Going Rogue: An American Life (102 page)

Chapter Five

The Thumpin’

seem to

basically nicerpeople,

they have

demonstrated time and again

they have

sleills of

celery.

leind ofpeople who’d stop to

you

aflat,

would somehow

to setyour car on

I would

to

them

a Cuisinart, let alone

economy.

Republicans, on

other hand, would know

tofix your

wouldn’t

to stop

they’d want to

on time for

Ugly Pants

at

country club.

-DAVE BARRY

Backinthecampaignseasonof2004someAlaskanshad

suggested that I challenge incumbent Lisa Murkowski in the U.S. Senate race. The seat was vulnerable because of the nepotism issue, and the GOP would have trouble holding on to it. As always, I polled my family. Everybody thought it was a decent idea, until I asked Track.

“I don’t want you to run for U.S. Senate, Mom,” said Track.

“Who would be our hockey manager?”

It sounds trivial now, but … who
would
be the hockey manager? At that point in his life, having an involved mom was more important to him-and to me-than having a mom with a powerful position in Washington, D.C. So it was a pretty easy deci
sion not to run.

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SARAH

PALIN

I remember telling that to the same local radio host who gave me a hard time when I tried to make it to Track’s boot camp graduation four years later. He treated it as if that were the phoniest excuse he’d ever heard.

“You’re lying,” he said. “You’re chicken to run.”

“Why would I lie about that?” I said. “If anything, admitting the real reason just opens me up to more criticism.
It
sure isn’t for political gain.”

There was no need to validate myself with the radio host, but he left the impression with listeners that women couldn’t do more than one thing at a time. He wanted to portray me as a too-simple mom who was not serious about serving the public. He didn’t understand that there is no greater service than mothering. I always admired Karen Hughes, President Bush’s former adviser, because she left the White House so she could be close to her teenage son and spend quality time with him. At a ctossroads, she was candid and courageous enough to tell the public she wanted to teach him how to drive. She had the right priorities.

Now, five years later, I found myself at a crossroads. On November 5, 2008, I

home to a political landscape

that had permanently changed. The VP race had been an incredible, extraordinary ride, and I was still the same governor who had enjoyed rremendous-and humbling-citizen support just sixty-eight days earlier. But that had all changed on August 29, 2008, when John McCain and I teamed up to challenge a charismatic political figure who inspired worshipful loyalty from his supporters.

The fallout was immediate: the governor’s office was inundated with frivolous ethics complaints. Literally scores of Freedom ofInformation Act (FOIA) and Public Records Act requests rolled in, generating thousands of pages that required hours of work to process. Reporters abandoned actual reporting in favor of tabloidiz
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