The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (39 page)

SHE DIDN’T NEED Alaska anymore, and Alaska no longer needed her. Wayne Anthony Ross said that, as attorney general, one of his tasks would be to stop “having barbs thrown at the governor all the time.”

The legislature threw a barb his way on April 16, rejecting his appointment by a vote of 35–23. It was the first time in Alaskan history that someone nominated to head a state agency had been rejected.

Just how far Sarah’s stock had fallen in the state was made clear by a Paul Jenkins column in the
Daily News
on May 3. “There are signs of frustration and anger,” he wrote. “People already are wondering whether she will, or should, consider running for governor next year. She could lose.”

That was a risk she had no intention of taking.

On May 12 she announced that she’d signed a multimillion-dollar book deal with Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing company.
She said the book would give her a chance to tell her story “unrestrained and unfiltered.” HarperCollins announced that the book would be co-published for the Christian market by its subsidiary Zondervan.

In early June she went to New York to make a speech, lead a parade, and attend a Yankees game. Then she went to Washington to attend a Republican fund-raising dinner. She was interviewed by Fox News, CNN, and NBC.

Life Outside seemed far more appealing than the prospect of spending the summer on the shores of Lake Lucille surrounded by a swelling chorus of critics whom, in her binary way, she called “haters.” As Howard Bess said, in Sarah’s world, “everything and everyone is either good or evil.”

Economist Gregg Erickson went binary in the
Juneau Empire
, writing that Sarah was “either a cynical hypocrite or delusional.” In a June 22 editorial, the newspaper said, “If it wasn’t noticeable before, it is now painfully obvious: Alaska is no longer big enough for Sarah Palin … Governor Palin needs to decide soon what she’s going to do with the next year: run the state of Alaska or run for national office.”

ON THE AFTERNOON of July 3, standing in her backyard, on the shore of Lake Lucille, Sarah announced her decision: she would resign as governor before the end of the month. The speech in which she made her announcement was so jittery, incoherent, and just plain daffy that many who heard it feared for Sarah’s mental and emotional health. Almost everyone—not only her growing bevy of critics, but even the dwindling band of true believers—felt it signaled the end of Sarah’s political career.

They were wrong. She had no intention of disappearing. She knew that, unencumbered by the demands of the governorship, she’d be free to pursue the office she’d had in mind even before she became mayor of Wasilla: the presidency of the United States.

T
HE TIME has come to strike the tent.

That may seem like a strange thing to say in the last chapter of a book about the star performer of the circus. But no matter how much my book sales might benefit from a Palin presidential campaign in 2012, I sincerely hope that the whole extravaganza, which has been unblushingly underwritten by a mainstream media willing to gamble the nation’s future in exchange for the cheap thrill of watching a clown in high heels on a flying trapeze, is nearing the end of its run.

The sheer giddy
spectacle
of Sarah has mesmerized the media for far too long. Quitting her job as Alaska’s governor enabled Sarah to make the jump from politician to full-time celebrity. Her new status meant that it no longer mattered what she did or said—the mere fact of her doing or saying it made it news. The same was true for other members of her family. And even for people whose only connection to her was that they’d briefly lived in her neighborhood.

Thus, my moving out of the house next door to hers in September 2010 became national news. “Joe McGinniss is packing his bags and notebooks and leaving Sunday for his home in Massachusetts to write the book he has been researching on the former governor and GOP vice presidential candidate,” an Associated Press story reported.

I moved in, I moved out: nothing newsworthy happened in between. But Sarah could not get over the fact that I’d been there at all. At the start of an October 1 telephone interview, right-wing radio host Mark Levin asked her, “By the way, did that jerk next door leave yet?”

“He left,” she said. “Just in time. We had a big windstorm, too, and half the fence fell down. So he left and we’re gonna hopefully get back to normal … the
freak.
”

Even six weeks later, on the premiere of her TLC series,
Sarah Palin’s Alaska
, she was still obsessing about me. The first episode opens with Sarah seated at a table on the patio outside her house, wearing a yellow jersey and scribbling in a notebook.

In a voice-over, she says: “Where I like to do a lot of my writing and researching—especially on a beautiful day—is outside, on our slab, where I get to take in the beauty of the lake.”

Then Todd approaches and says, “Gettin’ some work done?”

Sarah answers in a whisper: “Yeah.”

Todd: “So, ah, you comfortable up here?”

Sarah (sotto voce): “I am if you want to peek around the corner and see if he’s over there.”

We don’t see Todd actually peeking. The next shot is of Sarah, wearing a blue top (indicating that this part was filmed on a different day), saying, “Our being here certainly has changed this summer”—cut to a shot of my house, taken from the lake—“because of this new neighbor.”

Then we have a closeup of my deck, with my American and Alaskan flags hanging from the railing. And lo and behold, there, sitting on a chair reading a book, is someone whose face has been intentionally blurred but who looks a lot like me.

Cut back to the opening scene on the patio.

“Yeah, he’s probably over there,” Todd says.

“Do you want me to look?” Sarah says.

“No, that’s okay.”

“You need to drill a little tiny hole there, a peephole, and let me look through and see where he is,” Sarah says.

The next shot shows Todd by the lake, saying, “Our summer fun has been kind of taken away from us because of a new neighbor next door, who’s writing a hit piece on my wife. I mean, life’s about bein’ productive, but these people want to seek and destroy.”

Then it’s back to Sarah (yellow top) and Todd on the slab. Sarah says, “He doesn’t need to be seein’ what I’m writing and reading, right?”

“Yeah,” Todd agrees. She pats him affectionately on the leg.

“Todd and his buddies got out there and built a fourteen-foot-high fence, and I’m very thankful for that,” blue-top Sarah says. “By the way, I thought that was a good example, what we just did, others could look at and say, ‘Oh, this is what we need to do to secure our nation’s border.’ ”

Then we see Todd and yellow-top Sarah get up from the patio table. Sarah says, “I want Piper to play on the other side of the house, too, okay?” As they walk away, Sarah says in a voice-over, “I think it’s an intrusion and an invasion of our privacy and I don’t like it.”

Back to blue-top Sarah: “Some reporters have said I was overreacting, and I wanted to ask them, ‘How would you feel if some dude who you knew was out to getcha’ ”—then a cut to yellow-top Sarah on the bed of a pickup truck on the other side of house—‘moved in to keep you away from
your
kids? How would you feel?’ ”

About twenty minutes later in the episode, Sarah returns to the subject again. As she and Todd and Piper are walking from the lake to their house after a floatplane trip, she says, in voice-over, “And Piper spies, right there in the next-door neighbor’s yard, our neighbor.” This is followed by the same shot used earlier of me reading a book on my deck.

“He’s an author who’s writing a book about us,” Sarah continues, “and Piper whispered to me as we were comin’ up the lawn, ‘Mom, that neighbor’s out there, he’s watchin’ us, he’s watchin’ us.’ ”

The camera shows Sarah and Piper walking up the lawn.

“Where is he?” Sarah asks. “Are you gonna wave to him? We’ll just keep walkin’.” Then she asks, “Is he takin’ pictures?” Although I never took a picture of any member of the Palin family, Piper nods. She seems already aware of how she’s supposed to respond, regardless of the truth. Sarah walks faster, with an exaggerated stride. “Don’t give him the pleasure of takin’ a picture.”

Then we’re back to blue-top Sarah, facing the camera. She says, “I would think, really, at the end of the day, he’s gonna be bored to death if that’s all he has to do is observe our normal, kind of boring family and our activities, but”—then a cut for the third time to the same shot of me reading—“it’s just none of his flippin’ business.”

The scene—if that’s what we can call such a spliced-together mishmash of voice-over and footage taken at different times—ends by returning to the shot of yellow-top Sarah, Todd, and Piper walking toward their house.

“He was stuck inside, writin’ an ugly book,” Sarah says to her nine-year-old daughter. “See, we one-upped him, Piper, we had a good day. And he’s stuck in his house.” She and Piper exchange a high five.

A NUMBER of reviewers of
Sarah Palin’s Alaska
commented on the irony of Sarah complaining about my intrusiveness even as she invaded her own children’s privacy by thrusting them in front of TLC cameras in return for $250,000 per episode. Others, however, swallowed the bait whole, failing to recognize that “reality” television is to reality as love handles are to love.

Particularly credulous was Janet Malcolm, writing in the
New York Review of Books:

“We” believe her? Maybe not quite all of us. Longtime Alaskan and former rock climber Phil Munger wrote on his Progressive Alaska blog, “The rock climbing episode was simply awful.… Her whining and self pitying was horrid.”

Author, photographer, and guide Stewart Green, who has written nineteen books about rock climbing, reviewed the “sorry episode” for
About.com
. He wrote, “If there are three things that climbers can agree about, they are these: We don’t like made-up climbs to make someone look good; we don’t like anyone faking it; and we don’t like having BS tossed around about our beloved sport.”

Sarah, he wrote, “groaned and cackled and whined with a cat-claws-on-blackboard-voice all the way up the route. Her stiff boots were not rock climbing shoes.… Her pants were way too tight and restricted her leg movement.… Another huge problem with the episode was that Sarah Palin, husband Todd, as well as the climbing guide were not wearing climbing helmets. Tsk tsk tsk. Very bad form and a
very bad idea … I seriously doubt that the ‘Bumpit’ that Sarah wears while climbing would protect her noggin from falling boulders.”

Thus, contrary to what the gullible Malcolm wrote, most of us were
not
taken in by Sarah’s histrionics. Malcolm also fell for a more disturbing ploy that involved Trig and his future as a Down syndrome child.

“There is another passage in
Sarah Palin’s Alaska
that stands out … for its emotional truth,” she wrote. “It takes place in a native village called Eluk, where Todd Palin’s Eskimo cousin Ina has set up a summer ‘fish camp.’ … In Ina’s kitchen, Sarah and Ina cut up fish and have an intimate women’s talk”—as if women ever have “intimate” talks when surrounded by cameras, boom mikes, slithering cables, and milling television technicians.

Ina has a Down syndrome twelve-year-old. After talking to her, Sarah confides to producer Mark Burnett’s cameras and a television audience of millions, “Getting to meet our little cousin there … kind of gives me a look at ten years from now.” Malcolm writes that Sarah “is devastated by the look into the future.… We see her breaking down and beginning to cry, and we cry with her. At this moment … she is a woman one pities and sympathizes with and, yes, even admires.”

I can only speak for myself and not for “one,” but I don’t think I’m alone in being revolted by the cynicism of choosing to parade severely disabled children in front of television cameras for monetary and political gain.

The eight-episode series was stuffed to the gills with hokum and tripe. In the
New Yorker
, Nancy Franklin wrote, “Nearly every … moment comes across as calculated … and we find out nothing about Alaska that we didn’t learn in elementary school. I know that some Americans think Palin is stupid, but I never realized that she thinks
we’re
stupid.”

A reviewer in the English
Telegraph
wrote, “Various people called
things like Truck and Trog, Troop or Trib or Troll wander about, walk-on players in this risible woman’s delusional pitch for power. Alaska looked very fetching though. It was a bit like being on a spectacular holiday marred only by the worst travelling companion imaginable.”

The
Guardian
observed that Sarah, “freed from her political brief of standing on the far-right talking rubbish, is just this incredible force for boredom. It’s like a magic trick; she can take an observation that is already inherently boring, then make it 10 times more boring with unenlightening statistics, a Newspeak vocabulary and this ghastly cheerleader delivery.… The truth is, there’s nothing to see but a tedious, narrow-minded, pedantic, uncurious person. And some snow.”