Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (13 page)

I told Neen that I understood, suggesting I'd do my best to be more attentive to her daily struggles. As with any compulsive behavior, however, that is a pledge I failed to keep. What if we lost the election by that one vote I might have influenced? How could I live with myself? This wasn't a forever commitment, just until Sarah became governor. I had no concrete thought that my participation might drag on for several more years. For now, the sacrifice seemed steep, but finite. Besides, I wasn't alone in the massive workload. The team needed me. Sarah and the state of Alaska needed our 100 percent commitment.

Sarah also felt the pressure, her nerves and temperament racing along an ever-sharper edge, and even the positive poll numbers could not dull the blade. If a campaign volunteer stepped out of his or her assigned shoes and she didn't approve, she'd let everyone know—
except
for the person with whom she was upset. Scott Heyworth, for example, fell out of favor on a regular basis. The reason was that he became the one person who had no hesitation in letting Sarah know what he thought. Sarah forwarded this email to several of us, with the comment:
“With friends like this—who needs enemies?”

He went on to warn,
“You will be seen as whiny, vindictive, haughty, smarmy, no issues candidate!”

As a result of his opinionated missives, which we assured Sarah were not in the least bit true, Sarah did not trust him to speak or represent the campaign on any level. When Scott made contact with a nonunion Palin acquaintance, Scott Johannes, regarding a fund-raiser, Sarah immediately wrote:

As with Scott Heyworth, Sarah often shared behind-the-back criticism that at times crossed into the cruel. Just as volunteer campaign workers could go from being in favor to out of favor to back in favor again on a minute-by-minute basis, Sarah's opinions of hired staff also swung from one extreme to another.

Kelly Goode was a case in point. Sarah brought Kelly into the campaign in January 2006 after having decided that we needed a professional campaign manager. When Kelly arrived, Sarah gushed, “You'll love her. She's perfect.” Kelly immediately set up shop in one of the two inner offices within the Anchorage headquarters. I occupied a middle office between Sarah and Kelly, with a door to each. The inner circle had a new member who was a hard-driving, experienced professional, and we felt confident and suddenly legitimate.

Petite, at something like five foot tall and less than one hundred pounds, Kelly was nothing if not a spitfire. She burst in and wasted no time displaying a take-charge personality, immediately pegging us for what we were: a grassroots organization without much organization. She believed that we'd been successful
despite
the ragtag operational structure, not because of it. She shot out commands and sought to coordinate everyone's time in a methodical manner, replacing a campaign wall calendar with a computerized schedule that planned events for Sarah all the way through primary Election Day. The new, stricter structure and authoritative commands made us all feel like a bunch of teenagers who'd been grounded, and office morale sunk. Kerm Ket-chum and I strategized about how to approach the problem. I suggested raising the issue with both Sarah and Todd.

In a phone call shortly thereafter, I outlined to Sarah my concerns. Kelly's blunt manner (which I later deemed an absolute asset), I suggested, was turning off staff and volunteers, and we ran the risk of losing enthusiasm and momentum. The fact that Sarah agreed with
these sentiments suggested that she too was tiring of Kelly's take-charge personality, despite only weeks on the job.

That Kelly made staff uncomfortable was one thing, but when she continued to insist that Sarah's top priorities be position papers and fund-raising, that was a recipe for disaffection. No doubt Kelly's strategy was sound and professional and typical of well-run campaigns. However, as John McCain would discover during the 2008 presidential race, Sarah does not like to be pigeonholed or told what to do, especially since laboring on position papers and dialing for dollars were things she disliked. In addition, Kelly played devil's advocate, always analyzing the potential downside to any action Sarah wished to pursue. Sarah had great affection for cheerleaders. Critics? Not so much.

The first sign of estrangement was Sarah's copying Kelly less often on group emails, thus freezing her out of the information loop. That coincided with snide comments about Kelly to the staff. When Sarah began referring to her sarcastically as “that Kelly girl,” I knew our campaign manager's days were numbered. With Sarah unwilling to take her advice or acknowledge there might be ways to improve operations, Kelly read the interpersonal tea leaves correctly. With no fanfare or formal farewell, our campaign manager officially resigned after just two months on the job. Sarah, in classic passive-aggressive fashion, fixed the problem without the need for direct confrontation. Although Kelly was gone, she wrote in an email,
“not communicating with Kelly will be a huge mistake because of her connections.”
She couldn't resist adding a sarcastic
“Oh, great.”

None of this deterred us from using Kelly throughout the campaign on a freelance basis. Her support from a distance proved valuable, as she participated in the future letter-writing effort and provided seasoned, strategic advice. Kelly hung on long enough to eventually make a return engagement; in 2008 Governor Palin appointed her legislative director, but once again Kelly soon found herself in the doghouse and resigned a second time.

Tension among staff members also began to flare as close quarters, long hours, and the stress of the campaign wore us down. In one instance, after I'd been named campaign administrator (a position that
paid roughly enough to cover my children's day care expenses), I had a run-in with full-time office hand Cathy Fredericks, a middle-aged woman. One day Cathy misinterpreted an innocent request I'd made for thank-you notes as a criticism of her competence. In response, she sent a blistering email to Sarah, who then forwarded it to me. Among other things, Cathy wrote:

When I phoned in an attempt to soothe her hurt feelings, Cathy hung up on me.

Perceptively, Cathy's email did hit a couple of points dead-on. Sarah often
did
roll her eyes at me when it came to spending money, and she
was
talking about Cathy behind her back—something from which nobody was immune. Demonstrating her behind-the-back candor, Sarah wrote:
“Holy moly—she has NO RIGHT whatsoever to hang up on you . . . how did she manage in the real working world? or the military? can you imagine her taking actual “commands”? I'll not get brought in by her if she whines about any of this. . . . I'll remind her I've tasked you with this.”

In an unusual direct meeting soon afterward, Sarah listened to Cathy's complaints and shut her down by saying, “Frank is emailing me late at night, early in the morning, responding to what I need
when I need it. So I don't want to hear any more about Frank.” Expecting that we'd lose Cathy, the next day Sarah backpedaled from her staunch Frank Bailey can-do-no-wrong support:

It took a couple of days—and the relationship never was what I'd call a good one—but Cathy Fredericks returned after Sarah said she was “so sorry for any offense I've caused you.” To further placate her, we turned a closet into a small office so she wouldn't be bothered by unnecessary human interaction, especially with me.

The stress built as Election Day drew closer. Ragtag friendships faltered and cliques began to emerge while our sensitivity to criticism grew increasingly acute. Like a dog that hears a siren, whenever a radio show host, blogger, or editor at the
Anchorage Daily News
made a pejorative comment, we'd follow Sarah's lead and howl at the top of our lungs. Remarkably, after all these months, our collective skins had not thickened, and radio voice Dan Fagan remained enemy number one—as he opposed her policy to tax oil companies and what he regarded as her antibusiness bias, disagreements that eventually became angry and personal. We continued to waste hours and hours listening to his inane show, then formulating plans to counterattack his messages. We might solicit irate callers or write nasty letters. Sarah, on one occasion, personally did both. After phoning into his show to set the record straight, she sent her nemesis a confusing follow-up email that included this:

Sarah then went through pages of supportive statements that Fagan had emailed her prior to her campaign. They were full of praise, while expressing love—writing an email that once said, in no uncertain terms, “I love you, Sarah”—and suggesting that it was God's will for her to win. She would, he said, rescue Alaska from its corrupt past. She concluded her own email by writing:

After reading her e-mail, I wrote Sarah my support, and she replied back:

Should we get tapes of his show?
Could there be any bigger waste of time that that? It seems looking back, the obvious answer is
no
, but as the primary drew closer, those considerations didn't matter. We reviewed tapes and discussed how unfairly we were being treated for hours on end. And while I am not proud of my role in stoking the flames, I did so.