The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by McGinniss, Joe

  Wheeler is still unsettled by the memory. “They had it in for this guy. Todd would not accept that nothing could be done. They wanted something and Sarah was governor, so they felt they should be able to have it. For the next few months, every time I saw Todd he’d tell me something else Wooten had done. ‘He shot a moose without a license.’ ‘He had beer in his patrol car.’ ‘He tasered his stepson.’ I couldn’t understand why he was so obsessed. Then somebody told me: Wooten had been married to Sarah’s sister and it went bad. They were going to spend the rest of their lives trying to get back at him for that.”

  A few months into her term, Sarah dispensed with Wheeler’s driving services. “She and Todd picked out a fifty-thousand-dollar Suburban just so she could drive herself. What it came down to was she didn’t want us around. She didn’t want anybody to follow her to Nordstrom’s when she went shopping every day. Her first year in office, she must have bought a hundred pairs of sunglasses. Every day she’d have a new pair. Overall, she didn’t want anybody to know that she wasn’t coming in until ten AM and then leaving by three to go home.”

  Wheeler could not help but compare Sarah’s work habits with those of her predecessors. “For six years I was with Murkowski and Knowles,” he says. “For them, the job wasn’t forty hours a week, it was eighty. Whatever you thought about what they accomplished, those two guys—one a Democrat, one a Republican—worked like hell, up to sixteen hours a day. For her, it was a part-time job.”

  One of the problems with Sarah’s insistence on driving herself everywhere was that she was always getting lost. “There’d be a function in Anchorage,” Wheeler recalls, “and we’d be there waiting for her and—zoom!—her Suburban would go flying past. ‘There she goes,’ we’d say. ‘Let’s try to talk her back to earth.’ ”

  But they couldn’t talk to her because she didn’t want to be talked to. So they’d text her, telling her she’d overshot her destination once again. “Her BlackBerrys, they were the closest thing to family to her, maybe closer,” Wheeler says. “Texting was how she related to the world.”

  He takes a sip of the sweet tea Corky has served. “You know what she was? A housewife who happened to be governor. I’d fly cross-country with her many times and she’d spend the whole trip looking at People magazine, or one of the others like that. Knowles and Murkowski, they used those hours to work. For her it was like she was waiting for her appointment at the hair salon. She was really into celebrities. She could spend hours looking at pictures of them.”

  In Juneau, Wheeler soon learned that he was as likely to find Todd in the governor’s office as Sarah. “He’d go up to the slope once in a while, but mostly he’d be in her office. He had his own desk in there and he’d do a lot of her stuff.”

  “Would he sit in on meetings she had with her staff?” I ask.

  “She didn’t have meetings. If she was meeting with anybody it was with Vogue magazine or Vanity Fair. We were supposed to get her schedule a day in advance so we could plan who would cover what, but most days there was nothing on her schedule. It was blank. We never knew what she was planning to do or what she did. Her staff would fill it in as best they could later, because they knew it wouldn’t look good to have day after day with nothing there.”

  One day Mike Nizich told Wheeler that he wanted a trooper who’d been on the governor’s security detail for sixteen years returned to patrol immediately. Why? “Bristol and Willow don’t like him.”

  Wheeler recalls accompanying Sarah to a National Governors’ Association meeting in Washington February 22–25, 2008. One morning he got a call from Sarah’s Juneau office telling him to bring her to a meeting at the Willard Hotel at 3:00 PM.

  “Who’s the meeting with?” he asked.

  “John McCain.”

  Wheeler was stunned. McCain was front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. “No,” he said to himself. “No way. He’s got to be smarter than that.”

  The meeting lasted forty-five minutes. Wheeler stood outside the door. “She never said a word about what happened.”

  By late February of 2008, Sarah presumably would have been seven months pregnant with Trig.

  “She didn’t show,” Wheeler says. “I can’t say she wasn’t pregnant, but there was certainly no indication that she was. I remember at National Airport she went into the rest room to change from her nice clothes into jeans so she could wear jeans on the flight home. Did you ever see a woman six or seven months pregnant decide to wear tight-fitting jeans because they’re comfortable?”

  Wheeler did not accompany Sarah on her trip to Texas when she said her water broke, precipitating the thirteen-hour “wild ride” back to Wasilla, where Trig was supposedly born.

  “It was her first trip Outside when she didn’t want security. I had to call Texas so they could have their car and their troopers meet her at the airport. I have no idea why she didn’t want me along on that trip, but I can tell you this: if I’d been with her and if I’d known her water broke in Texas she would never have got on that plane to come back.”

  I ask Wheeler what churches Sarah attended when she traveled. Were they always evangelical?

  “She never went to church when I was with her. There were a number of times when we’d be out of state on a weekend. She never asked me to check on any services and she never attended any.”

  I ask if he’d formed any impression about the degree of closeness between Sarah and Todd.

  “Well, you can’t help but notice things like this: she and Todd never showed any affection for each other. I’d travel with Knowles and Murkowski and their wives, and you could tell that these were happily married couples. Sarah and Todd were like business partners. She could never even hold hands with him because she always had a BlackBerry in her hand.”

  Of greater concern to Wheeler was Sarah’s propensity for putting old friends from Wasilla into jobs that were beyond their capabilities. “The people closest to her were all idiots, little guys in big guys’ shoes. They had no qualifications. They were a bunch of loyal little puppies. Kris Perry, Frank Bailey, Ivy Frye? These people had positions in state government? It was a joke. Listen, I know Sarah. She doesn’t belong leading people; she’s just not smart enough. She has no intellect and no interest in learning, because she thinks she already knows it all.”

  Sarah’s paranoia made the deepest impression. “She was just so defensive all the time. Everybody was out to get her. This ran deep and it made her mean. Maybe she’d be mean anyway. But I’ll tell you one thing: she’s no mama grizzly; she’s a rabid wolf. Take a look at the snow: wherever she’s been, there’s a trail of blood in her wake.”

  TEN

  EVEN IF she’d been permitted to do so, it’s unlikely that Sarah would have run for a third term as mayor. No matter how crazily Wasilla continued to grow, she felt she’d outgrown it. She wanted to perform on a larger stage, and she believed that God would put her there.

  She also seemed to need new foes to vanquish. She would ask herself, says John Bitney, “Where’s the fight? That’s what she’s looking for. It gets her juices flowing. If there’s no win, she’s not interested. She’s a terrible manager, finds policy details too boring, but if you put the goalposts in front of her, you’d better get out of the way. She’ll chew your ass up.”

  By November 2001 she was letting it be known that she planned to run for lieutenant governor the following year. It had been more than two years since her last electoral fight, and that one had never been a contest. Like her father before a hunting trip, she was hungry for fresh blood.

  According to a number of people in Wasilla, Sarah’s domestic life was in tatters at the time. Time with friends—not that there were many friends—would degenerate into marital squabbles, raised voices, and frequent mutual threats of divorce. A recurring cause of conflict was Sarah’s inability or refusal to act as a mother to her children. She did so little that Todd had to rely on Debbie Richter, the wife of his close friend Scott Richter, to help raise t
hem. “Take care of the kids?” says John Bitney, who is now married to the former Debbie Richter. “She can’t, she won’t—whatever it may be—but she doesn’t. She just doesn’t. Todd has to take care of everything. And that’s the way it’s always been.”

  Bitney says, “Todd was both the matriarch and patriarch in that family. That can be a compliment or not, depending on how you want to look at it, but it’s the truth. He did the diapers when the kids were young. He was the disciplinarian. Sarah was all about the photo op.”

  Friends recall that when Todd was working on the North Slope, the children literally would have a hard time finding enough to eat. “Those kids had to fend for themselves,” one says. “I’d walk into that kitchen and Bristol and Willow would be sitting there with a burnt pot of Kraft mac and cheese on the stove and they’d be trying to open one of those Ramen noodle packs, and Sarah would be up in her bedroom with the door closed saying she didn’t want to be disturbed.

  “Todd may have his faults, but when he was off work for two weeks he took care of those kids. He’d come off hitch and land in Anchorage and he knew he’d come home to a house with no food. Sarah would never go to Anchorage to pick him up, so he’d find a ride with someone. First stop would always be Costco, and he’d get a case of peaches, a case of applesauce, like that, hoping there’d be enough to last through his next hitch.

  “But when Todd was up north working, those kids were a bunch of wild maniacs, running around Wasilla with no dinner cooked, no breakfast cooked, no homework done, and Sarah lying in bed. If she wasn’t working, that’s all she did.

  “It made her crazy to have to take care of the kids. I remember one time her coming in with Piper in a carrier and sliding it across the foyer and sayin’, ‘Take this fuckin’ baby!’ Then she walked out the door.

  “She never took care of those kids. They would be dirty, filthy. Bristol and Willow had a shared bathroom between their two bedrooms in the Lake Lucille house and it would be—oh, my God!—a poop ring in the toilet. And the girls themselves, they’d be … dirty. You know, they were getting to the age where they could take baths by themselves, but you still had to clean their ears, make sure they brushed their teeth, help them fold their clothes—and nobody did. They didn’t even have dressers in their rooms. The laundry got done and it was just ‘throw it on the floor.’

  “When Piper was a baby and Willow wasn’t old enough to be on her own, Sarah dumped those kids off on a woman who cleaned houses, a nasty woman. She would take them to wherever she was cleaning and just tell them to sit down and shut up. Todd used to be liv-id. Livid. Those kids never had any parenting, they had to raise each other.”

  Part of the problem Sarah had with feeding her children may have been connected to the fact that she herself ate only sporadically. “I never saw diet pills,” Bitney says, “but it’s amazing how far she’s gotten on Red Bulls and white mochas. She’d start off with a white chocolate mocha, maybe two, then a Red Bull, then switch to Diet Pepsi in the afternoon. It was Diet Pepsi, not Diet Dr Pepper—she just made that up later because she thought it fit better with her image—and she’d go through a lot of Diet Pepsi.”

  Bitney recalls that Sarah never wanted to eat breakfast, “but if I got a double order of bacon on the side, she’d eat most of it. And any time of day, if it was chocolate, it was gone. I never once saw her eat greens. It was just meat and chocolate and the drinks with caffeine.”

  Another friend tells me: “She’d never eat. She’d never eat.” There were, however, exceptions. “One day she came in with Oreos, bread, bags of fast food, and she ate everything and then disappeared and came out of the bathroom later with blurry eyes, her hair up, and her knuckles red. I said, ‘What you up to, girl?’ She gave me a look like, ‘Don’t you even fuckin’ go there.’ ”

  There was also the matter of cocaine. “I remember, back before she was governor, one time snow-machining at Crosswinds Lake, way up above Glenallen,” a friend tells me. “It was me, Todd, Sarah, five or six other people, and Todd and Sarah had a fight, so Sarah was riding with somebody else. The cocaine was free flowing. Somebody found a fifty-five-gallon oil drum and turned it upside down and we were all doing cocaine lines off the top of the drum.”

  In 2007, someone mentioned the incident on a blog, writing, “How’s that cocaine out at Crosswinds Lake, Sarah?” I spoke to the author of the blog post, who said, “Todd saw it and got a message to me: ‘Keep off the fuckin’ blog, Sarah’s fuckin’ pissed.’ ”

  Neither did Sarah find nourishment in the joy of sexual intimacy with her husband. “Todd complained a lot about never having sex with Sarah,” a friend of his tells me. “He’d say, ‘I must have gotten laid at least four times, ’cause I got four kids.’ This was way before Trig.” The friend adds, “I can honestly say that in a decade plus of interacting with them I never saw them even show affection.”

  One former houseguest says Sarah’s aversion to intimacy was so extreme that she didn’t even like to think about other people having sex. “I get real dry in the winter,” the houseguest tells me, “so I keep a bottle of baby oil by the bed. I’ll come out of the shower, put it on, and go to bed. One day, when we’re staying at the Wasilla Lake house, Todd says, ‘I gotta talk to you guys. Sarah’s pissed. She found that big bottle of baby oil in your bedroom and she knows you guys are rubbin’ it on yourselves and havin’ sex.’ My husband was like, ‘She uses it on her skin, dude.’ But Todd says, ‘Sarah wants you out. She’s really upset thinkin’ you’re in there havin’ sex with baby oil.’ We left. We went to a motel. Sarah dresses hot and acts hot in public, so you’d think she’d probably be pretty hot in bed, but that’s all just part of the show.”

  THE LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR of Alaska is paid $100,000 a year to supervise the Division of Elections, to maintain oversight of the state’s notaries public, to regulate commercial use of the state seal, and to authenticate the signatures of state officials for foreign countries. In terms of labor intensiveness, it’s not exactly piano moving. The job, in fact, is so undemanding that had she been elected to the office, Sarah probably wouldn’t even have had to hire someone to do it for her.

  In 2002, with Republican U.S. senator Frank Murkowski heavily favored to become governor, it seemed likely that winning the Republican primary for lieutenant governor in August would be tantamount to winning the general election in November.

  Sarah entered an already crowded field, which included two state senators, Loren Leman of Anchorage and Robin Taylor of Wrangell, and former speaker of the house Gail Phillips of Homer.

  In theory, ethics required that Sarah not campaign for lieutenant governor from her mayor’s office. In practice, she effectively turned the office into an unofficial campaign headquarters. She wrote and received campaign-related e-mails on the computer in the mayor’s office; she had her administrative assistant use city hall facilities to print thank-you notes to campaign donors; she had her secretary make campaign-related travel arrangements from city hall while being paid by the city. On June 12, 2002, Sarah met with representatives from a campaign advertising agency at city hall. Following the meeting, the agency faxed proposed campaign logos to deputy administrator Cramer at city hall. Paul Jenkins, editor of the conservative Voice of the Times, would later write that Sarah’s city hall office became “little more than a command center for her lieutenant governor campaign.”

  While there were obvious differences between a statewide race and a municipal mayoral election—especially in a state the size of Alaska—in some respects Sarah’s campaign for lieutenant governor resembled her first race against John Stein: she was the new face; her opponents were the business-as-usual old guard, offering stale ideas that had already proven ineffective. While they touted their legislative experience, Sarah derided it. They were tired old hacks; she was a vibrant young mother who would bring a fresh perspective to Juneau. In the absence of any significant issues, the message played well.

  Leman was the favorite in the race, with mos
t observers expecting Phillips and Taylor to provide his strongest opposition. It was Sarah, however, who emerged as the surprise. With voter turnout of only 22 percent, the second lowest in state history, Sarah finished a close second to Leman, losing by less than two thousand votes out of more than seventy thousand cast. “She’s a sharp, attractive candidate,” Leman said. “I think she had a lot to offer.”

  As expected, Frank Murkowski easily won the gubernatorial primary, but his daughter, state representative Lisa Murkowski, wasn’t assured of victory over her more conservative opponent until the count of absentee and questioned ballots in her Eagle River district was completed in early September.

  The Wasilla mayoral election was held in October. Sarah’s stepmother-in-law Faye Palin was one of three candidates. Even though Faye had donated $1,000 behind Sarah’s first mayoral campaign, Sarah threw her support to Dianne Keller, a right-wing Christian member of the city council. For Sarah, conservatism and evangelical Christianity trumped even family ties. Keller wound up winning the October election with 402 votes to Faye Palin’s second-place total of 256.

  Sarah campaigned so vigorously for the Murkowski ticket throughout the fall that the Frontiersman described her as “a spokesperson for the Republican party through television, radio and newspaper ads,” observing that “at times it seemed Palin was more visible than Murkowski’s running mate, Loren Leman.”

  This was not entirely altruistic. If Murkowski were elected in November, he would name a successor to serve the remaining two years of his term in the U.S. Senate. In fact, he not only won but also received the highest percentage of votes in the history of Alaskan gubernatorial elections. Immediately, attention focused on whom he would name to fill Alaska’s first open U.S. Senate seat in twenty-two years. Sarah’s name was among those most frequently mentioned.

  “Everything is up in the air still,” she said. “I don’t necessarily want to retire, and with Todd’s flexible schedule it allows me to serve in a couple of different capacities.”