The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by McGinniss, Joe

  Eventually Sarah mounts the podium and does her thing. “There’s something very special about this place,” she says. “You’re all so energetic and inspiring and encouraging.” There are maybe a thousand people in the parking lot. They wave signs and hold their copies of Going Rogue in the air and cheer.

  Then Sarah does her interview with the blond Fox Gretchen, whose last name turns out to be Carlson. Can this be right? Don’t they have a guy named Tucker Carlson? Can there be two Carlsons at Fox? Are they related? I’ll have to ask Roger Ailes. As Sarah chats with Gretchen, their backs to the crowd, a makeup woman is making up Piper so she can join them. That is almost as sad as seeing her work the line.

  Up close, Sarah radiates energy, just as the crowd’s enthusiasm energizes her. “She loves to have people adore her,” a longtime Alaskan friend of hers once told me. “Who doesn’t, right? But Sarah feeds off it like a bear in a berry patch.” If so, she’s clearly come to the right place. I look at the eyes of the people in the crowd as Sarah speaks: these people are besotted with love, they live only to worship, they are having a religious experience. I have no doubt that if she put her mind to it, she could have half of them speaking in tongues.

  But once she goes inside to sign, the toll taken by the long night and morning becomes evident. We’re suddenly all just a bunch of old farts standing around a parking lot in funny clothes with nothing to do, Ray and me most definitely included.

  As we walk out of the parking lot, I overhear occasional snatches of conversation. A sturdy, white-haired white woman dressed in red, white, and blue says to a companion, “I would love for her to get to the White House so bad. We need an American like us there.”

  That’s no more than a predictable racist comment from a resident of a central Florida retirement community. The comment that gets me—and I hear it a dozen times if I hear it once—is “She’s so real.”

  She’s so real. Sarah Palin, whose every word and gesture is the product of carefully constructed and well-maintained artifice, is hailed for being “so real.” Truly, as P. T. Barnum apparently never said, there is a sucker born every minute—and a disproportionate number of those over sixty-five seem to have made The Villages their home.

  I don’t need to see the Sarah show again, especially not with the odious Glenn Beck involved.

  I LOVED every minute of my time in Alaska this summer. The new friends I made will be friends for the rest of my life. Walt Monegan, Sharyn Moore and Kelly Walters, and J. C. McCavit all give me smoked salmon to take home, and another friend gives me three pounds of Kaladi Brothers coffee.

  I throw a terrific farewell party on the night of Saturday, September 4. I know it’s terrific because Verne Rupright and Kelly are still debating constitutional issues in my kitchen at 2:30 AM when Verne’s wife calls and tells him to get home. He needs to rest up for his 2011 mayoral campaign against Levi Johnston.

  My only regret is that I never got to meet the woman next door.

  TWENTY

  I WAS IN ALASKA the day before Election Day 2008, researching my story about AGIA and the gas pipeline for Condé Nast Portfolio magazine. Because I was staying at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage, it was a simple matter to go to the lower lobby, where a second Troopergate report was to be released.

  Alarmed by what they accurately sensed would be a withering report from Stephen Branchflower, the state personnel board, whose members were hired by and could be dismissed by the governor, had enlisted Anchorage attorney Tim Petumenos to conduct a separate Troopergate investigation.

  Unsurprisingly, Petumenos found no wrongdoing on Sarah’s part. What everyone overlooked at the time, but what Anchorage attorney C. Donald Mitchell pointed out in an Alaska Dispatch article the next summer, was that Sarah, who had refused to testify during the Branchflower investigation, may have committed perjury when questioned under oath by Petumenos.

  Both Sarah and Walt Monegan gave sworn testimony to Petumenos. Monegan described the January 2007 conversation with Sarah in Juneau during which he’d said, “Ma’am, I need to keep you at arm’s length with this,” warning her that it was inappropriate for her even to raise the question with him of firing Wooten.

  Sarah denied that the conversation had occurred. Petumenos wrote, “Governor Palin … testified under oath that this is not a failure of recollection on her part since the nature of the conversation as described is such that she would have remembered having it.”

  In other words, one of them was lying. For Sarah to have lied under oath would have been an impeachable offense. Under the Alaska constitution it was the duty of the state senate to determine whether such an offense had been committed.

  During the winter of 2008–2009, as Sarah resumed her duties as governor, the senate showed no inclination to impeach, but as Mitchell pointed out, the question remained very much alive and may have been a significant, if overlooked, factor in Sarah’s decision to resign the following summer. “If Sarah had decided to stay for her full term,” Mitchell wrote, “the perjury issue would have circled back on her.”

  Even absent such an explosive allegation, the state Sarah came back to on Election Day was not the one she’d left two months earlier, at least in its attitude toward her. In the Daily News, Tom Kizzia quoted Kate Troll, executive director of the Alaska Conservation Alliance: “All the alliances she used to get things done have been shattered. She comes back to unknown territory.”

  From her first days back, it was clear she did not want to stay. Reporting to work at her Anchorage office three days after the election, Sarah pretended she still cared.

  “Good to be here, good to be here,” she chirped. “A lot to do, as every day is a full day here in the governor’s office, so, ah, anxious to get to talk to the folks who have been holdin’ down the fort and workin’ real hard also, but, ah, you know, it’s gonna be busy days here, just like it was busy days on the trail, ’cause bein’ the governor’s a full ti … a full time … in addition to bein’ a candidate. Now, of course, we get to concentrate just on … one of those.”

  As I wrote in Portfolio, “The last three words—‘one of those’—emerged with jaws so tightly clenched that it wouldn’t have been surprising to see a broken molar pop out.”

  During her speech to the Republican convention in September, Sarah made the bizarre claim that Alaska had already begun “a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline.” She repeated the statement during her debate with Joe Biden, saying, “We’re building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline, which is North America’s largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever.”

  But the state was not building any such thing. All AGIA had done was commit Alaska to paying $500 million to a foreign company that had neither gas nor access to gas and was under no obligation ever to lay a single piece of pipe.

  So many excited utterances, so many false claims, so many words and actions now waiting to haunt her. From her first day back as governor, it was obvious she wanted out.

  Also, in the aftermath of her failed vice-presidential campaign, a number of those who’d worked with her “on the trail” began to talk. Shopping sprees, temper tantrums, ignorance of issues, emotional instability—handlers began airing the dirty laundry. “I never asked for anything more than maybe a Diet Dr Pepper once in a while,” Sarah said in response, but the words didn’t ring true.

  She said the charge that she’d thought Africa was a country, not a continent, was “taken out of context” and that it was “cruel, mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional and those guys are jerks … It’s not fair.” She did not, however, deny it.

  She did deny that she’d changed. “If there’s criticism that all of a sudden I’ve … become an obsessive partisan, then it’s not accurate.” Maybe she was right about that. Maybe she’d been an obsessive partisan from the start and the only change was that she’d finally stopped pretending that she wasn’t.

  In an interview conducted in her house on Lake Lucille, Sarah lashed o
ut against “misinformation.” Asked for an example, she said, “Some of the goofy things like who was Trig’s mom. Well, I’m Trig’s mom and do you want to see my medical records to prove that?” But once again, no medical records were forthcoming.

  “My life is in God’s hands,” she told CNN in mid-November. “If he’s got doors open for me … I’m going to go through those doors.” But Sarah herself—establishing a pattern that would become more marked as time passed—was opening her own door only to those she could trust not to ask hard questions. She turned down interview requests from Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters, George Stephanopoulos, and Charlie Rose (although she would do Winfrey’s and Walters’s shows at the time of Going Rogue’s publication), while agreeing to talk to Wolf Blitzer, Larry King, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, and Glenn Beck.

  Her selective postelection image rehabilitation campaign prompted Zane Henning, the oil field worker from Wasilla to whom I spoke in the summer of 2010, to file a new ethics complaint, citing the November 10 interview with Van Susteren conducted in Palin’s governor’s office. “The governor is using her official position and office in an attempt to repair her damaged political image on the national scene,” he charged.

  Meanwhile, with Todd and Sarah back, state police were receiving so many calls threatening harm against Mike Wooten that officials took him off patrol and reassigned him to desk duty in Anchorage.

  Nothing was going right for Sarah. On November 20 a photo op built around her pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey provoked widespread glee when video showed birds being bloodily slaughtered directly behind her as she spoke. “It’s unfortunate, because it’s been a rough fall, and this was meant to be a lighthearted event,” one of Sarah’s spokespeople said.

  Alaskans for Truth, the group that sponsored the second local anti-Palin rally of the fall, called for the legislature to censure Sarah for breaking state ethics laws, to hold hearings regarding possible perjury by her and Todd in connection with Troopergate, and to seek contempt charges against Todd for ignoring the subpoena that required him to testify in person.

  It was only Outside that people still seemed glad to see her. On December 1 she campaigned with Georgia senator Saxby Chambliss, who was involved in a runoff election, and was met by adoring throngs of Republicans wearing PALIN 2012 T-shirts.

  Back home, thorny budget issues loomed as a result of the price of oil plummeting from $145 to less than $40 a barrel within four months. Worse, there were calls for Sarah to release the sworn testimony she’d given to Petumenos. On October 24, the day she’d answered his questions under oath, Sarah had promised to make the deposition public. Now she refused. A spokeswoman said, “The matter is closed. We are moving forward now, not looking back.”

  But doing so was not as easy as saying so. Andree McLeod went to court in Anchorage seeking e-mails that Sarah had refused to release on grounds of “executive privilege.” Although not a state employee, Todd had been copied on many of the e-mails Sarah was trying to withhold. “The state can’t cloak these communications in secrecy when the governor and her staff have broken the chain of custody by sharing them with a mere private citizen,” McLeod said.

  As winter arrived, the price of oil continued to fall. Even the news that Bristol had given birth to Tripp on December 28 was marred by simultaneous reports of Levi’s mother’s arrest for selling Oxycontin. The eight hundred dollars Sherry Johnston got for her pills was dwarfed by the reported $300,000 Bristol received for giving People an exclusive first look at her son.

  As Alaska celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its statehood on January 3, there was little question that Sarah was less a part of its future than its past. On January 27, only a week after the state legislature opened its 2009 session, Sarah showed where her priorities lay by announcing the formation of a political action committee, SarahPAC. Nonetheless, she told reporters the next day, “I’m not going to leave Alaska … I’ll rarely travel outside Alaska … We’re a little bit more parochial here, which is good, it keeps you grounded.” She then flew to Washington to speak at the elite Republican Alfalfa Club Dinner and to meet privately with a new cadre of national political advisors.

  With the state facing a budget deficit of more than $1.5 billion, Sarah became conspicuous by her absence from Juneau. On February 6, 2009, the state senate voted 16–1 to find Todd and nine members of Sarah’s staff in contempt for ignoring their subpoenas. The resolution, however, did not call for punishment, because all those subpoenaed eventually delivered sworn statements in writing.

  Four days later attorney general Talis Colberg, who had tried to quash the subpoenas, resigned. “He just explained that it is a tough environment right now,” Sarah said. No wonder Todd was happy to be back on his snowmobile for the 2009 Iron Dog race.

  Alaskans learned on February 17 that Sarah would have to pay income tax on the thousands of dollars she’d taken in per diem expenses while living in Wasilla. A spokeswoman for her formerly open and transparent administration said, “The amount of taxes owed is a private matter.”

  Two days later Sarah announced that she finally intended to do something to help Natives in the Lower Yukon region of western Alaska, many of whom—hit by a perfect storm of high fuel prices, a poor fish harvest, and an extended spell of subzero temperatures—were finding it impossible to feed their families.

  The villagers’ plight had come to statewide attention in January through a letter sent by Nick Tucker of Emmonak to various Alaskan media sites. For a month, Sarah tried to ignore the emergency. Her small-government vision apparently did not allow for state aid to people who were on the verge of freezing or starving to death. Only when she arranged for help from a private source—in this case, Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian organization directed by Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham—did she involve herself.

  Sarah and Graham had been courting one another since she was first elected governor. Both in 2007 and 2008 (when he was joined by Mary Glazier on the dais), Graham spoke at Sarah’s Governor’s Prayer Breakfast, an annual event staged by a group whose website says it believes that “God directs the affairs of Man and is the ultimate authority over human events.”

  Especially with television cameras rolling (as she demonstrated again in 2010, when she accompanied Graham on a brief but well-publicized drop-in on Haiti), Sarah was apparently quite comfortable in the presence of a preacher who in 2001 had described Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion.”

  Accompanied by the ever-faithful Sean Parnell and a Samaritan’s Purse television crew, Sarah and Graham and right-wing Anchorage evangelical minister Jerry Prevo flew to the Alaskan villages of Russian Mission and Marshall on February 20. Sarah handed out chocolate chip cookies, while Graham provided more substantial fare, accompanied by religious pamphlets.

  Seeking to avoid what she feared might be a confrontation with Nick Tucker, Sarah and her entourage gave Emmonak a wide berth. The industrious Tucker, however, hitched a ride on a bush plane and flew the 125 miles to Russian Mission in order to talk to Sarah in person.

  Her combination of condescension, evasiveness, platitudes, and non sequiturs made for one of the most awkward meetings with a member of the voting public that Sarah had ever had. It was captured on handheld video and later, with accompanying transcript, made available by Sarah’s least favorite Alaskan bloggers, including Mudflats, Progressive Alaska, and Immoral Minority.

  Despite being offered a chocolate chip cookie, Tucker—who had told Sarah, “I don’t do politics. I come from the heart and the sorrow of our people”—was offended by Sarah’s words and attitude. In a follow-up letter to rural newspapers, he said, “I am outraged … I felt like Governor Palin treated Emmonak with most disregard and disrespect by not coming here where it all started … Here, I had a person whom I voted for and who turns around and stabs us … Is it not embarrassing enough to have to cry out, let alone be put down by our state leadership? I think all rural Alaska deserves an
apology and never to be treated like this again … I am an open man, but I feel insulted myself and on behalf of our rural Native villages.”

  A week later Sarah settled one of the ethics complaints against her by agreeing to reimburse the state $6,800 for nine trips her children took with her in 2007 and 2008. Sarah being Sarah, however, she would not admit she’d done anything wrong. In a written statement she said, “This is a big state and I am obligated to … keep Alaskans informed and meet with them as much as I can … At the same time, I am blessed to have a large and loving family, and the discharge of my duties should not prevent me from spending time with them.” The next day, she said she’d also repay the state for the cost of bringing her three daughters to the starts of the 2007 and 2008 Iron Dogs to watch their father.

  In mid-March she angered Alaskans anew by rejecting almost $300 million in federal stimulus funds that had been set aside for the state, including $170 million for education, a move that critics said was designed to enhance her standing among conservatives nationally at Alaska’s expense.

  A few days later she said she intended to bolster her personal finances by creating a fund through which the public would be able to help pay the legal fees she incurred while defending herself against the growing number of ethics complaints against her. Of ten already filed, six had been dismissed, one was settled, and three were pending. She said she owed her Anchorage lawyers more than $500,000. In a written response to questions put to her by the Daily News, Sarah said, “With the political blood sport some are playing today, only the independently wealthy or those willing to spend their income on legal fees … can serve.”

  AGIA was getting nowhere and achieving nothing but increased indebtedness for Alaska. In conjunction with the price of oil, natural gas prices had plunged almost 50 percent since Sarah had charmed the legislature into approving her proposal to give TransCanada $500 million of Alaskan taxpayers’ money for nothing more than a hope and a prayer that the company might one day think about building a pipeline.