Going Rogue: An American Life (52 page)

SARAH

PALI’N

From the start, my husband was much more accepting and optimistic than I was. His attitude was kind of like “Well, okay here we go!” Bur I was still having a hard time wrapping my head and heart around it. So we didn’t share the pregnancy with anyone else, even our children. It was such a tough thing to explain, and I just wasn’t ready to grapple with it yet or answer any questions. I had always faced life head-on, but here was something that had humbled me into silence.

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“None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating
power ofthe hope offreedom to those who are not free.”
Pearl S. Buck wrote those words many years before the lean, proud, newly shorn young men standing before us were even born. The bleachers chilled our backsides as moms, wives and girlfriends, and contemplative military dads, many teary-eyed, warched soldiers march in unison across a Fort Benning field in January 2008. As we watched rank upon rank match in front of us, it seemed true what they say about boot camp changing boys into men. I knew what Track and his friend, Johnnie, had looked like when they had left for basic training months before, and now all these young men looked tall and strong and serious. And they were headed into a mission that asked them to be ready to sacrifice all in a fight for freedom. Yet freedom had never been absent for them. How did they know how imperative this was?

We hadn’t spotted Track yet, but if he looked anything like his fellow soldiers, I knew that my boy had become a man. I turned to Todd, who sat berween my mom and me in the second tier.

“Can you Spot him?”

Piper searched, shaded her eyes, then clapped her hands for all the soldiers. “He’s right there!” she said, pointing left.

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“He’s right there!” Todd said, pointing right.

“No, that’s him!” I said, “I think. Maybe not …”

“They all look alike,” we all said in unison.

“That’s the point,” some top-brass character whispered over his shoulder.

The boots on the ground at boot camp graduations on every base paint the picture of what is right in America. Left, righr, one step at a time, it is straight ahead for those who, it can only be assumed, have a special quality that gives them a sense of honor and selfless duty. What else explains their choice, amidst so many other possibilities, co serve in the U.S. military?

I recalled Senator

Kerty’s comment co California college

students in 2006: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

What a loon,
I thought.
What an elitist loon.
Now I was in a position CO know firsthand what I had always implicitly hoped: the kids enlisting are smart and observant and have made the most of the opportunities America has given them. So they choose to put other desites and ambitions aside for a while to protect our opportunities. I knew it because my son and his buddies were part of a culture that enjoys comfurtable luxuries and choices, boys who knew that once they graduated high school the world was their oyster. And here they chose to make sactifices and give up luxury and comfort. They have within them a willingness and drive to fight for freedom, the absence of which they do not even know, and that fascinates me. I thanked God for this second greatest marching in fcont of us, because if not

them, who?

It had been quite a journey for Todd, Sally, Piper, and the Bates family co get there that day. I had scheduled our trip for Track’s graduation a month prior. My chief of staff made sure the state

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SARAH

PALIN

Senate president knew 1’d be taking two days outside Alaska to artend. (The sixty-nine-year-old Republican was a fixcure in state politics and was one of the gang not happy to see a new administration rock the boat.) We gave her the date. A letter was sent. We did this because after I was elected, the rules for governors’

travel seemed to have changed with no notice. I attribured it to my inauguration speech, when I had promised to be a “protective mom” to the stare, though I referred to it as protecting Alaska’s interests the way a mama grizzly protects her cubs. But now, it seemed, a few lawmakers didn’t want me to leave Juneau. Ever. Our official January calendar was. printed with my scheduled State of the State Address to be delivered in front of the legislature on January 15 at 6 p.m. My plan was to leave immediately afterward to fly through the night, making all the stops and plane changes necessary to arrive in Georgia in time for the graduation
ceremonies.

Then the Senate president changed her mind. She claimed she had not known when I would need to travel. She decided the 6 p.m. time slot on January 15 wouldn’t work for her, and as president, she insisted, she needed to be in the legislative chambets for the address. The lawmakers had just arrived in Juneau for their session, and she was just getting settled in her suite at infamous Baranof Hotel, where she’d lived for years.

Alaskans had

voted to shorten the legislature’s session

from 120 days down to 90 because the public was tired of seeing lawmakers waste the first few weeks, or months, not accomplishing much. There was nothing else going on in Juneau the night of January 15, so my staff was flabbergasted to hear the senator say, “Sorry, that time just won’t work after all.” We explained to her again that my trip to see Track graduate had been set in stone a month before. And we had proof that I had notified the legislacure of that fact. But she dug in her heels.

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Believe it or not, this became a public issue. In fact, it was a top story in the news, with reporrets bteathlessly asking, “Is this the bellwether? Who will be in concrol of Juneau this session?” Finally, ir came down to: Will the Senator Let the Governor Give Her Speech So She Can Get to Georgia in Time?

Good grief. It was more politicsas-usual silliness.
Let her he “in
control,”
I thought.

My administration’s ideas and common sense conservative agenda were good for Alaskans; we would win on those ideas in the court of public opinion. As an olive branch, I offered to give my speech earlier in the day to accommodate the senator. Or two days later, after my return. It became so ridiculous that we had liaisons running back and forth between offices, trying to broker a deal.
Government dollars at work.
I was game for anything that would let me make my flight connections, which are no small deal when trying to make ir from Juneau to Georgia in record time so that I would be 0llt of the Capitol Building for only a minimal number of hours.

I wouldn’t be traveling with staff or security, though our previous governors did, even on vacations, because I knew a double standard would apply,. this time with accusations that I was using state resources for personal gain. So Todd and I had made the trip arrangements ourselves; we needed to keep with the schedule.

I sensed that the senator was enjoying the media attention that
this “showdown” brought. She rallied a couple of radio talk hosts to her cause, and they were milking the drama, such as it was. Some drama: it must have been a slow news week. One particularly caustic host proclaimed my “selfishness” for trying to leave’

Alaska for two days when the legislature would just be getting under way. Supporters tried to explain to him that most governors steered clear of the Capitol Building during the session so

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