The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by Joe McGinniss

  As for my side of the fence, almost anytime I glance out my kitchen window, I see a car parked by the chain. Not the same car—dozens of different cars and trucks and campers. Often, people will be standing outside the vehicles taking pictures of the fence.

  It reminds me of the looky-loos who throughout the O. J. Simpson trial flocked to the condo on South Bundy Drive in Brentwood to see where O.J. killed his wife and Ron Goldman. The difference was that something had actually happened there.

  Here, there is nothing going on. There is only a fence: two fences, actually, the original and Todd’s addition. Pictures have appeared all over the Internet for six weeks, but still the curious drive down the rutted dirt lane until they reach the chain that lets them go no farther, except on foot.

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  Despite the POSTED and DO NOT ENTER and NO TRESPASSING signs, some do walk around or duck under the chain, wanting to get closer to the fence. If I’m there, I tell them that they are trespassing on private property and they have to leave. “But we just want a picture.” I tell them they can take all they want from outside the chain. And they do, morning, noon, and night, as if the fence itself has become some sort of quasi-religious shrine, protecting Queen Esther of the North from prying, agnostic eyes.

  FINALLY, I FIND a friend of Sarah’s who will talk to me. I’ve put a lot of time into trying, but, forget fences, Sarah has dropped an iron curtain of silence around herself. Not only will she not talk to anyone who isn’t paying her, but she’s made family and friends take an oath of omertà, at least in regard to me.

  By insisting that those close to her rebuff my requests for interviews, she is ensuring that I’ll wind up speaking mostly to those who do not feel bound by her wishes. Then she and her acolytes can complain that my book is not “fair and balanced” like Fox News.

  Even this friend of hers, who at first tells me I can use her name, then changes her mind, is trepidatious about talking to me, to put it mildly. She insists on meeting where we will not be seen, eventually agreeing to The Digital Cup, on Knik-Goose Bay Road, which is almost deserted on the afternoon we meet.

  Despite all the precautions, she’s so jittery it’s hard for me to concentrate on what she’s saying.

  “Tell me about Sarah.”

  “The first time I saw her was at aerobics. She had no makeup on and her hair was in a ponytail. Then I saw her at a PTA function, wearing makeup, and I said, ‘Oh my God, she’s beautiful!’ ”

  “But beyond her looks, what drew you to her?”

  “She was exciting. Even at city council meetings. She’s much more exciting in person than she looks like on TV. And then, when she ran for mayor, they ran such a dirty campaign against her. They misused a state law just to find out that Todd had a DUI charge against him in Dillingham. She got so afraid they were after her that she had to paint her car a different color. And then, of course, they slashed her tires.”

  “By ‘they,’ whom do you mean?”

  “Stein’s people, of course. Who else would do it? They were sexually harassing her, pretending to be in her aerobics class just so they could make her feel uncomfortable by looking at her. And then, after the council meetings, they’d all get together at Nobody’s Inn and do their real business, and Sarah knew that was unethical and she had the courage to stand up and stop them.”

  “How well did you know her socially?”

  “For fifteen years my friends and I had a Christmas ornament exchange, and until she got too busy Sarah always came. She’d come late and leave early.”

  “Did you ever have any serious talks with her, one-on-one?”

  “She’s not that kind of person. She’s too busy for talk because she’s always doing something to try to make things better for everyone else.”

  “Really?”

  “I remember when she quit the oil and gas commission after she forced Ruedrich to resign. She was with a bunch of us, I think it was at an ornament exchange, and she said, ‘Well, the Democrats have always hated me, and now the Republicans hate me, too. I’ve ruined myself politically, but I just had to do what I knew was right.’ ”

  “But it turned out that the publicity she got because of Ruedrich was what made her viable as a statewide candidate.”

  “Yes, but she didn’t want that. Sarah never thinks of herself. She only thinks about the good she can do for others. Maybe people in Alaska have gotten cynical, but just go Outside and take a look. I’ve been to lots of places in the past couple of years and people just love her. It’s oozing out, from all kinds of people.”

  “Then why have people here lost their enthusiasm for her?”

  “Because of the press and the bloggers. All that negativity. Nobody ever writes about the good that she does. There was a boy a couple of years ago, when she was governor, who was in a bicycle accident. She actually went to his house and brought him a gift. The Frontiersman wrote it up, of course, but the rest of the press just ignored it.”

  “So you’re still friends with her?”

  “She’s too busy now to have time for that. But last year a vehicle I didn’t recognize came up to my house and Piper jumped out of it and gave me a present. It was a wind-chime bell from Arizona. I called out, ‘Sarah!’ She slid down her window for a sec and said, ‘Love you, bye—gotta take my kids to the library.’ That’s how she is: always a mother first.”

  “Were you surprised when she quit as governor?” I ask.

  “At first, yes, but then I realized, just like she said, it was because of all the attacks. Attack, attack, attack, that’s all people wanted to do. My daughter in Colorado sent me an e-mail after Sarah resigned, and I’m just so proud of her because, even living so far away, she understood. ‘People are so cruel,’ she wrote. I don’t think Sarah wanted to resign, but so much cruelty didn’t give her any choice.”

  This goes on for another hour. Dutifully, I take notes. This woman’s eyes are like laser beams on my notebook. She seems able to read my handwriting upside down better than I can read it as I write.

  “I said she deals with stress with grace and dignity. Why didn’t you write that down?”

  “It’s one of those phrases I won’t forget.”

  “Well, write this: her only problem is Todd. He’s a lot more controlling than we realize. When my dad died, I never got a card from Sarah, and by the way, she never supported me through my divorce, even though I had told her that for twenty-two years I’d been in an abusive relationship and she’d cried when I told her that. I think it’s all because of Todd. The last time I called her, Todd answered and he wouldn’t even let me talk to her. I don’t know how she puts up with that. I think she’s actually a saint.”

  I’m reminded of this conversation months later, when I talk to Catherine Mormile. Although her friendship with Palin never deepened, Mormile and her husband continued to support Sarah politically. When she ran for governor in 2006, her Anchorage campaign office was near Mormile’s office and she’d frequently stop by there in late afternoon. “She’d storm in the door in her red outfit, all aglow,” Mormile told me. “She’d have Bristol with her. She always has one of her kids with her in public, like a human shield. She’d say, ‘There you are! You’re my hero! You’re my role model!’ And she’d give everyone in my waiting room a big smile. By then I was starting to wonder, what’s with all the hyperbole?”

  Having contributed a thousand dollars to Sarah’s gubernatorial campaign, Mormile and her husband were invited to the inaugural ball in Wasilla. Long recovered from the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning, Mormile had earned a doctorate in physical therapy, was a board-certified orthopedic specialist in physical therapy, and was writing a textbook, Temporomandibular Joint Disorders: One Name for Two Diagnoses, which would be published in 2008. She was no longer the wounded creature to whom Sarah had reached out eleven years earlier.

  “I congratulated her on her election,” Mormile told me, “and said I’d be happy to offer her any help I could, especially wi
th health care issues. She said, ‘My, aren’t you stuck on yourself.’

  “I was dumbfounded. I said, ‘All I’m doing is offering my help, if you think you could use it.’ She said, ‘No, you just keep on doing your little health care things and leave it to me to do the heavy lifting. I’m the governor.’

  “I backed away. I didn’t know what to say. Then she said, ‘Oh, here, at least let me give you a hug.’ That’s a trait of hers: when she doesn’t know what to say to someone, she hugs them. She’s never spoken to me again.”

  Mormile now feels that Sarah’s attitude toward her changed once she recognized that Mormile was not simply a victimized dog musher, but rather, an educated, accomplished professional.

  “She recruits those who feel worthless and powerless and uses them as tools,” Mormile told me. “Lyda Green and I call them zombie rats: people who feel their lives are so meaningless that only commitment to Sarah can give them purpose. She takes the transactional analysis concept of ‘I’m okay, You’re okay’ and twists it into, ‘I’m okay, you’re not.’ Somebody who worked for her once actually said to me, ‘I’d gladly drown facedown in a puddle if Sarah could keep her feet dry by walking across my back.’ That’s a zombie rat.

  “I almost became one myself. Sarah approached me when my life was at its lowest ebb. I felt she wanted to help me climb out of a hole, and I was so grateful that I would have done anything for her. The people who stay with her—Ivy Frye, Frank Bailey, Linda Menard—are the ones who never get beyond that. Wasilla is the perfect place to find them because there are so many victims in Wasilla. It’s the kingdom of the addictive personality, and Sarah has made a career of seeking out people she senses will grow addicted to her.”

  BACK AT MY house, the beat goes on. I’m locking the chain one afternoon when a car with Texas license plates comes down the dirt road. Two middle-aged women get out.

  “Excuse me,” one of them says. She points at the fence. “I know that one on the other side of the fence is Sarah’s house and that little one up there on this side must be where that writer is living, but which one is Roland Hedley’s house?”

  “There’s no one named Roland Hedley living around here,” I say.

  “Oh, yes there is! He’s up here for Fox News. We read it in the paper.”

  They leave grouchily, convinced that I knew where he was but wouldn’t tell them.

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  ON ANOTHER ESPECIALLY vile day in late July, a flotilla of floatplanes lands on the lake and, single file, taxis to Sarah’s dock. I’m heading out to buy groceries, but I get no farther than the chain when an SUV comes splashing down the dirt road at high speed. It stops and a highly agitated man in a poncho jumps out into the downpour.

  “Have they left yet?” he asks me.

  “Has who left? Left where?”

  “Kate Gosselin and her kids. I followed them up from Anchorage. I know they’re at Palin’s house. They’re going camping with Sarah.”

  “You know more than I do.”

  “Are you the writer? The guy living next door?”

  “I am, but you still know more than I do.”

  “Listen, I’m a photographer. If I can get the right shot, I’ll make the cover.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “But you can. Listen, I’ll give you five hundred dollars cash, right now, if you’ll let me onto your deck so I can take pictures.”

  Five hundred dollars? If I’d been a corrupt Republican in Juneau, I would have hit Bill Allen up for more than that.

  “Sorry, but I can’t let you do that,” I told him.

  “But Sarah and Kate Gosselin together! Do you know what a great picture that would be?”

  The photographer leaves, disappointed. I decide to delay my shopping trip until all the planes have left the dock, because I don’t want anyone sneaking in behind my back.

  What a very strange society we’ve become.

  I THINK it’s time to take a break. I’m heading home for ten days to see Nancy and my children and grandchildren. My tire tracks are still fresh in the mud of my driveway—in fact, I haven’t even boarded my flight from Anchorage to Philadelphia—when Sarah goes on the Chris Wallace show on Fox News to complain that I’ve ruined her summer.

  After talking to her about Obama, taxes, immigration, Afghanistan, and her plans for 2012, Wallace closes his interview by asking if I’m still living next door. What a perfect chance for Sarah to take the high road, to say, “Yes, he is, but it hasn’t been the problem I was afraid it might be. He’s respected our privacy and we’ve respected his and everything’s fine.”

  In response to Wallace’s question, she says, “He is. And we just avoid certain angles in the house. And we avoid the front yard … We’ve changed our behavior as a result of our new neighbor.”

  It’s true that since late spring Sarah has spent the vast majority of her time away from her house, but I’m hardly the reason why. She’s been flying all over the South, Southwest, and Midwest endorsing Tea Party candidates. When in Alaska, she’s been everywhere but Wasilla, filming Sarah Palin’s Alaska for The Learning Channel and flying around with Greta Van Susteren and her Fox News crew in an orgy of self-promotion. The notion that my presence next door has forced her and her children to skulk around behind their curtains is as nonsensical as her next comment.

  “Only dead fish go with the flow,” she says. “We won’t ever just go with the flow and accept that somebody has infringed upon our privacy to try to kind of hamper some of our freedom and hamper our fun. So, no, not just going with the flow. Changing our behavior. But in October the guy finally moves back to the East Coast and goes and does his thing with somebody else. You know, like Todd says, some people just need to get a life. Well, bless his heart. He needs to get a life.”

  SIXTEEN

  SARAH’S ELECTION as Alaska’s youngest governor and first woman governor was decisive, but the wave of support that carried her to Juneau was hardly a tsunami. Only about two hundred thousand people voted, the smallest turnout in a statewide election since 1990.

  Her fresh face and feisty spirit proved appealing, as did the girl-next-door persona she presented, but the two biggest positive factors in her success were voters’ distaste for Frank Murkowski—which led to his being so emphatically repudiated in the primary—and fallout from the FBI raids on legislative offices. Sarah had put herself in the right place at the right time and she used serendipity to maximum advantage.

  Cunningly, she also turned Knowles’s and Andrew Halcro’s presumed advantages—intelligence, education, experience—against them. The Anchorage Daily News interviewed Tilly Ketchum at Sarah’s election night victory celebration at the Captain Cook hotel in Anchorage, and Sarah’s former college roommate said, “I can understand what she’s saying. She doesn’t talk over your head.”

  The campaign taught Sarah that ignorance, if accompanied by a bright smile and a catchy phrase or two, was not necessarily a drawback. On the contrary, it allowed her to connect with that bloc of churchgoing, gun-toting, God-fearing, government-distrusting voters who, like her, might not grasp the intricacies of public policy, but who knew, doggone it, how they felt. Sarah would encounter these people in far larger numbers on the 2008 national campaign trail and beyond.

  But Sarah’s most significant accomplishment as a candidate was a negative: she and her advisers did not let voters learn the true extent of her religious views. She kept her opposition to abortion and stem cell research off the table. Except for that one slip late in the campaign, she did not let on that she wanted creationism taught in public schools, nor that she did not believe in the separation of church and state.

  Both her opponents and the bedazzled Alaskan press gave her a pass on her radical dominionist theology. Her relationships with Thomas Muthee and Mary Glazier were never mentioned, nor was her belief that the earth had been created only six thousand years ago, that men and dinosaurs had walked it together, and that civilizatio
n was so far into the end-times that Jesus would return to earth during her lifetime.

  Speaking at a New Apostolic Reformation conference in June 2008, Glazier made it clear that Sarah’s election as governor had been divinely ordained.

  “We were given an assignment in Alaska,” she said. “There was a twenty-four-year-old woman that God began to speak to about entering politics. She became part of our prayer group in Wasilla. Years later, became the mayor of Wasilla. And last year [sic] was elected governor of the state of Alaska. Yes! Hallelujah! At her inauguration she dedicated the state to Jesus Christ. Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

  Within two weeks of her election, Sarah made a decision in accordance with Romans 12:19. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Juneau had given her only 20 percent of its vote, and she wasted no time showing the city what payback looked like: she refused to take her oath of office there, shifting the ceremonies to Fairbanks.

  In her inaugural address—in which, despite Glazier’s claim, she did not explicitly dedicate Alaska to Jesus—Sarah debuted the imagery she’d later refine into the “mama grizzly” meme, saying, “I will unambiguously, steadfastly and doggedly guard the interests of this great state as a mother naturally guards her own.” After a full minute of applause, the crowd began to chant, “Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!”

  Alaska’s infatuation with its first woman governor reached a fever pitch. The bumper stickers appeared overnight: ALASKA—THE COLDEST STATE WITH THE HOTTEST GOVERNOR. Outsiders took notice. The Wonkette blog posted a photo of a bare-shouldered Sarah taken during her reign as Miss Wasilla. A Daily News columnist wrote, “There’s something refreshing about Palin. She’s like your high school English teacher, quite capable of scolding when necessary.” Men with dominatrix fantasies took note.