Going Rogue: An American Life (78 page)

Going Rogue

in Columbus, Ohio, she started with an energy-related question.

“Governor Palin, it will take about ten years for domesric drilling to have an impact on consumers,” the anchor said. “So isn’t the notion of ‘drill, baby, drill’ a little misleading to people who think this will automatically lower their gas prices and quickly?” I said, ”And it’s why we should have started ten years ago tapping into domestic supplies that America is so rich in. Alaska has billions of barrels of oil and hundreds of rrillions of cubic feer of clean, green natural gas onshore and offshore. Should have srarted doing it ten years ago, but better late than never.” That’s the pare CBS left in. They edited a discussion of the

need to wean ourselves off hydrocarbons and a call for America to stop spending billions of dollars on foreign oil when we could

,

be investing it at home. Did Katie think Americans wouldn’t be interested to know that I was in favor of alternative energy sources and reducing our carbon footprint? Or that I might be a conservative who was both pro-development
and
proenvironment?

Perhaps my answer didn’t fit her agenda.

then moved on to ANWR. “Experts say it will take almost twenty years … to achieve peak production,” she said.

”And it would still only cur foreign oil dependency by about two percent and only for a little while … so is it really worth … the
risk?”

I replied that I didn’t know which experts those were. But I explained that as the chait of the AOGCC and IOGCC, I knew from the geologists and petroleum engineers with whom I had worked that it could be done a lot quicker. I also pointed out that ANWR is a 2,OOO-acre plot that’s in the midst of 21 million acres. Americans needed to know how unconscionable it is that anti-development radicals use ANWR as their fund-taising poster child. They use bogus Photoshopped pi,ctures showing mountains and waterfalls and lush furests with Bambi prancing to and fro.

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SARAH

PALIN

That’s all fake and these fund-raisers know it. It is an absolutely barren, permanently frozen, remote sliver of land rhat requires a minimal drilling footprint, and irs development parameters are equivalent to the size of L.A.’s airport. But neither Katie’s question nor my answer wound up on the air.

I knew the media would distort my responses on social issues. But I thought surely they couldn’t distort my economic and energy-related responses, because they would have to stick with the facts. I was mistaken.

Though Katie edited out substantive answers, she dutifully kept in the moments where I wore my annoyance on my sleeve. For instance, when she asked me how living in Alaska informed my foreign policy experience, I began by trying to frame the geographical context. Lower 48ers grow up seeing our state tucked with Hawaii in a little square off the coast of Mexico on the nightly news weather map. So I began by trying to squeeze a geographical primer into a ten-second sound bite, explaining that only a narrow maririme border separates Alaska Russia, tbat

we’re very near the Pacific Rim countries, and that we’re bordered by Canada.

But Katie interrupted and I did not complete my answer. I wish now I had stopped her and said,

the geographical con-

text. Now may I amwer your question?”

There was so much I could and should have said, and I later kicked myself for not doing so. There was much Katie appeared not to know, or care to hear about. For instance, that Alaska’s geographic position makes our telations with Pacific Rim countries
of great strategic import, and that we’re the air crossroads of the
world. That Russian bombets often play cat-and-mouse with out Air Force near Alaska’s aitspace. That I dealt with Canadian officials on a weekly basis and have signed agreements concerning everything from security to salmon fishing, and that NAFTA .

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Going Rogue

has significantly affected out economy. That melting polat sea ice has created new tcade routes but has also cteated security thteats to Notth Ametica. That Alaska takes on Japanese and Russian fishing ttawlets that want to ravage the ocean floot. That Chinese and Russian energy companies had both sought access to (and possible control of) our natural gas resources. That these and other countries were staking their own resource claims in Arctic waters while the U.S. sat on its hands. And that, yes, you can indeed see Russia from Alaska.

And those were just the foreign policy issues (though issues certainly foreign to most governors). How much more I would have liked to say about Alaska’s contribution to the U.S. economy, its potential to help the nation reduce its dependence on foreign energy sources, and the delicate balancing act required to manage and responsibly develop our abundant wildlife resources. But Katie wasn’t interested in discussing these issues. And when I did, she didn’t air them. Instead, when I tried to describe frequent Russian incursions by figuratively referring to Vladimir Putin entering our airspace, CBS researched the Russian leader’s actual flight plan over the United States and called my statement inaccurate. And when I referenced Alaska’s narrow maritime border to describe our close proximity to other nations, CBS

reported that the Coast Guard monitored the border and not the governor.

But Katie’s putpose-shared by most media rypes-seemedto be to

a “gotcha” moment. And it worked. Instead of my scoringpoints for John McCain, I knew I had let the team down.

You’d have thought the otdeal would have been ovet then. Nope, there

be mote. The next interview segment would take

place backstage immediately after I finished speaking at an in-