The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (19 page)

Bitney says, “Todd was both the matriarch and patriarch in that family. That can be a compliment or not, depending on how you want to look at it, but it’s the truth. He did the diapers when the kids were young. He was the disciplinarian. Sarah was all about the photo op.”

Friends recall that when Todd was working on the North Slope, the children literally would have a hard time finding enough to eat. “Those kids had to fend for themselves,” one says. “I’d walk into that kitchen and Bristol and Willow would be sitting there with a burnt pot of Kraft mac and cheese on the stove and they’d be trying to open one of those Ramen noodle packs, and Sarah would be up in her bedroom with the door closed saying she didn’t want to be disturbed.

“Todd may have his faults, but when he was off work for two weeks he took care of those kids. He’d come off hitch and land in Anchorage and he knew he’d come home to a house with no food. Sarah would never go to Anchorage to pick him up, so he’d find a ride with someone. First stop would always be Costco, and he’d get a case of peaches, a case of applesauce, like that, hoping there’d be enough to last through his next hitch.

“But when Todd was up north working, those kids were a bunch of wild maniacs, running around Wasilla with no dinner cooked, no breakfast cooked, no homework done, and Sarah lying in bed. If she wasn’t working, that’s all she did.

“It made her crazy to have to take care of the kids. I remember one time her coming in with Piper in a carrier and sliding it across the foyer and sayin’, ‘Take this fuckin’ baby!’ Then she walked out the door.

“She never took care of those kids. They would be dirty, filthy.
Bristol and Willow had a shared bathroom between their two bedrooms in the Lake Lucille house and it would be—oh, my God!—a poop ring in the toilet. And the girls themselves, they’d be … dirty. You know, they were getting to the age where they could take baths by themselves, but you still had to clean their ears, make sure they brushed their teeth, help them fold their clothes—and nobody did. They didn’t even have dressers in their rooms. The laundry got done and it was just ‘throw it on the floor.’

“When Piper was a baby and Willow wasn’t old enough to be on her own, Sarah dumped those kids off on a woman who cleaned houses, a nasty woman. She would take them to wherever she was cleaning and just tell them to sit down and shut up. Todd used to be
liv-id
. Livid. Those kids never had any parenting, they had to raise each other.”

Part of the problem Sarah had with feeding her children may have been connected to the fact that she herself ate only sporadically. “I never saw diet pills,” Bitney says, “but it’s amazing how far she’s gotten on Red Bulls and white mochas. She’d start off with a white chocolate mocha, maybe two, then a Red Bull, then switch to Diet Pepsi in the afternoon. It was Diet Pepsi, not Diet Dr Pepper—she just made that up later because she thought it fit better with her image—and she’d go through a lot of Diet Pepsi.”

Bitney recalls that Sarah never wanted to eat breakfast, “but if I got a double order of bacon on the side, she’d eat most of it. And any time of day, if it was chocolate, it was gone. I never once saw her eat greens. It was just meat and chocolate and the drinks with caffeine.”

Another friend tells me: “She’d never eat. She’d never eat.” There were, however, exceptions. “One day she came in with Oreos, bread, bags of fast food, and she ate everything and then disappeared and came out of the bathroom later with blurry eyes, her hair up, and her knuckles red. I said, ‘What you up to, girl?’ She gave me a look like, ‘Don’t you even fuckin’ go there.’ ”

There was also the matter of cocaine. “I remember, back before she
was governor, one time snow-machining at Crosswinds Lake, way up above Glenallen,” a friend tells me. “It was me, Todd, Sarah, five or six other people, and Todd and Sarah had a fight, so Sarah was riding with somebody else. The cocaine was free flowing. Somebody found a fifty-five-gallon oil drum and turned it upside down and we were all doing cocaine lines off the top of the drum.”

In 2007, someone mentioned the incident on a blog, writing, “How’s that cocaine out at Crosswinds Lake, Sarah?” I spoke to the author of the blog post, who said, “Todd saw it and got a message to me: ‘Keep off the fuckin’ blog, Sarah’s fuckin’ pissed.’ ”

Neither did Sarah find nourishment in the joy of sexual intimacy with her husband. “Todd complained a lot about never having sex with Sarah,” a friend of his tells me. “He’d say, ‘I must have gotten laid at least four times, ’cause I got four kids.’ This was way before Trig.” The friend adds, “I can honestly say that in a decade plus of interacting with them I never saw them even show affection.”

One former houseguest says Sarah’s aversion to intimacy was so extreme that she didn’t even like to think about other people having sex. “I get real dry in the winter,” the houseguest tells me, “so I keep a bottle of baby oil by the bed. I’ll come out of the shower, put it on, and go to bed. One day, when we’re staying at the Wasilla Lake house, Todd says, ‘I gotta talk to you guys. Sarah’s pissed. She found that big bottle of baby oil in your bedroom and she knows you guys are rubbin’ it on yourselves and havin’ sex.’ My husband was like, ‘She uses it on her skin, dude.’ But Todd says, ‘Sarah wants you out. She’s really upset thinkin’ you’re in there havin’ sex with baby oil.’ We left. We went to a motel. Sarah dresses hot and acts hot in public, so you’d think she’d probably be pretty hot in bed, but that’s all just part of the show.”

THE LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR of Alaska is paid $100,000 a year to supervise the Division of Elections, to maintain oversight of the state’s
notaries public, to regulate commercial use of the state seal, and to authenticate the signatures of state officials for foreign countries. In terms of labor intensiveness, it’s not exactly piano moving. The job, in fact, is so undemanding that had she been elected to the office, Sarah probably wouldn’t even have had to hire someone to do it for her.

In 2002, with Republican U.S. senator Frank Murkowski heavily favored to become governor, it seemed likely that winning the Republican primary for lieutenant governor in August would be tantamount to winning the general election in November.

Sarah entered an already crowded field, which included two state senators, Loren Leman of Anchorage and Robin Taylor of Wrangell, and former speaker of the house Gail Phillips of Homer.

In theory, ethics required that Sarah not campaign for lieutenant governor from her mayor’s office. In practice, she effectively turned the office into an unofficial campaign headquarters. She wrote and received campaign-related e-mails on the computer in the mayor’s office; she had her administrative assistant use city hall facilities to print thank-you notes to campaign donors; she had her secretary make campaign-related travel arrangements from city hall while being paid by the city. On June 12, 2002, Sarah met with representatives from a campaign advertising agency at city hall. Following the meeting, the agency faxed proposed campaign logos to deputy administrator Cramer at city hall. Paul Jenkins, editor of the conservative
Voice of the Times
, would later write that Sarah’s city hall office became “little more than a command center for her lieutenant governor campaign.”

While there were obvious differences between a statewide race and a municipal mayoral election—especially in a state the size of Alaska—in some respects Sarah’s campaign for lieutenant governor resembled her first race against John Stein: she was the new face; her opponents were the business-as-usual old guard, offering stale ideas that had already proven ineffective. While they touted their legislative experience, Sarah derided it. They were tired old hacks; she was a
vibrant young mother who would bring a fresh perspective to Juneau. In the absence of any significant issues, the message played well.

Leman was the favorite in the race, with most observers expecting Phillips and Taylor to provide his strongest opposition. It was Sarah, however, who emerged as the surprise. With voter turnout of only 22 percent, the second lowest in state history, Sarah finished a close second to Leman, losing by less than two thousand votes out of more than seventy thousand cast. “She’s a sharp, attractive candidate,” Leman said. “I think she had a lot to offer.”

As expected, Frank Murkowski easily won the gubernatorial primary, but his daughter, state representative Lisa Murkowski, wasn’t assured of victory over her more conservative opponent until the count of absentee and questioned ballots in her Eagle River district was completed in early September.

The Wasilla mayoral election was held in October. Sarah’s stepmother-in-law Faye Palin was one of three candidates. Even though Faye had donated $1,000 behind Sarah’s first mayoral campaign, Sarah threw her support to Dianne Keller, a right-wing Christian member of the city council. For Sarah, conservatism and evangelical Christianity trumped even family ties. Keller wound up winning the October election with 402 votes to Faye Palin’s second-place total of 256.

Sarah campaigned so vigorously for the Murkowski ticket throughout the fall that the
Frontiersman
described her as “a spokesperson for the Republican party through television, radio and newspaper ads,” observing that “at times it seemed Palin was more visible than Murkowski’s running mate, Loren Leman.”

This was not entirely altruistic. If Murkowski were elected in November, he would name a successor to serve the remaining two years of his term in the U.S. Senate. In fact, he not only won but also received the highest percentage of votes in the history of Alaskan gubernatorial elections. Immediately, attention focused on whom he would name to fill Alaska’s first open U.S. Senate seat in twenty-two years. Sarah’s name was among those most frequently mentioned.

“Everything is up in the air still,” she said. “I don’t necessarily want to retire, and with Todd’s flexible schedule it allows me to serve in a couple of different capacities.”

Sarah was one of eight possible successors whom Murkowski interviewed in person. Sarah’s interview, apparently, did not go well. “She came off as vapid and uninformed,” says Anchorage lawyer C. Donald Mitchell, who spoke to some of those who were advising Murkowski during the selection process.

Within days of the interview, Sarah received a call from Murkowski telling her she would not be his choice. “I knew all along it was a long shot,” she told the
Frontiersman
. “Maybe I’m someone who is perceived as being too conservative.” Murkowski named his daughter, Lisa, to the seat, a choice that outraged many Alaskans, none more than Sarah.

As Mitchell wrote in the
Alaska Dispatch
, “Sarah, a 38-year old former small town mayor who had never won a statewide election, reportedly was livid and reportedly never fully forgave Frank, because in her self-absorption she was certain that she should have been the obvious choice.”

As a consolation prize, Murkowski appointed Sarah to one of the two open seats on the three-member Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

When the Alaska legislature created the commission in 1978, it specified that one seat had to be occupied by a petroleum engineer and another by a petroleum geologist. Duties of the commissioners included fixing the liquid-to-gas ratios that well operators must maintain, monitoring oil and gas pool pressures, and regulating the drilling, plugging, and spacing of wells, the disposal of saltwater and oil field wastes, and the quantity and rate of production of oil and gas from particular wells. Despite the highly technical nature of the work, the commission’s third seat was open to any member of the public, no matter how unqualified (an oversight the legislature later corrected).

It was this seat to which Governor Murkowski appointed Sarah
in February 2003. At the same time, in a display of the deep reverence for patronage that would soon have Alaska voters ruing the day they elected him, Murkowski tapped state Republican Party chairman Randy Ruedrich to fill the slot reserved for a petroleum engineer.

Sarah would be working in the commission’s Anchorage offices. It would be a full-time job, paying a salary of $118,000 a year, which, in those days was not an insignificant amount of money to Sarah and Todd.

The two appointments raised eyebrows. Anchorage assemblyman Eric Croft, a Democrat, said, “Anytime you appoint the head of your party … and the lieutenant governor runner-up, it looks a little questionable.”

Ruedrich, at least, could claim experience. He’d worked in the oil and gas industry for more than thirty years, including stints in Yemen and the United Kingdom. Sarah, on the other hand, said, “There is so much information and it’s all very technical. But maybe by the time this is finished I can have an intelligent conversation with my husband.”

The appointments required legislative approval. At Sarah’s confirmation hearing, one skeptical legislator wanted to know “what you bring to the mix.” Cheerfully ignoring the question, Sarah replied, “I’m absolutely motivated, excited and challenged to be able to serve in this capacity.”

Another said, “You’re going to be asked to make rulings on things of a very technical nature. I don’t see where you’ve had any background in oil and gas development … How are you going to keep people from blowing smoke up your skirts?”

“You’re right, I don’t have all the technical background,” Sarah replied. “But thankfully we have a technical staff here at the commission and I have confidence that they do with their technical knowledge give objective and fair advice to the commissioners.”

Despite her lack of qualifications, Sarah’s appointment proved the
less controversial of the two. Both she and Ruedrich were confirmed by the state legislature in early March, but while eighteen legislators—all Democrats—voted against Ruedrich, believing that it would be a conflict of interest for him to serve on the commission while retaining his position as state Republican Party chairman, only three voted against Sarah, citing her lack of qualifications.

She’d been on the job for only four months when rumors began to circulate that she might challenge Governor Murkowski’s daughter, Lisa, in the 2004 Republican primary for the full-term U.S. Senate seat. In early August, Sarah said she was considering a run. In September, she said, “It’s not out of the question.”