Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (42 page)

The very next day, Sarah told me to stay at home while they sorted out the Monegan mess. Midmorning, she instructed me to phone in to her official state line. When I did, she put me on speaker for Chief of Staff Nizich to hear. Her tone of voice made it clear that mean Sarah was back, sharpening her knives for guilty me.

“I need to know everything, Frank. Why does the media think you're guilty?”

“Governor, I've told you everything I can remember.”
More than once
, I felt like adding.

She grilled me, going over territory covered at her home on Sunday. I repeated everything truthfully without reminding her that she had acknowledged knowing Todd was my source of all information. In an uncharacteristic outburst, I said, “Why don't you ask Todd where he got all this stuff?”

“No, Frank, I'm asking you! I know you think I'm being wishywashy, but the Department of Law still thinks you did something wrong here.”

She concluded by telling me I'd be put on administrative leave retro active to the day before, pending the investigation. With an ounce of her former support, she concluded by saying, “At least it's with pay.”

27
 

Imprudently Impulsive

B
eginning with my leave of absence, I started having fractured dreams centered around Trooper Wooten confronting me, gun in hand, ready to put one between my eyes; or, in a second nightmare, seeing a whirl of flashing lights pulling up to our house followed by blue-vested cops busting down the door, arresting me and then sending me to a maximum security prison where I'd never see my family again. During the day, things weren't any better. Sleep deprivation and humiliation entwined like a cord around my neck.

There was a single moment from the previous Sunday at the Palins' lakefront house that did manage to seep through this sieve of panic. At one point, late in the evening, my wife serendipitously said to Sarah, “One day, when you're president, we can spit in all these jerks' faces.”—a reference to those who purposefully held my recorded call as ammunition to inflict maximum political damage. As for me, internally, I felt I had handed by boss's opponents those “bullets” and wished for the chance to be the sole owner of my mistake with that call. After Neen's comment, I noticed Todd and Sarah sharing a quick, knowing look, as if they were guarding a secret. Unbeknown to me, that
something
, whatever it was, was the other gigantic reason
for Sarah's fickle treatment of me and her refusal to deal honestly with anyone or anything. That reason had a name, too: John McCain.

By late August, I was days into what was to become a nearly five-week suspension from my official duties as director of boards and commissions and my unofficial role as Palin gofer, warrior, and loyal pincushion. Much of my information now came indirectly from Ivy Frye and, to a lesser extent, Kris Perry, who was now distancing herself from my radioactivity, and Todd Palin. I was, however, aware that by the time the Republican National Convention was set to begin in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Sarah had multiple messes on her hands that would preclude lesser mortals from being plucked from obscurity into the heady realm of GOP royalty.

There was Syrin spouting about an affair, asking on the
Anchorage Daily News
blog, “What peculiar branch of Christianity does Sarah believe in and teach her family? That it's ok to have an affair with her hubby's best friend when he's at work kind?” Worse, Senate President Mean Lyda Green, among others, had yelped enough that on August 11, Stephen Branchflower began his investigation after the twelve-member bipartisan Alaska Legislative Council voted unanimously to look into the dismissal of Walt Monegan. That investigation promised to drag on for at least a couple of months. From being in the center of Troopergate, I knew there was no way their conclusions were going to be pleasant for us. Next on the list of vice presidential obstacles was the hiring and dismissal of Monegan's replacement and the payment to him of $10,000 after it was discovered he'd been subjected to a sexual harassment complaint while police chief of Kenai. Finally, at the top of these mountainous crap clusters, how would abstinence-advocate Sarah possibly explain that her own seventeen-year-old daughter was pregnant, and the father was a self-professed
redneck
hockey-playing high school dropout?

Were Senator McCain's other choices so distasteful that Sarah's baggage was worth the price? Pawlenty, Romney, Bobby Jindal, Tom Ridge, and Joe Lieberman were worse candidates given what was going on in Sarah's life? Bill Kristol, appearing on
Fox & Friends
in
August, said, “Obama can pick a boring choice like Evan Bayh, and McCain can pick an exciting choice like Sarah Palin.”

Media reports suggested that Sarah was a last-minute brainstorm of a selection, a name that rose to the top at a Sedona, Arizona, meeting between McCain advisors headed by senior campaign advisor Steve Schmidt on Sunday, August 24. Whether the case or not, Sarah was first formally notified she was under serious consideration, with initial requests for information, that very day. Then, three days later, on Wednesday, August 27, she was flown to Arizona, arriving in Flagstaff around ten at night. The very next morning, the governor was offered the job as John McCain's running mate.

His vetting team, led by Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr., was under the gun to approve this “high risk, high reward” selection. In a 2009 speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, Culvahouse said, “Me and two of my most cynical partners interviewed [Palin] and came away impressed.” On Monday, September 1, two days after the announcement, McCain advisor Doug Holtz-Eakin maintained that Palin “was completely vetted by the campaign” before being chosen. However, Culvahouse's initial interview with Sarah was after her 10:00 p.m. arrival in Flagstaff on August 27 (which, if they were part of that conversation, apparently made those two “cynical partners” easily impressed). More startlingly, as of ten in the morning on Tuesday the twenty-sixth, nobody in the McCain camp had seen Sarah's financial disclosures, tax records, or the formal lengthy vetting questionnaire delving into her background, because Sarah had not yet finished preparing them. Culvahouse, only a day or two from having Sarah offered the job as running mate, seemed nonplussed and asked in an email for the tax returns only
“if possible.”
As late as nine thirty that night, at least some of the financial documents were still being assembled by Todd with the assistance of Kris Perry. Again, not that Culvahouse seemed particularly concerned. He indicated to Sarah that he did not intend to begin sifting through these materials until the next day anyway, which happened to be the Wednesday Sarah arrived for her face-to-face with McCain.

So as far as I could see, the process was (1) review Sarah's file for the first time on Wednesday, (2) interview her late that night, and
(3) based on that, it's
welcome aboard
the Maverick Express by around eleven in the morning on Thursday, August 28. How, as Mr. HoltzEakin implies, this qualifies as “completely vetted” will forever remain a mystery.

Was there any other investigation going on that made financial data and questionnaires irrelevant? Likely not much. With Trooper-gate news stirring things up in Anchorage, the two people most likely to be questioned were me and Walt Monegan. Neither of us ever had a word with McCain's people. Sarah contacted Culvahouse on the matter for the first time on August 25, explaining away the situation in a single emailed sentence: she said that her decision to replace Commissioner Monegan (an at-will political appointment) perturbed the police union, and the
“senate Democrat leader called for an investigation of the issue.”
Sarah and Todd had done a thorough job of preparing me to parrot their claims that Sarah had no knowledge of anything Wooten, but thanks to the serendipitous “vetting,” that turned out to be unnecessary.

As for the other bombshell, did McCain and handlers know about Bristol's pregnancy? Sarah had yet to publicly announce it, so unless she volunteered the information—not something she'd likely do if it risked some prize she coveted—that seems unlikely. Nowhere in the personal data questionnaire was such a revelation required. Fortunately, this didn't become much of a campaign issue.

Did Culvahouse and his vetting team speak to Sarah's family ahead of her nomination? Her three daughters were told the couple was going on a trip to Ohio to celebrate Todd and Sarah's wedding anniversary and not told of the nomination until Thursday. Sarah's mother had no inkling on August 20 as she asked Sarah on that day if she was even going to the convention while bemoaning the fact she'd heard McCain might choose someone as distasteful as Joe Lieberman. On August 27, Sarah's mother blithely discussed her desire to see victories in their upcoming elections for Sean Parnell (running unsuccessfully for Alaska's lone US House seat) and presidential hopeful McCain, unaware of her daughter's impending nomination.

Nor did McCain's staff contact brother Chuck Heath. On Thursday, August 28—the very day Sarah was offered the position—he
bet Sarah that Pawlenty would get the nod, even though, as he said, the numbers favored Romney. He did joke that maybe Sarah was the dark horse.
“Who do you think will be the nominee?”
he wrote her; Sarah responded early the next morning, August 29,
“Me???? Turn on your TV in an hour.”
Within two hours, on his seventy-second birthday, McCain made the formal announcement. Brother Chuck owed McCain's new running mate a skinny white chocolate mocha.

As for me, I was as clueless as everyone else. Upon hearing the announcement, I stared at the television hard enough to sting my eyes. As I listened to McCain speak of the gritty, full-of-fightin'-spirit and compassionate Governor Sarah Palin, a recurring question nagged at me: How could Sarah do this to Bristol? Later on, when a reporter asked just that, Sarah laughed and said, “Well, that was going to be revealed pretty soon anyway. I don't know what I can say about that. It is what it is.”