Going Rogue: An American Life (110 page)

An hour later, now driving across the Palmer flats with Bristol, I turned the radio back on just in time to hear talk of another antitax tea party. Just what I needed to hear to spark hope again! I had to believe enough Americans were listening, warching, learning what was going on in
their
White House, with
their
Congress, and thar they weren’t going to just sit quietly and buckle up while those in Washington took the country for a ride.

We were almost home when Bristol stirred and yawned. She

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Going Rogue

must have been teading my mind the whole tide. “‘Bristol’s is dorky, Mom,” she finally mumbled. Okay, she was right about that, but I was at least tight about our economy.

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In early 2009, as our legal defense bills piled up, Todd and I retreated to my quiet bedroom office and sat down for a sobering look at our finances. By then, we were faced with attotneys’ bills that would grow to more than $500,OOO-a lot more than my total salary for all the time I’d served as governot. Then Meg btoke the news that a large chunk of those bills-neatly 50,000-was courtesy of the campaign. It was our portion of the bill I had no idea, nor was I ever told, that we would have to pay personally to go thtough the VP selection process. (If I had, I would have kept my answers shorter!) Meg and Tom made polite inquiries with the RNC and the remnants of “headquarters” to see whether the McCain campaign could help with these expenses, The word came back from on high: if we had won the election, they would have paid; but we lost, so the responsibility was mine. Looking on the bright side, though, if anyone questions whethet I was properly vetted, at least now I can tell them, “Yes, and I have the bill to prove it!”

As the number of complaints mounted, I remembered the ob
servations of the leftwing-radical.,.turned-conservative-activist
David Horowitz in his treatise
The Art of Political War.
I’d been following Horowitz’s wotk ever since I met him a decade earlier at an Alaska GOP convention at which we both spoke. His book explained the stark difference between the left’s expert use of the weapons of political warfate and the right’s high-minded but ineffective approach, One of the left’s favorite weapons is frivolous ethics complaints. That’s what they used to bring , 363

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SARAH PALIN

down the atchitect of the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” Newt Gingtich.

Ptior co the election of 1994, the Democrats had held a majotity in the House of Reptesentatives fot fout decades. Wotking with a team ofgtasStoots activists, Newt selected and ttained candidates, shaped a political message, and became what Hocowitz called “something rare in Republican politicsa genuine movement leader.” To the left, that meant one thing: he had CO be eliminated. Thete are many fine Democtat public servants, but sadly many in the patty have moved incteasingly co the left, and often the beating heart of their political warfare has been the petsonal destruction of theit enemies. Genetally speaking, aftet decades of failed social policies and weak national secutity positions, the patty doesn’t have a strong base of success from which to win political arguments. So it targets people instead of ideas.

Back in the 1990s, Democtats had Newt in theit sights. And strangely enough, the mote influential he became, the more “unethical” he became-at least if you counted the number of complaints filed against him. Horowitz wrote, “Eventually, Democrats lodged seventy-four separate charges against Gingrich, sixty-five of which were summarily ‘laughed out of committee.”’

Over time the cloud of ethical questions hanging over Newt
reached critical mass. Instead ofdefending their own, Republicans on certain committees forced Newt co concede to one charge. In my case, one by one, every ethics charge filed against me and my staff was cossed out. But there was one that was settled with a finding of no wrongdoing.

It concerned Fitst Family ttavel. Since we live in a huge state

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with few toads linking rural communities, flying to anothet city usually isn’t just a day trip. Before, when I’d travel on the road system for a state function, any of the kids who were not tied up