” Powell noted, “the party has moved even further to the right, and Governor Palin has indicated a further rightward shift. I would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, but that’s what we’d be looking at in a McCain administration.”
Powell continued with an impassioned repudiation of Palin’s concept of “real America.” “Mr. Obama, at the same time, has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people,” Powell said. “He’s crossing lines—ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines. He’s thinking about all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values.”
Powell’s withering critique of the Republican Party under Palin delivered the coup de grâce to McCain. After withstanding months of attacks on his national security credentials, Obama now had the full-throated support of the former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McCain’s judgment, once considered his greatest strength, a quality borne from decades of experience, was now in question.
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