Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (49 page)

Colberg's resignation triggered embarrassing fallout. Sarah did not want anyone to suspect she might have pressured the AG to resign.

Within hours, Ivy shot off an email to Fairbanks attorney Joe Miller asking if he'd help deflect potential rumors.

As events would unfold, Ivy's concerns over Talis Colberg were wasted. Sarah would do what Sarah does best: take a bad situation and manage to have everyone forget it by pushing the pendulum off the grid in the opposite direction. Sarah's office had released the promise “I will look for someone with the same strong moral character as Talis.” As far as Sarah was concerned, the replacement was an easy decision. She chose somebody who would fight to the death for her, no matter what. The choice boiled down to only one man, Wayne Anthony Ross. Regarded as equally loyal but smarter and infinitely more aggressive, the person who helped push Talis Colberg out the door was perfect. We'd replace a poodle with a pit bull.

Only one small problem. The slice of support for WAR was small, confined mainly to the religious right. In a world requiring legislative confirmation of the selection, the nickname fit perfectly, and the bloody WAR began.

31
 

Clowns to the Left,
Jokers to the Right

S
arah and Todd Palin may have disliked Levi Johnston, the eighteen-year-old father of Bristol's unborn child, but during the campaign they needed him. Originally summoned from a sheep hunt in the Alaskan wilderness, Levi was fitted for a suit, received a hundred-dollar haircut, had someone teach him how to speak only when spoken to (keeping his comments to “yes, sir” and “no, sir”), and was then jetted off to the campaign trail as Bristol's fiancé. While not an ideal situation, the lipstick on this pig was thick and expertly applied by a PR machine with, by now, a tremendous amount of porcine makeup experience. The storyline went: while they might've made a mistake, make no mistake that these kids are heading toward a happily-ever-after life together. Amazingly, the vast majority of supporters found this an inspiring fairy tale, and the couple was enthusiastically cheered whenever trotted on stage to stand with Sarah and/or John McCain.

Once the campaign ended, however, Levi Johnston instantly became an ex-fiancé with a penchant for publicity. In early April 2009, he appeared on the nationally syndicated
The Tyra Show
and hung out a load of dirty laundry about his relationship with the Palin family, including the assertion that Sarah was probably aware the young couple
were having sexual relations, he was not allowed to take his son out of the house, and he and Bristol did not always get along.

This interview landed Levi on a list of unfavorable persons that was already lengthy and about to become seriously long.

Through spokesperson Meg Stapleton, the governor responded:

Naturally, we individually and collectively did
walk word for word
through Levi Johnston's statements despite pledging not to do so. Sarah kicked off the process by writing us,

In July Sarah continued to monitor her almost son-in-law. When someone filed an ethics complaint against her, alleging she illegally received payment for granting interviews, we did opposition research on the complainant and managed to tie him back to Levi. Sarah wrote to her ghost biographer Lynn Vincent, copying her inner circle for support:

Sarah was developing her own plan to do something she did quite well: she'd seek to destroy her opposition from afar.

When two days later Levi was interviewed by Ann Curry on NBC's
Today
show, Sarah pledged, from that day forward to boycott all major news outlets except Fox. In finalizing this decision, she wrote:

Sarah then continued,
“What good does it do to ignore FOX and keep talking to networks?”
She pledged, from that day forward, to boycott all major news outlets except Fox. In finalizing this decision, she wrote:

We came to employ a strategy we referred to as “reaching out to surrogates with our talking points.” That surrogate list included
Weekly Standard
editor and Fox News contributor Bill Kristol, GOP advisor Mary Matalin, former special assistant to President Bush Jason Recher, former Bush aide Steve Biegun, GOP executive director Nick Ayers, chairman of the GOP Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News hosts Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, and Sean Hannity. We could normally expect them to repeat any coordinated message we sent. In a scramble, the mainstream media often picked up on the message in an attempt to catch up on our Fox News scoops.

The strategy of selective media access spread from networks to local media and online reporters. For a time, Anchorage television station KTUU was put in the penalty box for a series of unfavorable comments that began with Chuck Kopp's resignation. Certain reporters at the
Anchorage Daily News
were also excluded from access, while others, who were labeled “friendlies,” could count on the occasional exclusive. At one point, Sarah decided to temporarily withhold all comment to the paper when she disliked a story about her opposition to President Obama's pick of Katherine Sebelius to head the Department of Health and Human Services. She wrote,
“More bullshit headline grabbing unethical journalism at work.”

As for Levi Johnston, despite the valuable media insight she gained from dealing with his treachery—speak only to surrogate outlets—he joined Sarah's two-eyes-for-an-eye list. Furthermore, with Sarah's return to Alaska, this was just the beginning. For all of us, the trials and tribulations were about to become Job-like.

Some enemies faded for a time, never discarded but—with the list as long as it was becoming—placed into a kind of cretinous cold storage. Others remained intact, never quite as oppressive as Trooper Wooten, but near enough. The most persistent new thorn was a formerly fervent supporter, Andree McLeod.

McLeod—who, for the sake of full disclosure, filed a complaint with the Alaska attorney general's office, seeking to derail this book—
had tried and failed to secure a position with the state shortly after Sarah's gubernatorial victory. At the time, we attributed her incessant attacks as sour grapes. Sarah wrote of McLeod's efforts:

And the preoccupation with McLeod wasn't a short-lived thing. Two months later, Sarah was increasingly disturbed:

Whatever McLeod's gripes, she correctly understood that campaign reformer Sarah Palin had not upheld that promise once in office. McLeod took it upon herself to become a watchdog of an administration run by a woman who said repeatedly, “Hold me accountable.” Arguably going overboard—and I believe she did—McLeod took on the hold-accountable challenge with massively more energy than Sarah exhibited in managing government.

McLeod filed requests—technically, an Alaska Public Records Request (PRR)—for documents and emails she felt would show that Ivy Frye and I had illegally campaigned for Sarah on state time. In January 2009 she filed a formal complaint with the state, alleging that persons, including Kris Perry, while working on state time had also
participated in Sarah's vice presidential campaign. She even sent informal complaints about the dress code in state offices after being “astounded at the amount and magnitude of cleavage being exhibited by female employees.”

In what I can describe only as a growing pattern of petty counterattacks, we latched onto this last item in an attempt to bring disgrace to a persistent critic: leaking this story, via our spokesperson, to the
Anchorage Daily News
political gossip column, The Ear. In Sarah's book
Going Rogue
(page 354), she discusses this incident in the broader scale of ethics charges: