Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (23 page)

Truth Optional

I
t was impossible for me to deny: I had witnessed the Palin campaign coordinate the filming of an RGA television commercial with the Republican Governors Association. When confronted by critics, Sarah convincingly decried the allegations as malicious attacks on her good name. Employing a familiar strategy, we counterattacked the Tony Knowles machine for spreading lies and accused his campaign of conducting a host of illegal actions.

As far as dealing with a guilty conscience, I'd suffer in silence, not daring to even discuss this with my wife. However, this was the one instance where I did not feel required, beyond keeping my mouth shut, to protect Sarah from herself. If there were an investigation, I would not lie to protect her or the campaign. Of course, that didn't keep me from begging God to forgive me and let this one slide.

Curtis Smith, our bold and blunt spokesman, was again sent out to “refudiate” (a Sarah word) the accusations. Speaking with the
Anchorage Daily News
, he responded to allegations once again without wavering: “It's unfortunate they feel that this is the best shot they've got,” Smith said. “They want to nibble around the edges and do a ‘gotcha' on Sarah, when I can tell you there is no ‘gotcha' to get.”

Curtis was not alone in his unabashed support of Sarah. Once the Democrats started publicizing their outrage at the ad campaign, conservatives—having no reason to doubt Sarah's honesty—sprang
to her defense, repeating the assertion that Tony Knowles should be ashamed of himself for crossing the line and suggesting that Sarah might lie. What a bully.

Independent candidate Andrew Halcro made the mistake of agreeing to an interview with Palin nemesis Dan Fagan to discuss the RGA controversy. Halcro, believing himself on sympathetic ground, suggested that he
knew
the Palin campaign had coordinated with the RGA. For one, he claimed, the entire film clip
looked
staged. No matter the truth, Halcro's statement sounded ridiculously subjective. He further noted that in the commercial, Sarah didn't have her large red handbag with her when she exited the building and strolled down the street. To our amazement, Fagan ridiculed Halcro and stated forcefully, “Sarah Palin may be many things, but she is not a liar.” The handbag argument even elicited cries of sexism from callers because only women carry handbags. Halcro's voice grew unsteady by the end of the show.

In 2009 Halcro wrote in his blog about these events:

An incredulous Fagan went so far as to say, “
This
is why Andrew Halcro will
never
become governor.” Fagan, for the only time in several months, directed his verbal spittle at someone besides Sarah. But the talk show host got it wrong yet again. While I disliked Andrew Halcro, the guy nailed the truth in this case, and no one—including the perennially Palin-bashing, persistently misguided Dan Fagan—believed him.

To drive home the point, campaign spokesman Curtis Smith issued a public statement: “There's no coordination. To imply that, is disingenuous.” I don't believe Curtis knew what had actually taken place. Sarah encouraged these kinds of denials. In vain, I hoped this was a one-time affair.

I can only guess what went on in Sarah Palin's mind, but I am confident that she convinced herself that Knowles had conducted far worse campaign sins. On top of that, through no fault of her own, our campaign lagged far behind in both money and establishment support. To date, Knowles had spent $640,000, while we'd spent about $226,000. Even Halcro, though bringing up the rear in the race, had sunk more than $200,000 of his own money into his campaign. This hardly felt like a level playing field. We needed the extra help, and while not perfect, we remained—at least relatively speaking—the good guys. (Or, more accurately, I suppose, the
better
guys.) Eventually Sarah would convince herself nothing untoward was ever done, at least by her.

Within days, as the rhetoric died and the crisis faded, we breathed a bit easier. Thanks largely to Sarah's reputation for honesty, we Rag Tags survived the DNC and Halcro attacks.

However, survival did not include forgetting. It wasn't only the dishonesty that bothered me. The negativity in the RGA ads seemed to be the antithesis of what we'd preached so hard against for so long. Even Sarah's daughters weighed in—confirming that nobody in their right mind thought these were anything but attack ads. As Sarah wrote to us,
“Bristol and Willow are arguing it now—W says
[
the RGA commercial is
]
totally negative and to ‘delete it now, Mom!,' and B says, ‘Hey, it's free publicity.' ”

When Bristol said, “Hey, it's free publicity,” she had no idea of the emotional and ethical price we paid to run those ads in the way we did. How could the campaign have been so blind? For hours on end, I continued to seek ways to rationalize away the reality. Part of me kept saying—even as I wrote this book—“Frank, you're wrong. Something
is missing here, a mistake on your part.” Could this be a simple public relations film that somehow got into the hands of the RGA and they used it in the same way a reporter might use a clip from a speech to set up a news story? Of course the answer was no, but that didn't keep the thought from festering.

When McGinniss released the unauthorized early text of
Blind Allegiance,
Palin supporters claimed that the evidence presented in the book was circumstantial and that “Sarah Palin would never do such things”—a comment I'd heard a hundred times before. While I knew my story was real and accurate, there would be no way, I thought, to convince critics; Sarah would likely treat the story as the ranting of a former employee, then play the victim and deny. That was, I suspected, one of the things I'd have to live with.

However, a strange thing happened on the way from leaked manuscript to final draft.

“You nailed it one hundred percent.” So began an unsolicited response to my accounting of the RGA incident from a participant in the September fund-raiser for Sarah Palin at the Hotel Captain Cook in September 2006. As a result of the publicity from Joe McGinniss's actions, we were contacted by an individual—whose credentials we verified—working on behalf of the Republican Governors Association that day and the next.

“I wasn't paying attention to Frank Bailey,” this individual said. “The person who seemed to be buzzing around Sarah Palin for the most part was Kris Perry. Kris and Sarah spent nearly an hour with the people from the RGA, coordinating the shoot along the east entrance. Sarah came in and out, in and out, in and out, just as Frank Bailey reported.”

The team of RGA operatives, this person confirmed, communicated directly with Kris and Sarah, letting them know if and when a particular shot was in the can or in need of another take. They also filmed Sarah climbing from a car as if she were just arriving—scenes that I did not witness, likely because I was running late that day. According to this eyewitness, “Sarah very much cooperated with the film crew—wholeheartedly!”

Our source then said, “There was no question that Sarah knew full
well who was filming her and why. She spoke to the crew, asking questions about what part of California we had traveled from to participate in the filming.” Not only that, but Sarah and Kris were not alone in that knowledge.

As Sarah walked away, someone else on the film crew mockingly commented that with her enthusiasm for their efforts, “If this was a high school, she'd make a great cheerleading advisor.”

Our source spoke of a second coordinated filming that was to take place the next day at a Republican Ladies fund-raiser at the prestigious and private Petroleum Club. Sarah, as I'd come to expect, in typical form arrived thirty minutes late, squandering the opportunity to stage additional footage. Had they used that footage instead of the Captain Cook take, it's likely I never would have discovered the ruse as I was not a participant in that event.

With nothing to gain personally from stepping forward, our eyewitness admitted, “I'm not a fan of Mr. Bailey,” but felt it was important to set the record straight, especially in light of criticism from conservative commentators after the McGinniss leak.

For that honesty, all I can say is, “Thank you!”

The Republican Governors Association went on to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on our behalf, blasting Tony Knowles while idolizing Sarah Palin. The whole time, lingering in my mind was how close we came to disaster. And for what? A camera angle to make Sarah Palin look more perfect, more intelligent, more serious, more ready to be governor? This stupid commercial frightened me; we might have derailed the entire campaign over such an inconsequential matter.

Later, even some supporters objected to the tone of the RGA ads. When a longtime Wasilla friend of Sarah's called her and suggested that many people were put off by the tenor of the commercials, Sarah—oblivious to how deeply deceptive she was becoming—whipped out her talking points and wrote to her friend:

As she'd done to Scott Heyworth when falsely suggesting that we had no influence on the content of letters to the editor, Sarah demonstrated a willingness to misrepresent the truth, this time to a dear friend. Sadly, I played along. To our little group, I wrote:

At one point, we did ask the Alaska Public Offices Commission for a ruling on whether we could legally request the RGA to pull its ads. APOC director Brooke Miles responded that while coordination between an agency like the RGA and a campaign is not allowed, her staff would never blast a campaign for calling such a group and telling it to stop airing ads. “A person has the right to ask someone to stop something,” she said. We pretended to not hear or comprehend that message and stuck with Bristol's advice that, hey, it's free publicity!

However, knowing what we'd done, covered up, and allowed to continue, the word that best sums up my emotions today is
disappointment
. And not just in Sarah. More so, I am disappointed in myself for having gotten it so wrong and later convincing myself that somehow this wasn't a big deal—that the end result justified any path we chose to get there. I'd bitten into that forbidden political apple and embraced a new, unstated slogan: