The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (35 page)
Sullivan wrote:
If her giving birth to a Down Syndrome child is a complete hoax, then she’s simply psychotic … If the scenario is merely a function of deep irresponsibility, an unconscious desire to miscarry her child by extreme recklessness, then the same applies …
My real frustration here is with the media who have never questioned, let alone seriously investigated, the story, and who have actually gone further and vouched for its truthfulness and accuracy without any independent confirmation …
What’s their excuse for not investigating or even asking? Their first is Palin’s alleged family privacy. But there is no family privacy once you have deliberately forced an infant with special needs into the bewildering public space … and used him as the central prop in the construction of a political identity.
Their second reason for not investigating is that it doesn’t really matter. As I am often told by the Beltway crowd, she’s never going to be president, she’s just a flash-in-the-pan, leave it be, she’ll go away soon enough. Well, she hasn’t yet, has she? … Trig’s political salience is obvious, and critical to Palin’s brand—in fact, the only thing, apart from her amazingly good looks, that keeps her in the game …
If Palin has lied about this, it’s the most staggering, appalling deception in the history of American politics. Not knowing which is true for real—and allowing this person to continue to dominate
one half of the political divide—is something I think is intolerable. In the end, this story is not about Palin. It’s about the collapse of the press and the corrupt cynicism of a political system that foisted this farce upon us without performing any minimal due diligence.
And only Joe McGinniss seems to give a damn.
That was a heavy mantle to have placed upon me. To write about “the collapse of the press and the corrupt cynicism of a political system” was not what I set out to do. Despite Sullivan’s conviction that the “story is not about Palin,” it is the story of Palin that I am telling.
Having said that, the longer I spend in Wasilla and environs, the more skepticism I encounter about the accounts Sarah has given of her 2007–2008 pregnancy and Trig’s birth.
Some people simply accept Sarah’s version on faith, the way they believe in heaven and hell. Others are so certain it’s a fabrication that they would not accept that Trig was her baby even if she produced a birth certificate and a videotape of the delivery.
Why has there ever been a question? And why do the questions continue? Because:
Through her seventh month, not even those who saw Sarah up close every day saw any signs of pregnancy.
Her story of having her water break in Dallas on April 17 and giving birth to Trig in Wasilla twenty-nine and a half hours later stretches credulity to the breaking point.
She has steadfastly refused to provide the birth certificate or medical records that would document her account.
The first public suggestion that Trig was not Sarah’s baby was made by an anonymous poster on the Daily Kos blog on August 29, 2008, the day after McCain named Sarah as his running mate. Two
days later, the
Anchorage Daily News
described the post as “a version of a rumor—long simmering in Alaska—that Palin’s daughter Bristol was pregnant and the governor somehow covered it up by pretending to have the baby (Trig) herself.” The newspaper said, “Palin baby speculation is inescapable at this point.”
Sarah’s Alaskan spokesman said the rumor wasn’t true. How did he know? “The governor’s not a liar,” he said. By the end of August 2008, however, that was an opinion many Alaskans no longer shared. When it was suggested that making Trig’s birth certificate available would put the rumors to rest, the spokesman was appalled. “What a thing to request—prove that this is your baby. I mean, my God, that’s horrifying to think that she would have to do that.”
She did not. And in Alaska, birth certificates are not public record, so the rumors continued to swirl, fed by publication of numerous photographs that showed Sarah looking distinctly unpregnant only weeks before giving birth to a six-pound, two-ounce infant.
Sullivan, a conservative, posed the following questions on August 31, 2008:
Why would a 43 year old woman, on her fifth pregnancy, with a Down Syndrome child, after her amniotic fluid has started to leak, not go to the nearest hospital immediately, even if she was in Texas for a speech?
Why would she not only not go to the hospital in Texas, but take an eight-hour plane flight to Seattle and then Anchorage?
Why would she choose to deliver the baby not in the nearest major facility in Anchorage but at a much smaller hospital near her home-town?
Why did the flight attendants on the trip home say she bore no signs of being pregnant?
Sullivan then wrote, “It strikes me as likely that there are reasonable answers to these questions … and the rumors buzzing across
the Internets and the press corps are unfounded and unseemly … So please give us these answers—and provide medical records for Sarah Palin’s pregnancy—and put this to rest.”
But neither answers nor records were forthcoming, from either Sarah or the McCain campaign. Instead, they tried to put the story to rest by announcing that Bristol was pregnant. This proved, they claimed, that Trig could not have been Bristol’s child.
Bristol was going to be an unwed teenage mother and, by God, Todd and Sarah were going to parade her around the country as such, because it showed how all-American they were, facing up to difficulties caused by randy teenagers just like any other New Apostolic Reformationist mother and Alaskan Independence Party father.
The media spotlight quickly swung to Bristol and Levi. Because it was only just barely mathematically and anatomically possible that Bristol could have become pregnant with a second child so soon after having given birth to a first, she clearly could not be Trig’s mother, which meant that Sarah must be. From that point forward, people such as Andrew Sullivan and various bloggers both inside Alaska and Outside who continued to seek answers to their questions about Trig’s birth were exposing themselves as unspeakable boors.
Indeed, as was revealed in the summer of 2010, the predominantly liberal membership of the Washington insider group JournoList quickly circled its wagons to protect Sarah, fearing that a full-scale inquiry into the circumstances of Trig’s birth would lead to a right-wing backlash.
“By all accounts she’s a wonderful mother … Leave this be,” cautioned one. Another warned, “Leave the kid alone,” as if questions about his birth constituted an invasion of the privacy of Sarah’s infant son, rather than a measurement of her credibility.
The majority of the invited subscribers to JournoList favored the election of Barack Obama and therefore evaluated the merits of even asking the question in terms of its presumed effect on his campaign, rather than its journalistic validity.
This was a significant first step toward what Sullivan referred to in the summer of 2010 as “the collapse of the press,” a dereliction of duty so absolute—a lamestreaming of itself that occurred long before Sarah coined the term—as to constitute a mad dash toward its own immolation on a pyre of irrelevance.
“This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen,” Sullivan wrote on July 26, “totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever. And people wonder how this farce of a candidate now controls one major political party and could well be our next president.”
Legitimate questions were not asked during the 2008 campaign for fear that middle America might perceive them as offensive. But because Sarah refused to release her medical records as the other three candidates had done, the questions did not disappear.
Less than two weeks before the 2008 election, NBC’s Brian Williams asked Sarah if she would make the records public. “My life has been an open book,” she said. “And my life is an open book today.” In typically garbled syntax, she continued: “The medical records—so be it. If that will allow some curiosity seekers, perhaps, to have, oh, one more thing that they can either check the box off that they can find something to criticize, perhaps, or find something to rest them assured over, fine.”
But she never released them. Instead, on election eve, the McCain campaign presented a one-and-a-half-page letter from Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, Sarah’s doctor, longtime friend, and fervent evangelical. Baldwin-Johnson wrote, “Routine prenatal testing early in the second trimester showed evidence of Trisomy 21 … there was no significant congenital heart disease or other condition of the baby that would preclude delivery at her home community hospital. This child, Trig, was born at 35 weeks in good health …” The doctor did not confirm either that she had delivered Trig or that Sarah had given birth to him.
In the months that followed the 2008 election, Baldwin-Johnson’s refusal to speak to the media and Sarah’s refusal to provide simple documentary proof that Trig was her biological child not only kept the rumors alive but led to a network of arcane conspiracy theories reminiscent of the years that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
But one does not have to wear a tinfoil hat to wonder.
As her former security chief and many others have said, Sarah displayed no signs of being pregnant when she traveled to Washington for the National Governors Association meeting February 23–25, 2008. After posing for a group photo on the White House steps and meeting privately with John McCain at the Willard Hotel, she flew back to Alaska, wearing jeans.
Within days of her return, she phoned Mary Glazier and prayed with her for “wisdom and direction.”
On March 4, McCain won the Republican nomination. The very next day, Sarah announced that she was seven months pregnant. The child would be born with Down syndrome. Giving birth to such a child would make Sarah the patron saint of the antiabortion movement and would spark fervent enthusiasm within a Christian conservative base that was notably cool toward McCain.
Once again, Sarah found herself in the right place at the right time, and—in this instance—in the right condition. McCain later said Sarah had made a strong impression on him during their meeting. It’s not unreasonable to assume that he at least hinted that she was one of the people he’d consider as a running mate if he won the nomination.
It would be worse than unreasonable to assume that he told her that the only thing that would make her a more appealing choice would be if she could somehow give birth to a Down syndrome baby before the Republican convention in September. Yet only eight days later Sarah announced that that’s exactly what she expected to do.
Glazier prayed again with Sarah—this time in person, not over the phone—at a Governor’s Prayer Breakfast later in March, after she’d announced her pregnancy.
At 9:26 on Monday morning, April 14, Sarah e-mailed a staff member to say she did not want Gary Wheeler or anyone else from her security detail to accompany her two days later when she flew to Dallas to speak at a Republican Governors Conference luncheon.
“First Spouse is available to travel instead,” she wrote. Never before as governor had Sarah traveled out of state without her security detail, and she offered no reason for wanting to do so at this time.
Any number of people have observed that it was reckless of Sarah to have traveled to Dallas in her condition. How much more reckless was it to leave behind uniformed security personnel who could have helped to ensure her safety and that of her baby if a medical emergency arose? What could have been her motive for doing so? Was it because, as Gary Wheeler told me, if he’d been there and her water had broken at 4:00
AM
on April 17, he would have whisked her to a Dallas hospital as soon as possible, and certainly wouldn’t have let her fly to Alaska twelve hours later?
Nobody asked Sarah this question at the press conference she held in Anchorage on April 21, three days after Trig’s birth. The atmosphere was celebratory, not inquisitorial.
Describing her time in Dallas, Sarah said, “Felt perfectly fine, but uh, had thought maybe a, a few things were starting to progress a little bit that, that perhaps there was an, an idea there that maybe he’d come a little bit early. So called my doctor at about, uh, four in the morning in Texas, [1:00
AM
Alaska time] and, um, I said, ‘You know, I’m gonna stay for the day’ … have a speech that I was determined to give at one o’clock that afternoon.”
She was asked if she’d felt contractions.
“Well, not contractions so much … nothing real painful but just knowing that, um, it was feeling like I may not, um, be able to be
pregnant a whole, another four or five weeks, knowing that it would be not a bother to call our doctor and let her know.… We knew to call her and just get her advice.”
She was asked if her water had broken.
“Well, if you must know, uh, more of those type of details, but, um—”
“Well, your dad said that and I saw him say it, so that’s why I asked,” a reporter said.
“Well, that was again if, if I m-must get personal, technical about this at the same time, um, it was one, uh, it was a sign that I knew, um, could lead to, uh, labor being, uh, kind of kicked in there was any kind of, um, amniotic leaking, amniotic fluid leaking, so when, when that happened we decided, okay, let’s call her.”
She tells the story somewhat differently in
Going Rogue
. “At 4
AM
a strange sensation low in my belly woke me and I sat up straight in bed. ‘It can’t be,’ I thought. It’s way too early. Moments later, I shook Todd awake. ‘Something’s going on.’ He sat up in bed, instantly alert. ‘I’m calling CBJ [Cathy Baldwin-Johnson].’ ‘No, don’t do that. It’s only 1
AM
in Alaska.’ I didn’t want to call anyone yet. I just wanted to take stock and see whether this baby was really coming. I also wanted time to pray and ask God silently but fervently to let everything be okay. Desperation for this baby overwhelmed me.”