Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (16 page)

Sarah did not take rejection well. That her editorial didn't accurately address the issues, misstated facts, and was devoid of proposals were unimportant. The blame went to Persily and the
Anchorage Daily News
. She wrote back,
“See?! Your piddly little 675-word limit forced me to lower my own standards. OK—back to the drawing board. Thanks for the challenge Larry.”

Not to be dissuaded Sarah had her oil advisors deal with Persily's pesky complaints while she submitted the original, error-challenged piece to her smaller hometown paper, the
Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman;
apparently its editorial board had less stringent standards. But since the much larger
Anchorage Daily News
would not publish an editorial that had already appeared in another newspaper, Sarah had to frantically unscramble her mess:

Since Sarah's participation on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission helped build her reputation as an energy expert (in 2010 she even asked President Obama to seek her counsel on the Gulf oil spill), oil and gas issues were of great concern. As such, Bruce Anders—the man who ultimately rewrote much of Sarah's original editorial and who later served as director of oil and gas leasing and was an early point person on Governor Palin's natural gas team—took on the role of tutor in addition to ghostwriter. We also relied heavily on Tom Irwin, a former commissioner of the Department of National Resources under Governor Murkowski. Anders and/or Irwin wrote the pieces, and Sarah read and added what she called some “normal-people-speak.”

When the
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
published an article in October 2006 entitled “Big Oil, Energy Commission Spar over Pipeline Provisions,” Sarah wrote to Anders,
“Bruce—care to decipher this article for me? Thank you . . . for all your prep work on debate!”

Sarah took great pains to hide the fact that her appointment to the AOGCC had nothing to do with knowledge of the industry. Nor did she serve on the commission long enough to gain much expertise (less than one year). In early 2006 a bill that became known as the “No More Sarah Palin Bill” (House Bill 300, sponsored by Vic Kohring, a Republican state representative from Wasilla-Mat-Su) was introduced as a means of insuring that in the future nobody with so little knowledge on energy issues as Sarah Palin could serve on the AOGCC again. Originally, the commission allowed that one member “need not be . . . experienced in either the field of petroleum engineering or the field of petroleum geology.” On her board, Sarah was that inexperienced person. The language in the proposed House Bill (eventually watered down before passage later that summer) stated that all members “shall have training or experience that gives the person a fundamental understanding of the oil and gas industry.”

The publicity behind this bill ran the risk of diluting Sarah's claim of oil energy expertise and implied that she did
not
have even a fundamental understanding. Todd and Sarah became alarmed and angry. John Norman, who took Sarah's AOGCC seat after her resignation, agreed with the bill's intent, prompting Todd to write bitterly,
“Norman testified saying it's important for the public seat individual to have extensive knowledge of the industry, he doesn't, I guess he's grandfathered in. The machine at work.”
Todd's indictment was not accurate, however, as Norman had extensive knowledge of the oil and gas industry from, at least, the resource law perspective.

When Sarah wrote to me that she'd
“uncovered an erroneous comment Vic
[
Kohring
]
made in Juneau that ended up making me look bad,”
she asked me to leak the information anonymously to The Ear, the
Anchorage Daily News
's political gossip column as a means to embarrass him.

That Sarah did not have significant expertise was not the issue for us. Loaded with all of her common sense, she didn't
need
in-depth knowledge or background. We believed, as Sarah once emailed,
“re-member: amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.”
The entire No More Sarah Palin episode boiled down to unwarranted mischief by evildoers Randy Ruedrich and
the machine
. Publicly, however,
of the attacks on her credibility, this was potentially the most damaging—all the more reason to get smart advisors to pump out policy pieces, especially as they related to energy, which was the biggest campaign issue in a state that has long depended on black gold for its livelihood. As a result of this urgency to upgrade Sarah's perceived command of policy, by September, she had a handful of writers at her beck and call and came to enjoy the perception that she'd authored these well-constructed editorials

Another emerging figure in the campaign was Ivy Frye, who initially became a writing coordinator. It was Ivy's job to seek experts to contribute editorial content. At one point, Sarah told me she valued Ivy because she was single, had no life, could write, and would work lots of hours. As with most of us who survived our association with Sarah, Ivy found her role constantly in flux; eventually she became Sarah's leading opposition researcher and advocate.

Sarah ultimately guided these and other Rag Tags into creating a formal editorial team. Although utilizing experts is a sound idea, a major problem was Sarah's utter detachment from the process and unwillingness to study issues herself or become familiar with what her advisors were writing on her behalf. In other words, she wanted credit without caring about even a fundamental understanding. Much later, months after returning to Alaska after the McCain campaign, opinion pieces in her name continued to be distributed on her behalf. In one instance, she gave us a curious heads-up: “Just another weird thing—an op-ed in the
Post
, by me, that I didn't write.” Sarah rarely wrote the pieces, but at times she found herself losing track of where her writers were sending them as well.

So, with Sarah's blessing but limited input, the editorial team's productivity took off. When necessary, we'd use professionals to craft a piece. In a fine example of ingratiating commerce, Pat Walsh—of the public relations firm Walsh and Sheppard—acquired a chunk of goodwill with her contribution:
“Sarah, attached are two approaches for op-ed piece. I love writing for you. It gives me a chance to pour out what I really believe. I just hope it gives you something to work with. . . . I hope there is something here to build on.”

Sarah's response to the editorial gifts:
“Right on! . . . This will be so
good. I say if ADN doesn't run our OpEd, we send it to all other publications and we incorporate the copy somehow in an ad. . . . Great work Pat!”

Graciously, Sarah referred to Pat's work as “ours.” When it hit the newspapers, however, it would be solely hers, even when she had little understanding of the issue being discussed. This writing process would be duplicated years later when we all cooperated with author Lynn Vincent in the production of
Going Rogue
.

Being an equal opportunity borrower of others' ideas, contributors might come from anywhere. Lyndsay Wheeles—tireless volunteer, future Mrs. Alaska, and Sarah worshipper (eventually posting on Facebook that the one job she'd like in life is to be the “personal assistant to Sarah Palin”)—wrote a piece about the controversy surrounding a rumor that Sarah wished to move the state capital from Juneau. Such a change would drop Alaska's third-largest city and its surrounding towns into an economic abyss, making such rumors political dynamite. Appreciative of Lyndsay's contribution, Sarah directed that she be included on the growing team:

Interestingly, in this email, Sarah let slip that the campaign had
paid
for an editorial placement in the Juneau newspaper. That paying a newspaper to publish an editorial is antithetical to the intent of an editorial never crossed our minds. We had poll numbers to buoy and an image to polish.

Having others understand and address important issues instead of the candidate was also a terrific timesaver. As Sarah wrote us on September 13,
“I'm overwhelmed with trying to organize all this. . . . My schedule is flippin' jammed.”
She preferred mundane functions such as working on signs to studying issues. In a bout of frustration, in August she wrote, “
This is all such bull crap . . . i just hope a presser goes out . . . and then i can eventually go to bed so i can get up early enough to do signs during early morning commute. after i conference with glen and bruce on the stinking gasline again, for the millionth time.”

Formal writing groups—such as opposition research and media teams—freed Sarah to do what she did best: speak to crowds, smile on camera, and listen to and respond to negative radio commentators, newspaper reporters, and Alaskan bloggers. Sarah would simply say, “Make it work. Period.” In fact, the word
period
was a favorite of hers. She used it often in emails and in conversation to cut short discussion. This was another way of saying, “Just get 'er done and don't bother me with the how!” We understood.

Our rationalization that other political campaigns were worse offenders allowed us to continue believing we walked on firmer moral ground. In the end, we deceived the public
and
ourselves.

Taking these communications strategies further, eventually, after her return to Alaska from the McCain campaign, Sarah became famous for Twitter messages which largely replaced slow-motion letters and op-eds. Communications Director Bill McAllister explained to us, “We have to be able to correct the record instantaneously.” However, the transition was not a smooth one. Just as she was initially challenged with the cut and paste function in Word and inadvertently sent copies of emails to those she was criticizing, this new communications vehicle produced headaches. Even while she had no understanding of the technology, messages were being posted as early as late April 2009. Sarah was anxious to see what was being written in her name, so she begged staff in emails,
“How do I even access ‘my' twitter? They better tell me this morning.”
Another early Twitter endeavor in May 2009, mirroring the mysterious op-ed that once appeared in the
Post,
she wrote,
“Who is twittering in my name? I haven't twittered anything, yet it's reported that I have re. Swine Flu, and maybe other subjects? How is this new form of
communication going to work—it still hasn't fully been explained to me, and I am not comfortable with others twittering in my name.”

Later that same day, she added,
“This is obviously a dangerous experiment in communication, so why would we have done this? . . . I can not afford more opportunities to be hoaxed or mocked. I didn't know it wasn't secure or would never have agreed to it.”

What Sarah came to quickly appreciate and embrace, however, was the monumental and instantaneous reach this new form of communication had. Why take a public relations buggy when a jet was available? Every time she or someone she authorized posted a message, the media light lit up and whatever she said made headlines. Only three weeks after nearly pulling the plug on this
“dangerous experiment,”
she was hooked, and all of us had a new set of tasks. She ordered,
“If u guys have ideas on 140-character twitters, pls share. It's a good communications tool, but is sometimes a burden on my ‘to do'list when I have to think of what to post throughout the day. . . . Need more ideas on twitter, folks, so pls contribute any you may have.”

While a
“burden
,” the Twitter love affair was blossoming, but not without another setback. The same day Sarah resigned as governor, July 3, 2009, we received a frantic message from a close friend wanting to know if Sarah had sent an invitation to her thousands of followers to join her in a July Fourth party at her Wasilla home. The message said there would be free beer for all and a chance to meet her infant son, Trig. Not only that, the messages was being retyped and sent out over an ever-extensive network. Sarah immediately responded,
“It's a lie. We'll try to shoot that down.”
More dramatically, the next day she let us know,
“If I were a hater, I'd be doing the same thing w messing w fake twitter sites . . . we need to put ourselves in the haters' mindset and anticipate what they're going to do to cont to screw with us and our message so we'll be prepared to counter (or avoid) this crap.”