Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (17 page)

Problems aside, Sarah and her Twitter team eventually crafted 140-bit nuggets in steady streams, thus generating sympathy, attention, and a forum for opinions that millions read and media dissected. This became, in ways, the equivalent of letter and op-ed writing but on cyber-roids.

At least as important as opinion pieces were face-to-face radio and television debates with rivals Tony Knowles and Andrew Halcro. In all, Sarah attended approximately twenty-five formal debates. By most accounts, she held her own and often did far better than that. As far as I was concerned, our candidate dominated these events. Sarah had a remarkable ability to freeze-dry complex issues into easy-to-memorize talking points. At one point, a debate moderator praised her for saying about the death penalty, “Hang 'em up.” He thought this was the kind of straight talk Alaska needed. The key was to avoid specifics. In September, leading up to the general election, advisor John Bitney suggested she do exactly that regarding benefits for same-sex couples (emphasis mine) in an email:

If she found herself unable or unwilling to answer a question—which was often—Sarah had little hesitation in changing direction. When, in 2008, she landed in the vice presidential debate with Senator Joe Biden, moderated by Gwen Ifill, she boldly stated this policy as “I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear.” Debate opponents felt flummoxed over her nonanswers, but many viewers cared little. Sarah had the Kennedy magic over her Nixonian rivals when it came to the camera.

Typical of what viewers saw in a Palin debate was the November 2, 2006, roundtable broadcast statewide on Juneau's KTOO-TV. Sarah sat in a bright red blazer, flanked by independent candidate Andrew Halcro on her right and Democratic candidate and ex-governor Tony Knowles on the left. Both men, as well at the two moderators, wore
drab, dark suits. Sarah jumped out immediately and powerfully as if she were in Technicolor and her opponents in black and white. She captivated the viewers' attention speaking in an unusually smooth, deeper voice—exactly as ex-advisor Kelly Goode had suggested.

At one point, she boldly chastised her opponents for not answering specific questions. However, with the very next question put to her regarding a specific bill that the state legislature had passed in the previous session, Sarah ignored the moderator and launched into an attack on Governor Murkowski's last four years in office. Nobody seemed to notice the apparent hypocrisy; her manner and appearance deflected substantive deficiencies. She did, in televised debates, what she did to crowds: wowed them with image.

On that metric of appearance, Sarah scored a convincing knockout. Later, according to Andrew Halcro, Sarah once complimented him on his encyclopedic knowledge of facts and policy, but then said, “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience, and I ask myself, ‘Does any of this really matter?' ”

Halcro admitted the wisdom of Sarah's advice when he later told BBC News, “The one thing I found during the debates was no matter how knowledgeable her opponents were on the issues, it didn't matter.” In 2009 Halcro wrote in the
Chicago Sun-Times
, “I've debated Governor Palin more than two dozen times. And she's a master, not of facts, figures, or insightful policy recommendations, but at the fine art of the nonanswer, the glittering generality.”

For instance, in one October debate, she said of health care, “My attitude and my approaches toward dealing with the complexities of health care issues is a respectful and responsible approach, and it's a positive approach. I don't believe that the sky is falling here in Alaska.” As a hard-to-disagree-with nugget, this was typical Sarah-speak.

The voters tended to agree with us that Alaska did not need Eggheaded Halcro; the state needed Commonsense Sarah, even if her twisted sentences were impossible to decipher. “I feel your pain” was more important than “I have a solution.”

12
 

Sacrificing Everything

A
s we moved into the heart of the general election season, already intense interpersonal pressures grew. Many evenings my children's goodnights arrived in the form of emails. Too often progress reports in school and feedback from teacher conferences came via rushed phone conversations. In what I suspect were similarly hollow words uttered by others in the campaign, I promised to slow down, take time off, and reprioritize. All of us, no more so than Sarah, wished to have this satisfactorily over and done with. An email of hers summed up our feelings:
“I just wish we could skip the election b.s. & get right into governing, implementing the changes that are needed. I see more and more piling on our campaign's plate, and more ‘pulling' from different directions.”

However, every time our opponents attacked or a new poll showed the lead growing or shrinking, we became amnesiacs regarding family promises and considered only our November date with destiny. Our children suffered most.
Regret
is not nearly a strong enough word to describe how I came to feel.

As for Todd Palin, throughout the campaign, he would regularly
vanish, largely because his job on the North Slope required him to be away for weeks at a time. My sense was that he tended to focus more on the kids when home than on the campaign. And for all his faults, and to his credit, during his time home from the job, Todd was an engaged father, picking up family slack while Sarah focused on the GOP race. Often, he struck me as both father and mother to the kids. My prayers were that Sarah, with what little time she had, was showering them with as much attention as she could.

Shortly after the primary victory, Sarah sought to consolidate the inner circle. My title went from coordinator of the primary to coordinator of the general election. In sum, I continued to direct volunteer efforts and organize campaign events. But equally vital for Sarah, I screened calls from reporters, tracked down staff, chauffeured VIPs, did opposition research when required, made calls, and wrote letters in defense of Sarah's reputation.

In a short August 27 email to the staff, Sarah outlined specifically the roles of several others. Longtime friend Kris Perry, who headed the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce when Sarah sat on the Wasilla City Council, would handle
“scheduling, admin. and assisting with everything I need.”
Curtis Smith would be
“focusing on admin & media/ message/ spokesperson & working with”
our PR firm, Walsh and Sheppard. John Bitney's job was
“focusing on administration and writing/research (working with Bruce
[
Anders
]
and Glen
[
Biegel
]
especially on this re: crafting message on gasline, et al).”
Bitney, as a former lobbyist, required permission from the Alaska Public Offices Commission to come on board and was prohibited from raising funds for the campaign.

In October Mike Tibbles—formerly our rival John Binkley's campaign manager and co-architect of the Palin smear campaign in the waning days before her primary victory—joined to work some of his tactical magic (or, as I thought of it, tactical
tragic
). Heavyweight attorney Wayne Anthony Ross, oil and gas lobbyist Paul Fuhs, Scott Heyworth, Jeff Lowenfels, and Ivy Frye remained central players as well, adding dashes of expertise, opposition research, and moral support for our emotionally up-and-down candidate.

While Sarah realized that some organization was required, there was no way she'd relinquish tactical power a second time. Recognizing her inability to take direction during the Kelly Goode experiment in January, Sarah finalized her August summation of duties by adding,
“I'm not giving anyone the Campaign Manager title because that's passé and it's not the way we'll run a team oriented campaign.”
The message was clear: Sarah now had a bone-deep desire to control her comings and goings and was de facto her own campaign manager. What was “passé” was any notion that someone else might dictate priorities. If that meant inefficiency and micromanaging, so be it. If that meant little critical feedback, all the better. Unfortunately, her attempt at assigning duties did little to relieve unending hours on the job.

Our biggest political asset, aside from our all-consuming commitment to Sarah and her message of reform, remained Democratic rival Tony Knowles himself. As an ex-two-term governor (and an ex-two-term mayor of Anchorage before that), he had name recognition, but when we ran across his volunteers and asked about their candidate, we detected ho-hum enthusiasm. Indications were that most support came strictly along Democratic Party lines or from voters believing Sarah Palin too inexperienced. Not only was he an entrenched politician in a state begging for change, but the Yale University graduate and Vietnam Veteran lacked charismatic energy. Our candidate was the latest in political fashion.

Whenever the Knowles campaign criticized her, Sarah's standard response became, “It appears to be the good ol' boy network doing business as usual. They just don't get that the public is sick and tired of such tactics.” Every time she uttered these lines, it reminded people that she was the
do-gooder
being bullied by
do-badders
. And at the age of sixty-three, Knowles represented a political movement that to the relatively young and changing population of Alaska seemingly began when humans were still using chipped-stone tools. Besides his own lengthy political career (beginning in 1981 as Anchorage Mayor), the
New York Times
, in October, 2006, noted that “two of the three members of the state's Congressional delegation, Senator Ted Stevens and
Representative Don Young, have been in office for a total of 71 years. The third, Senator Lisa Murkowski, has been in office since 2002 in the seat her father held for 22 years before that.” For a large chunk of Alaskans, a hundred-plus years of corrupt mismanagement was at least a hundred years too many.