The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (34 page)

“My goodness,” Dobson said. “If our audience is any indication, they’re getting it. There are millions of people praying for you and for Senator McCain.”

Evidence abounded that Sarah’s extremist beliefs were not only
religious but also political. But, again, the mainstream media were too busy swooning to pay attention. Even the disclosure that Todd had been a member of the Alaska Independence Party from 1995 to 2002—he changed his voter registration to Republican only when Sarah decided to run for lieutenant governor—caused little stir.

Sarah herself had spoken at the AIP convention in Wasilla in 2006. As David Talbot of
Salon
reported on September 10, party chairwoman Lynette Clark viewed her as a kindred spirit. “She impressed me so much,” Clark said. “As I was listening to her, I thought she sounds like what we’ve been saying for years.”

Salon
also disclosed that in October 2007, Clark’s husband, Dexter, told delegates at the Secessionist Convention in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that Sarah “was an AIP member before she got the job as a mayor of a small town. But to get along to go along, she eventually joined the Republican party … She’s pretty well sympathetic [to us] because of her former membership.”

In 2008, as governor, Sarah recorded a message of welcome to convention delegates in Fairbanks. She said, “I share your party’s vision of upholding the constitution of our great state … I say good luck on a successful and inspiring convention. Keep up the good work, and God bless you.”

The McCain campaign quickly denied that Sarah had been an official member of the secessionist party, and only Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert of
Salon
investigated her long-standing Wasilla connection to extremists such as Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll.

IN ALASKA, after an initial burst of parochial jubilation that for the first time in history an Alaskan was a candidate for national office, reaction to Sarah’s sudden ascent to national stardom was less than effusive. For one thing, she had unfinished business with the state, most important, Troopergate, the tar baby she couldn’t shake from
her heel. On September 12, legislators voted to subpoena thirteen witnesses, including Todd. The next day, more than a thousand anti-Palin protesters showed up at an Anchorage rally sponsored by a group called Alaska Women Reject Palin. The crowd, wrote the
Daily News
, “appeared bigger than any Anchorage has seen in recent memory.”

On September 18 one of Sarah’s spokespeople announced that Todd would refuse to testify in the Troopergate inquiry, despite being subpoenaed. The next day, neither Todd nor any of the other witnesses called by the legislative committee showed up at the hearing convened to take their testimony.

Again, on September 26, seven subpoenaed Palin aides failed to appear before the committee. The same day, Attorney General Colberg filed a motion in Anchorage superior court seeking to quash the subpoenas. Despite having said, “I’m happy to comply, to cooperate. I have absolutely nothing to hide. No problem with an independent investigation,” Sarah was now stonewalling as hard as she could. Hollis French said, “For over two hundred years, legislatures have exercised their right to oversee the activities of the executive branch. Denying us that authority undermines the basic democratic process.”

The next day, more than a thousand protesters, many chanting, “Recall Palin,” convened in downtown Anchorage to protest her obstruction of the Branchflower inquiry.

Scant attention was paid to any of this outside Alaska, as Sarah continued to mesmerize national media. But on September 30, columnist Michael Carey wrote in the
Anchorage Daily News
, “Sarah Palin may be making new friends as she campaigns the nation, but at home she’s making new enemies.” He said that “the bulk of the responsibility for the ugly mess” that was Troopergate “falls on Palin herself, who can’t separate her personal life from her professional life.”

On October 2, an Anchorage judge denied Colberg’s motion to quash the subpoenas, which were now being ignored not only by Todd but by almost a dozen members of Sarah’s administration. On
October 5, Colberg announced that seven of the subpoenaed state employees—although not Todd—would testify. Colberg said Todd would respond to written interrogatories.

In his sworn statement Todd acknowledged that he’d waged a personal war against Wooten throughout Sarah’s tenure as governor. For the first time he admitted to initiating frequent discussions with Monegan. “We had a lot of conversations …” Todd said. “We talked about Wooten possibly pulling over one of my kids to frame them, like throwing a bag of dope in the back seat just to frame a Palin. I had hundreds of conversations and communications about Trooper Wooten over the last several years, with my family, with friends, with colleagues, and with just about everyone I could—including government officials.”

On October 8 the state supreme court heard an emergency appeal by Sarah’s lawyers asking that the entire Branchflower investigation be shut down. The court denied the appeal the next day, clearing the way for Branchflower to deliver his report. As the
Daily News
wrote, “Within hours of the court ruling, the McCain-Palin campaign looked to discredit the investigator’s report without having seen it.”

The Branchflower report was made public on October 10. It found that Sarah had, in fact, abused the power of her office by seeking so strenuously to have Wooten fired and by allowing Todd to do the same in his capacity as her quasi-official representative. “Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda,” Branchflower wrote. Also, she had allowed Todd to use her office “to continue to contact subordinate state employees in an effort to find some way to get Trooper Wooten fired.”

The investigator also found that while Monegan’s refusal to fire Wooten was clearly a factor in his dismissal, Sarah did have the authority to act as she did because, like Irl Stambaugh in Wasilla, Monegan was an “at will” employee.

Sarah’s lawyer denounced the report as a partisan attempt to
“smear the governor by innuendo”—despite the fact that the investigation had been ordered by a bipartisan legislative committee.

The next day, extraordinarily, Sarah tried to claim that the Branchflower report had exonerated her. “I’m very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of any kind of unethical activity,” she said, stopping short of adding that black was white and up was down. She said she’d fired Monegan because he’d displayed a “rogue mentality.” Sarah apparently felt that “going rogue” was acceptable only when she did it herself.

In the
Daily News
, columnist Elise Patkotak wrote, “The legislative report comes out concluding Palin broke the state ethics law and she calls that an exoneration. The only thing missing from this circus is a bunch of clowns exiting a small car in the center ring … Alaska is in danger of becoming one big national joke, the Dan Quayle of states. Someone should tell our governor that we deserve better than that. Someone should give our governor her brain back.”

Alaskans were also incensed to learn that Sarah was not the ethical Snow White she’d pretended to be. On September 9 the
Washington Post
reported that she’d billed Alaskan taxpayers sixty dollars a day for meal money while spending more than three hundred nights at home during her first year and a half as governor. Ex-governor Tony Knowles said, “When you’re living at home, you don’t pay yourself for living at home … it’s not right.” The paper also disclosed that she’d charged the state more than $30,000 for airfares—as well as billing for meals and hotels—for family members who accompanied her on official trips.

Taking stock of national Republican efforts to sell Sarah as someone she was not,
Daily News
columnist Carey wrote the next day that the GOP, “Like con men in the Old West … used a few nuggets to salt a gold mine. Then they went out to sell the mine to gullible suckers who didn’t know the difference between a gold mine and a hole in the ground.”

As Sarah continued her barnstorming, revival tent, rock star tour
of red-state America, Alaskan bloggers such as Andrew Halcro, Shannyn Moore, Jeanne Devon, Phil Munger, and Jesse Griffin—people Sarah would later refer to in an
Esquire
interview as “bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie”—stepped up their campaign to inform America that Sarah was certainly not a gold mine.

Not only bloggers, but published authors such as Nick Jans and Seth Kantner put out informed and trenchant commentary. Jans, a Juneau-based magazine writer, member of the
USA Today
board of contributors, and author of several books about Alaska, wrote in
Salon:

Author and journalist Seth Kantner wrote from Kotzebue, fifty miles above the Arctic Circle:

As the campaign wore on, McCain advisors lost patience with Sarah’s impulsiveness, unbridled egotism, and volatile temper. CNN reported on October 25 that “They have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin ‘going rogue.’ A source said, ‘She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone. She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone
else. Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party.’ ”

McCain staffers were particularly outraged by what
Newsweek
termed “Palin’s shopping spree at high-end department stores.” It was reported that she’d billed the Republican Party more than $150,000 for new clothes for Todd and herself. One aide angrily complained to
Newsweek
about “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”

Sarah later denied the accounts of extravagant shopping, but to Alaskan ears they rang true. “You know that’s true,” one friend told me in 2010. “I know somebody who was over there. They’ve got the clothes. They’re there. They got them. They joke about it. Sarah’s a compulsive spender—for herself. When she had that job with the oil and gas commission down in Anchorage, Todd would be like, ‘Fuckin’-A, man, all she does is go to Nordstrom’s every goddamned day and buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of shit.’ ”

THREE DAYS before the election, Sarah was pranked by a Canadian radio host who had her thinking she was talking to French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

“I see you as a president one day, too,” the fake Sarkozy said.

“Maybe in eight years,” Sarah replied.

She refrained from saying that if McCain lost it could be four.

In Phoenix, on election night, Sarah demanded that she be allowed to give her own concession speech. She was furious when denied permission. A week later, she said to Matt Lauer on the
Today
show, “I thought, even if it was unprecedented, so what, you know?”

SARAH’S VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN made her a national star, but it destroyed her forever in Alaska. Her shrill partisanship (accusing Barack Obama of “pallin’ around with terrorists”), her twisting
of the truth, her mutation into a grotesque caricature of the woman Alaskans thought they knew, had created an indelible stain.

When she returned, in defeat, in November 2008, succor was in short supply; rancor was not. While Sarah saw herself as on a mission from God, in the minds of many Alaskans, she had made a deal with the devil, trading what she might—or might not—have become as their governor for a garish new identity as the patron saint of the right-wing extremists who would soon coalesce into the Tea Party.

S
EPTEMBER ARRIVES. It’s almost time to go home and start writing. I’ve been the good neighbor I told Todd I would be. I haven’t intruded on the Palins’ lives in any way. If Sarah hadn’t made an issue of it, only the few people I told would have known I’d been living next door since late May. My rent is paid through the middle of September and my trash pickup paid through November. I’ve talked to the people I wanted to talk to, except for those who were either too loyal or too scared of Todd and Sarah to talk.

The one unanswered question is Trig. Is he really Sarah’s child? That question has come up again and again throughout the spring and summer, and usually not because I asked it. Nothing has surprised me more than finding that so many people, even some who like and admire Sarah, have doubts.

At first it seemed outlandish, even indecent, to suppose that Trig might not be Sarah’s child. I did not, and I don’t. And yet … and yet … the circumstances surrounding both Sarah’s pregnancy and her fifth child’s premature birth are very difficult for anyone—especially anyone who has ever become a parent—to understand.

On his
Atlantic Monthly
Daily Dish blog on June 28, 2010, Andrew Sullivan, author, columnist, one-time editor of the
New Republic
,
and former Harvard professor, had a long post about why it matters whether Sarah actually gave birth to Trig. Sullivan has been ridiculed, not least in the liberal press, for continuing to care about this, but he makes some cogent points, especially about mainstream media, which—despite Palin’s incessant ridiculing of it as “lamestream”—has served as her great enabler, reacting to her every subwoof and tweet as if she were already the influential world leader that their fetishizing of her may someday allow her to become.