Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (2 page)

36
  Troopergate: The Sequel?

37
  No Excuse

38
  Good-bye, Rag Tags

39
  Eagle Mission and Serving God

40
  The End

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

I thought today—what would this campaign have turned into without [Frank Bailey]? We'd have fizzled. I'm so thankful things evolved the way they did and he took over so many, many important tasks. Pretty much everything is what he handles!

—SARAH PALIN, EMAIL, TUESDAY, JUNE 20, 2006

Since the 2006 campaign, no one person has been closer to the epicenter of the Palin campaign and administration than Frank Bailey.

—ANDREW HALCRO, ALASKA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE, IN HIS BLOG, NOVEMBER 6, 2009

FOREWORD

F
rank Bailey's memoir began when, through third parties, he and I got in touch via email. After extensive dialogue, we decided to begin a collaboration. Because Frank's association with Sarah Palin's campaign and administration involved one of the most controversial political figures in recent memory, we elected to tread lightly and work in anonymity. Two months into the project, it became evident that extensive knowledge of Alaskan politics and personalities demanded the addition of another brilliant mind. To that end, we invited Jeanne Devon, creator and editor of website The Mudflats (
www.themudflats.net
), to join our team. Amazingly, from that day forward, the three of us worked for over a year without a leak to the public. In late February 2011, we found an agent and finished the initial draft of the manuscript. All was well.

Then, as most of the world now knows, only days after submitting our rough draft manuscript to publishers for consideration, the unthinkable happened. Over Presidents' Day weekend, we woke to find our working manuscript being quoted on websites, television shows, and in newspapers. How did this unpublished manuscript become so famous so fast?

In brief, the copyrighted words and work were distributed by a competitor. Not in America, we told ourselves. And certainly not initiated by an award-winning bestselling author—with his own Palin tell-all due to publish soon. Yet that is exactly what happened.

Joe McGinniss received an unauthorized copy of our manuscript and then took our property—the product of thousands of man-hours—and electronically distributed it en masse.

McGinniss undoubtedly knew this was, at a minimum, an ethical breech. In an effort to deflect blame, McGinniss's attorney admitted in a letter to us (also released to the media) that while McGinniss did send
Blind Allegiance
“to a few people and media outlets in Alaska,” he'd advised them “that they should not reproduce any of the manuscript before contacting the authors for permission.” If it is true that McGinniss did attach such a warning—and we have at least one source who suggests that is not the case—why then did he not follow his own warning?

McGinniss contacted none of us prior to distributing our copyrighted work.

The simplest of Sunday school lessons would require recipients to report the violation to the appropriate people, starting with us, the authors, or at least ignore what was sent. In several cases, we did receive a heads-up. In many other instances, though, newspapers and television shows read and commented on excerpts, by and large agreeing that the revelations were significant, insightful, and entertaining.

Likely, the offenders may say of stealing our intellectual property, “It's not really stealing.” They are as wrong as Sarah Palin was when she issued similar rationalizations for inexcusable behavior. In a line from one chapter, Frank noted, “Only later did I realize that everywhere we traveled in our campaign to make Alaska a better state, ethical challenges were so thick we no longer had the ability to see them, except, that is, in others.”

However, the unethically distributed manuscript was an early draft of the book you now hold. In addition to our adding new material to the original manuscript, as is customary in any editing process, our plight inspired a source to come forward and confirm in its entirety one of the most controversial of our many spectacular revelations in the book. Having painstakingly reconstructed the story of the coordination between the Palin campaign for governor and the Republican Governors Association in violation of election law (chapter 14, “The Republican Governors Association and Our Limbo Dance with Truth”), we had no question about the information Frank Bailey supplied. However, supporters of Sarah Palin who read the leaked text took exception by suggesting that there was only circumstantial evidence
and “no smoking gun.” We now provide additional and incontrovertible evidence of this inappropriate coordination. And in that unsolicited confirmation is added credibility to the analysis and mountains of evidence provided in these pages. As such, it is impossible for me to deny that there is great truth in the cliché that the Lord works in mysterious ways.

On behalf of my cowriters, we thank Howard Books for recognizing that within the pages of this book there is an inspirational personal story of faith and redemption that accompanies the important look at how dangerous it is to elevate individuals to our highest offices based on image alone. We also wish to thank those brave people who came to us after witnessing the treachery of others to lend a hand and tell their stories. All of you helped salvaged our many months of work.

—Ken Morris

PROLOGUE

I Quit

A
year before her July 3, 2009, resignation, Sarah said to me when discussing her husband, “Frank, we're not like other couples; we don't talk.” In some matters, like resigning from the governorship, that appeared true enough when Sarah said in her speech, “And I'm thankful that Todd flew in last night from commercial fishing grounds in Bristol Bay.” Hours earlier, Todd was rushed from his commercial fishing venture in Dillingham, a 360-mile journey from Wasilla made possible only by plane to be present for the shocking main event. About forty-five minutes before the press conference, he phoned me, sounding agitated when I said I'd known about the announcement for a few days; I guessed that he was perturbed at being the last to know. He tried to explain his wife's reasoning for quitting but couldn't recall the term “lame duck,” so I prompted him and he then said, “Yeah, she'll be a lame duck.” It sounded as if he were rehearsing unfamiliar lines he'd just learned, using me as a test audience.

On resignation day—at the Palin home with family, a single
engine plane, with shimmering Lake Lucille in the background—Todd stood in stoic silence and assumed the role of obedient prop, listening maybe for the first time to his wife's puzzling explanations. He struck me as uncomfortable, if not a little dumbfounded.

I'd seen Sarah freeze out family and former friends many times before and had heard her say, “Watch out what you say to Todd; he can't be trusted,” so my feeling that she excluded her husband from this monumental decision shouldn't have come as a surprise. Nevertheless, it did.

Much later, when I heard from others that Todd had received a cell phone call from Sarah with the shocking news only the day before while waiting for the brief but lucrative “opener”—when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game determines that enough salmon have returned upstream to allow fishing to begin—I tended to believe the report to be true. Sometimes, despite all the pain he'd caused me, it was hard not to feel sorry for the man.

In her opening statement, Sarah said, “People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing's more important to me than our beloved Alaska. Serving her people is the greatest honor I could imagine.” For those of us by her side from the beginning until the end, we understood the words as another instance of Sarah parceling truth. Most decidedly, she did
not
enjoy serving the people of Alaska and she
did
imagine greater honors on a regular basis.

In reality, the seeds of this head-scratching development were planted long ago.

Sarah Palin may best be described as “serially dissatisfied.” It is well known that she enrolled and left
four
colleges before finally graduating after nearly six years from the University of Idaho in 1987. During her earliest political days, aspects of being the mayor of Wasilla enraged her—including dealing with an aborted recall; firing Police Chief Irl Stambaugh, for what he claimed was supporting her opponent in the election; and dismissing the city's librarian, until being forced to rehire her. When Alaska's newly elected governor, Frank Murkowski, appointed her to a highly paid job on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation
Commission (AOGCC) in 2002, she openly complained about having to work with men whose loyalty was to big business. Palin quit that job about a year after accusing a powerful co-commissioner of un-ethical behavior. She first threatened to abandon her own run for governor in early 2006 before she'd even won the GOP nomination—and repeated that threat numerous times thereafter. Then, at what should have been her finest hour, during the 2008 presidential race, she rebelled against playing second fiddle on a ticket with John McCain, a man she didn't support in the primary, thought “weird,” and whose wishy-washy politics she disliked.

On April 16, 2009,
Conservatives4Palin
, a blog dedicated to raising money for and furthering Sarah's career, wrote as part of a longer piece:

By intimating that there was a wellspring of support that would flow no matter what she did—including quitting—the article greatly buoyed Sarah's spirits. On April 28, 2009, a full nine weeks before walking away from her commitment to the state, Sarah wrote a simple but frequently repeated message:
“I hate this damn job.”
She sent the words to me, Frank Bailey, her director of boards and commissions, and to former administrative aide Ivy Frye, and then added,
“I'll quit in a heartbeat if we have the right message for Alaskans to be able to understand that I can affect change outside the system better than inside this flippin' kangaroo court joke of a job.”
Two days later, she wrote of blowing this
“popsicle stand”
in favor of
“effectiveness outside this Juneau zoo.”
Agreeing with a written assessment by Ivy, Sarah needed to
“travel the country talking to people unfiltered every day
[
because
]
Rs/Independents will love it . . . the dems won't know what to do with themselves.”

Several of us, including me, contributed to the dream of breaking the shackles of government scrutiny. Not that Sarah needed encouragement. In June I'd written to her—without consciously thinking
that it would come to pass—
“Again, can you affect more change from the outside? You certainly would lose the ties that hold you down.”

The Friday morning that Sarah resigned—symbolically timed to coincide with the nation's own Independence Day—I was out of state, driving from Olympia, Washington, to Sedro-Woolley, Washington. Sarah had instructed key advisor and aide Kris Perry to alert me on the previous Tuesday of her plans, so when the time came, I was dialed into the press conference.

In a word, Sarah's speech was confounding. Rambling and nearly incoherent, she attacked critics, spoke of dead fish going with the flow, and said, “You can choose to engage in things that tear down or build up. I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity.” Those words made me choke. To say her path had been one of “fruitfulness” or “productivity”—at least as she intended those listening to believe—was ludicrous. Governing in any sense of the word had barely been on the to-do list.

Since she had no intention of running again for the
“damn”
governor's job, she added something about not wanting to be a lame duck; there was, however, no mention of the multimillion-dollar deal for an autobiography that her inner circle had spent dozens of hours helping construct. Nor did she discuss the marketing and speaking arrangements that would net millions more dollars.