The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (22 page)

For Todd, June meant his annual escape to Dillingham to supervise the family’s fishing business. And to enjoy himself in other ways.

“Todd’s a player, especially when he’s out there at fishing camp,” a friend of his from Dillingham told me in 2010. “I could probably fill up most of my fingers with the names of women Todd has screwed in Dillingham. That man has sowed his oats. The ones in Dillingham, he knew them from growing up. Today, they’re in their forties, still caught up in drugs. In the summertime, when Todd came into town without Sarah, it was a fun time. Todd was partyin’, we all had a good time, daylight twenty-four hours a day.”

Sarah visited only infrequently. “Those people out there hate her,” a former Dillingham resident says. “All of Todd’s family hated her. She never interacted with any of them. J.D.’s wife, Wendy, cannot stand Sarah. Sarah has always treated Wendy like she was a piece of trash. And she hated J.D., was always mean to J.D., was always basically like, ‘J.D.’s not comin’ over here with his trashy friends,’ and Todd used to always be like, ‘I can’t even have my own brother around.’ ”

Sarah wanted no part of commercial fishing. “She’s never fished,” a longtime acquaintance says. “I was out there for years. She was never on the boat. She never was up at the fish camp. J.D., and I think Todd was part of it, they bought into a fish camp at the mouth of the Nushagak River. It was called Fishing Adventures or something like that. You’d bring the people in, you have a cook on site, you have tents, and basically you make big bucks.

“Sarah was never there. Sarah was never part of that. What she would do, maybe every two years she would show up and dump the kids and stay hidden. She’d never even come out to eat.

“When she was in town—for maybe three days, or two days, if she even came—oh, Todd was a completely different guy. We were all
warned. When Sarah was around we were always pre-warned. ‘Don’t tell her I did this, don’t say anything about that, don’t say nothin’.’

“If she didn’t win the governorship, they were going to divorce,” this acquaintance says. “Of course, back then they were divorcing every other month.”

IN 2005, Alaskans outside a closed circle of Wasillans were hearing none of these stories. Sarah was portrayed as the blessed mother of the Valley, a God-fearing Christian hockey mom wielding the big stick of true reform.

On October 18 she became the first Republican officially to enter the race for governor. “Keeping it simple is my philosophy,” she said. The
Daily News
reported on December 11 that she had “promising early poll numbers,” but said, “the former Wasilla mayor needs to work on name recognition.”

IT WAS NOT until late May that Frank Murkowski announced his intention to seek reelection. Having been elected in a landslide, Murkowski had used cronyism and imperiousness and an abject devotion to the interests of Big Oil to turn himself into the most unpopular governor in the country, with a June 15 disapproval rating of 78 percent.

A poll in late July, one month before the primary, showed Sarah leading with 36 percent, former state senator John Binkley of Fairbanks coming in second with 23 percent, and Murkowski last with 20. Twenty-one percent were undecided. Sarah’s one negative seemed to be her lack of experience. An August 4 letter to the
Daily News
called attention to this:

But that was a minority view. A week before the primary, a poll showed her leading Binkley 40 to 29 percent, with Murkowski trailing at 17. In the campaign’s final days, Murkowski tried to turn the ethical tables on Sarah, charging that, Ruedrich-like, she had used her mayor’s office to conduct political business. She responded by charging Murkowski with running a “smear campaign.”

On August 22, Sarah won the primary with 51 percent of the vote to Binkley’s 30 and Murkowski’s 19. In November she would face former two-term Democratic governor Tony Knowles and conservative independent Andrew Halcro, a former state legislator whose family operated the Avis franchise in Anchorage.

There was to be no stopping her. She was a fresh face—and a very pretty one—at a time when the Alaska media were starved for fresh faces. Where once she’d sought “glamour and culture” by driving to Anchorage to watch Ivana Trump sell perfume, now she personified at least the first of the two. The
Daily News
said she emerged from the primary “with a Joan of Arc glow,” and soon thereafter the paper christened her “the Joan of Arc of Alaska politics.” She was uncorrupted and incorruptible. She had fought her own party’s decadent power structure and had won. How could she not be heaven sent?

As the general election campaign began in September, Anchorage
Voice of the Times
columnist Paul Jenkins, as diehard a conservative as could be found in the Alaskan press, described the media’s embrace of Sarah as “nympholepsy,” a frenzy induced by nymphs.

He wrote about the “breathless, incredibly embarrassing fawning” over her, pointing out that her most prominent supporters, former governor Walter Hickel; former state senator Rick Halford; and her personal attorney, Wayne Anthony Ross, an avid gun collector who drove a Hummer with a license plate that read
WAR
, were members of the very faction Sarah had sworn to overthrow.

“The pseudo-coverage has gotten so bad that we are treated to stories about her winning smile,” he wrote. “And women, the talking heads now tell us, nowadays are dressing just as she does. The entire state, they blubber, is all atwitter over the lovely Ms. Palin. Oh, my.”

Any prospect that the media might recover its wits vanished with the explosive news, made public in early September, that the FBI had raided the offices of seven Alaskan legislators, all but one Republicans, seeking evidence that they’d accepted bribes from Veco, the oil services company founded by former welder and now multimillionaire Bill Allen.

That there was a corrupt coterie of Republicans in Juneau had been an open secret in Alaska for years, although no one in the timid media had ever revealed it. They even had a name for themselves, The Corrupt Bastards Club, and printed T-shirts and baseball caps with the slogan.

The FBI investigation eventually led to guilty pleas from or convictions of eleven Republicans, including the later overturned conviction of Alaska’s greatest living icon, U.S. senator Ted Stevens. The scandal colored the entire gubernatorial campaign. The Democratic candidate, Tony Knowles, was not implicated in the Veco scandal, but he had served eight years as governor, which was enough to make him a charter member of the privileged “good old boys” structure that Sarah was vowing to dismantle.

Given that climate, scant attention was paid to the fact that Sarah herself, while running for lieutenant governor, had accepted contributions from Veco. It was only $5,000, but that represented 10 percent of the money she raised for her lieutenant governor campaign.

Tony Hopfinger would later write in the
Dispatch
that she’d personally solicited a contribution from Allen in 2001, driving to his Anchorage home and sharing a bottle of wine with him. Following her charm offensive, Sarah received a total of ten five-hundred-dollar contributions from Veco executives and their wives.

As with her improper use of her Wasilla mayor’s office for political purposes, this blemish was ignored by media outlets more eager to sanctify her than report on her. Knowles, sixty-three, who’d run for the U.S. Senate and lost to Lisa Murkowski only two years earlier, was not a fresh face. In fact, in the aftermath of the FBI raids, the accomplished and affable Knowles was a dead candidate walking.

EVEN THOSE at the highest levels of Sarah’s campaign knew that she was not qualified to be governor. But they rationalized, and they hoped. As John Bitney told me in the summer of 2010, “We had a corruption issue. That’s one of the main reasons I worked on her campaign. I was pissed off. Watching Bill Allen float around the halls of my state capitol: it was disgusting. What I thought was, okay, we had this woman who couldn’t stick to a schedule and couldn’t make a decision about anything, and we had this cadre of crazies that were her circle, but if we get her into the governor’s office we can scissor off all the nut jobs, get a professional staff, and she will grow into the job and it will mold her.”

Sarah herself never slowed down long enough to let doubts about her abilities catch up to her. Other than scheduling—“a nightmare that not even Kafka could envision,” Bitney says—the hardest job her staff had was to keep her quiet about her religious beliefs. This wasn’t Wasilla, this was all of Alaska, and not everyone had a taste for her evangelical Kool-Aid.

Knowles sent a letter to voters who’d expressed support for abortion rights, pointing out Sarah’s opposition. As John Stein choked on his oatmeal, Sarah said with a straight face, “I think it’s a shame that
anyone would try to make this a banner issue in the campaign when it’s not.”

A month before the election, Sarah had an eleven-point lead over Knowles, with Halcro trailing in single digits. But she didn’t hide. She enjoyed taking on Knowles and Halcro in televised debates. Using index cards, a dazzling smile, and short, snappy answers, and—having studied video of Ronald Reagan—often responding to Knowles by saying, “There you go again,” in what the
Daily News
called “the sing-songy voice she uses when trying to score a zinger,” Sarah won the hearts, if not minds, of most viewers. The
Daily News
credited her with “classic schoolyard one-upmanship.” Her gift for it was not surprising, given that in so many ways she remained a tenth-grade Mean Girl.

Toward the end of the campaign, a despairing Halcro said, “We’re going to elect a candidate who never truly answered any questions.” Alaskans, as it turned out, didn’t want answers: they wanted Sarah, however imperfect she might have been. “The voters aren’t looking for perfection,” she said. “If they are looking for perfection, they should vote for God.” Clearly she was the next best thing.

She slipped up once, when she said that public schools should make creationism part of their curriculum as a valid alternative to evolution. Toward the end of a televised debate on October 25 she said, “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information … I am a proponent of teaching both.”

Bitney pulled her aside immediately.

“You just fucked up, girl.”

“I was just saying there needs to be both.”

“No, that’s wack! People think that’s wack.”

“I don’t see the problem,” she said.

“Trust us on this one,” Bitney said. “You’re way out there, too fucking far, you’re going to freak people out, Sarah. Don’t do that.”

After a heated backroom discussion, “We got her to backpedal and
we couched it down as best we could,” Bitney told me. In an interview the next day, Sarah said that all she’d meant to say was, “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”

“Even so,” Bitney recalled, “we still barely skated. Mostly she did a good job in the campaign of not letting that stuff seep out, but that’s who she is. She believes that stuff.”

It didn’t matter. In the climate of the time, nothing mattered except the image that Sarah presented to the voters. As the
Daily News
said in late October, “Her campaign has sometimes struggled this fall to put ideas and positions into clear focus. But they seem almost secondary. The main product Palin is selling this year, as in Wasilla ten years ago, is Palin herself.”

As Election Day neared, Bitney—like Sarah herself—was already looking beyond Juneau. “I was telling her in October, ‘You’d better be thinking of running for vice president,’ ” he said. “Here was a gorgeous young reformer, a woman, a fresh face with an intriguing story that could be developed. I thought, we can have this woman in the limelight going into the 2008 convention. So we need to be mindful of framing the story.”

She beat Knowles 48–41, with Halcro receiving 9 percent of the vote. But even before she moved in, Sarah saw the Governor’s Mansion as only a way station en route to her true destination, the one that God had always envisioned for her: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

O
N THURSDAY, June 24, I drive to Fairbanks. From Wasilla, on a fine summer’s day, it should take less than six hours to get there.

For me, Fairbanks evokes. In 1975 it gave me my first exposure to serious subzero cold. Forty below was normal, with ice fog, a phenomenon you don’t want to know about unless you’re considering moving to Fairbanks. But I was also there in July 1976, when the temperature was uncomfortable in a different way.

I drove to Fairbanks with my older three children, then aged nine, eight, and five. I was divorced from their mother, with whom they lived in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. They’d been out for a two-week summer visit. In those days, there was a direct flight to Philadelphia from Fairbanks, but not Anchorage. Undoubtedly, it had to do with Fairbanks’s brief and not-so-shining status as the epicenter of oil pipeline development.

I decided to drive the kids to Fairbanks so they could have a nonstop flight home. They’d get to see a bit more of Alaska, at least from a car window, and we could stop overnight at a roadside cabin halfway.

My first mistake was buying a used car in Anchorage for the trip. I thought I’d be okay because, I told myself, the dealer was a friend of a friend. It turned out that the dealer was a friend, or maybe acquaintance, of someone who turned out to be my acquaintance, not my
friend. It was a battered blue station wagon of indeterminate vintage, which would have been fine, except the radiator leaked.