Going Rogue: An American Life (29 page)

Going Rogue

and base my decisions on principle and sound ideas, nor cronyism or polirical expediency. I ran on my record as an executive and told Alaska voters that I would govern according to conservative principles, and if I were to err, it would be on the side of those principles.

I wanted to shake every hand on the trail. I wanted to meet the people who would be my bosses. While the other candidates jetted between big cities, our team drove
way
up to tiny towns like Tok and Delta Junction, where the permafrost heaves in the road make you feel like you’re riding ocean waves. It’s not unusual to see bear and moose and buffalo and an occasional wolf loping down the middle of the highway. Like stars in the northern sky, Alaska has hundreds of tiny towns and villages flung across it, and the people who live in them are the state’s heart and soul. When we visited, sometimes whole towns turned out, from little kids to Native elders bearing and blueberry muffins and

salmon strips.

In almost every community, I drew on local connections as I shared my message, like pointing our one of Todd’s cousins in the crowd, or recalling a summer job r d had years before in the area. Or r d mention my parents’

that would have taken

them to ,some adventure nearby. Before leaving, I told folks I wanted the job of serving them as governor; I asked them to hire me. Then, the kids would usually he loaded down with homemade goodies, r d grab coffee-to-go, and we’d barrel down the road again.

On one teturn ttip ftom Glennallen, we stopped late at night in the middle of nowhere to drop off a campaign sign. Todd had spotted the unmarked dirt road we needed to take, and we rumbled down a narrow lane lined by tall, spindly black spruce until we came to a tiny wooden cabin hidden in the woods. The elderly couple who lived there had called in to a political radio • 11J

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show and voiced their support, so we’d looked them up and promised ro deliver

a yard sign, even though you wouldn’t

be able to view it from the main highway.

These good folks were exacrly the type of Alaskans who supported us: hardworking, unpretentious, parrioric, and ready for honest leadership. They treated us to slices of homemade rhubarb pie, then gave us a whole blueberry pie that we shared with friends after our SaO-mile, 4o-hour round-trip, driven ro the sound of the Black Eyed Peas and an old LL Cool J

remix we found in the glove box.

Every part of our campaign shouted “Change!” A change in campaign financing: we ran on small donations from all over the state, mostly from first-time political donors, and we turned back some large checks from big donors if we perceived conflicts of interest. A change from photo-op stops ro honest conversations with actual voters. A change from emphasizing politics ro emphasizing people. A change from smooth talk to straight talk-even then.

We were amused a couple of years later when Barack Obamaone of whose senior advisers (come to think of it) had roors in Alaska-adopred rhe same theme. Kris and I joked about it:

“Hey! We were change when change wasn’t cool!” 2

During the Republican primary, I attended dozens of candidate forums, debates, interviews, and events. Near the August vote, a crucial debate was broadcast between the front-runners: incumbent Governor Murkowski, wealthy-businessman-turned-statesenator-turned-wealthier-businessman John Binkley, and me. I knew I could capitalize on the studio’s round-table seating arrangement because I could anticipate the guys would ross barbs
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Going Rogue

at each other,

their conventional ways of politicking.

Sure enough, Murkowski made an erroneous suggestion that Binkley had never gotten much of an education. Then Binkley shot back something about the private jet Murkowski bought in defiance of everyone and used to zip off on pricey, junkets. Back and forth they went until the moderator couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

, We switched to more serious topics

gross versus net oil

taxes, but they kept their claws out. I sat back in my chair and let them bicker. Then, just as their ears turned red and they had to come up for air, I leaned forward and let

mom in me
lowp>

,our. “Come on, guys,” I said, “I really think Alaskans deserve a better discourse than this.” I spent a couple of moments turning down the volume of their spat, then pivoted back on message. It was another good night for us.

It wasn’t the last time I’d find that there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood. At one point during the general election, motherhood became the focus of a unique line of questioning. In my responses to a series of debate questions on abortion, I remained consistent and sincere, explaining how personal and sensitive the issue is and that good people can disagree.

But the debate moderator decided to personalize his hypotheticals with a series of “What if .. :’ questions. He asked:

“If a woman were, say, raped .
.
.

“… I would choose life:’

“If your daughter were pregnant . . :’

“Again, I would choose life:’

“If your teenage daughter got pregnant .. :’

“I’d counsel a young parent to choose life ” . . consider adoption,” I answered. I calmly repeated my answers to all of his “what-ifs,” then

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looked pointedly to my right and my left, to one opponent, then the other. Then I returned to the moderator and said, “I’m confident you’ll be asking the other candidates these same questions, tight?” Of course, he didn’t.

On election day, we shocked evetyone. We won the primary, pulling 51 percent of the vote in a five-way

We won by

taking on the entrenched interests and the political machine. With no negarivity and with a highly energized grassrqots campaign, we moved on to the general election, where we continued to have a ball. I put in twenty-hour days, with Todd and the kids by my side.

In
the six-way general election, we wete routinely tag-teamed by our main opponents, two-term former Democrat Governor Tony Knowles and former two-term Republican State Representative Andrew Halcro, now running as an Independent. Halcro was a wealthy, effete young chap who had taken over his father’s local Avis Rent A Car, and he starred in his own car commercials. He would go on to host a short-lived local radio show while blogging throughout the day, all of which were major steps up from a previous job as our limo driver at Todd’s cousin’s wedding. During rhe campaign, Halcro had asked to meer with me many times to request that I run as his “partner”; though I was way ahead of him in the polls, he asked me to quit so we could run as “Co-Governor partners,” I finally had to tell him, firmly,
No.
Months later my new press secretary, Meghan Stapleton, and my acting commissioner of natural resources, Marty Rutherford, and I chuckled when we discovered thar Halcro had asked all three of us to run with him at different times during the campaign. As a candidate, Halcro was an ardent proponent of letting the natural gasline project be handed over to the Big Three oil companies to develop however they wanted instead of creating competition. We didn’t know at the rime that his brother-in-law
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