The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (7 page)

Weigel writes, “It’s incredibly irresponsible for [politicians] to sic their fans on journalists they don’t like. And that’s what Palin is doing here—she has already inspired Glenn Beck to accuse McGinniss of ‘stalking’ and issuing a threat to boycott his publisher … No one in the media should reward Palin for this irresponsible and pathetic bullying.”

Also in the
Post
, Greg Sargent asks, “At what point do Sarah Palin’s attacks and smears become so vile and absurd that they no longer merit attention? Is there such a point?”

In the Huffington Post, Alaska blogger and radio/TV personality Shannyn Moore points out that my house used to be an Oxford House. “The tenants were men recently released from prison, who were recovering addicts. What? No fence to protect sexy Sarah in her tank top? Dear God! Who was lurking in that house watching her children play?”

And in
Salon
, Alex Pareene notes that I “wrote a critically respected book on Alaska 30 years ago” and that my “one reported story so far on Palin was factual and responsible. There’s nothing even remotely tabloidy about McGinniss’ Portfolio story on the years Palin wasted not getting a gas pipeline built.” Nonetheless, writes Pareene, Palin knows that “she can, through sheer force of will and the devotion of her cult, make this into the story of a creepy gotcha journalist stalking her, and threatening her children.”

JUST OFFSHORE, a mother grebe is sitting on her nest. She and her mate are my summer neighbors, too. Grebes are fascinating, besides being noisy. With a bit of online research, I learn that they’re members of the
Podicipedidae
family of freshwater diving birds, notable for their floating nests, made of plant material, and for how the newborn chicks ride on the mother’s back before starting to swim on their own.

Their chicks hatch in late spring. Right now, at 10:00
PM
, I’ve got a mother grebe sitting on her eggs no more than ten feet offshore. I can’t quite tell how many eggs there are. If only I had a pair of binoculars.

T
HERE HAS BEEN much speculation that Sarah was pregnant with Track when she and Todd married in 1988. “It was essentially a shotgun-type wedding,” a friend of Todd’s confirms.

After briefly sharing Heather’s apartment in Anchorage, Todd and Sarah moved to a townhouse across from Wasilla High. Todd, taking advantage of the special status afforded him for being one-eighth Native, obtained a blue-collar job with BP on the North Slope. Sarah’s pregnancy proceeded uneventfully, though—in contrast to her 2007–2008 pregnancy with Trig—quite noticeably. “I’ve got pictures of Sarah being very, very, very, very pregnant with Track,” an old friend says.

In either April of 1989 or March of 1990—Todd used different dates on separate voter registration and absentee ballot applications—they bought a starter home in the Mission Hill subdivision. Their address was 825 Arnold Palmer Street. They were surrounded by neighbors on such thoroughfares as Sam Snead Loop, Lee Trevino Avenue, Jack Nicklaus Drive, Ben Hogan Avenue, Tom Watson Place, and Byron Nelson Drive.

Some say the marriage proved rocky from the start. “They don’t have a marriage,” Sarah’s brother, Chuckie, confided to a friend in Anchorage. “I don’t know how they live together.”

“It’s never been a happy marriage,” someone who’s known Todd and Sarah since high school told me in 2010. Part of the problem was Sarah’s lack of domestic skills. “She can’t cook shit,” the old friend said. “She couldn’t do grilled cheese. She’d burn water.”

Another sticking point was her lack of enthusiasm for child rearing, a trait she shared with her mother. “From the start,” a friend recalls, “Todd was the parent. When he was home, he changed the diapers. He fed the kids. Sarah never lifted a finger.”

With her father providing financial help, Sarah and Todd bought a home on the western shore of Lake Wasilla, at 1018 Westpoint Drive. There were three children by then: Track, Bristol, and Willow. Sarah had not worked since her brief stint as a sports announcer for an Anchorage TV station before her marriage.

IN 1987, Wasilla elected a new mayor: John Stein, a lifelong Alaskan, born in Sitka, and the holder of a degree in city planning from the University of Oregon.

Stein had arrived as city planner in 1984. Given the appearance of the city today, the notion of a Wasilla city planner may seem oxymoronic, but Stein says things could have been worse. “Those old forty-acre homesteads were being subdivided into one-acre lots,” he told me when I visited him at his home in Sitka during the summer
of 2010. “Anchorage was overflowing, and people were flocking to the Valley because it was cheap. And it was cheap: cheap, cheap, cheap. There were essentially no building codes and no minimum standard for borough roads.”

Speaking of his first term in office, Stein says, “It was the first time they’d had a planner as mayor. I tried to bring things under control. It was the first time anybody there had ever heard the phrase ‘comprehensive plan for development.’ Until then, it was still the frontier. You could say I’m responsible for the commercial strip on the Parks Highway, and I’ll plead guilty. But by allowing that, I protected the city’s residential neighborhoods.”

John Stein was reelected, uncontroversially, in 1990. By then Wasilla was a city in chaos, plagued by both substance and spousal abuse—the two not being entirely unrelated. Homeschooling was on the rise, and not only because parents feared exposing their children to the evils of secular education. A child who went to school could talk about how daddy had beaten up mommy the night before, or display his or her own bruises.

Intact nuclear families were a minority. One year, a fourth-grade teacher attempted a genealogy project. The first step was for the students to list their grandparents. He had to abandon the project because many students literally did not know what a grandparent was. Indeed, many, while knowing the woman they lived with, were unsure if she was their birth mother; nor were they certain if the man in the house was their father.

Young mother Sarah remained active in the Assembly of God and made a first gesture in the direction of politics by working to get a creationist majority elected to the Wasilla school board. It was also through her church affiliation that she found the cause that would inspire her for years to come: abortion.

The Valley Hospital was the only one in Alaska in which doctors performed second-trimester abortions, which had been legal since
Roe v. Wade
. This did not sit well either with Catholics, such as hospital
board chairman Clyde Boyer, or with the Valley’s exploding evangelical Christian population.

The hospital was controlled by a fifteen-member governing board, which in turn appointed seven members to an operating board that made policy decisions. Members of the governing board were chosen by an annual vote of the membership of the hospital association. Membership was open to any Valley resident who filled out an application and paid a five-dollar fee.

Until 1992 there had been only about four hundred members of the hospital association. But in the months leading up to the April 1992 election, in which five governing board seats were up for grabs, more than two thousand new members joined the association, almost all recruited by evangelical churches, foremost among them the Assembly of God.

No one recruited more enthusiastically than Sarah. The two thousand new voters were given a slate of five antiabortion candidates to support. All five won, receiving more than twice as many votes as the leading pro-choice incumbent, Sarah’s stepmother-in-law Faye Palin. The five new members gave the antiabortionists a majority on the governing board, which quickly translated into a majority on the operating board, which quickly translated into a vote to prohibit all abortions at the hospital.

Her contribution to the winning side whetted Sarah’s appetite for politics. “If it wasn’t for the abortion fight, she would never have run for any kind of office,” says Reverend Howard Bess, the only one of more than forty Valley ministers to oppose the antiabortionists.

At the same time, Mayor Stein had come to believe that Wasilla could no longer rely on state troopers for law enforcement, but needed its own police department. Merchants were reporting appalling rates of theft and robbery, and residents of the city’s new senior housing project were under constant threat of break-in by youths, who stole painkillers and other prescription drugs.

A police department, however, could be funded only by new taxes, and, as Stein recalls, Wasilla was populated largely by “libertarians who hate two things: cops and taxes.” Nonetheless, with the help of a city councilman named Nick Carney, a member of one of Wasilla’s oldest and largest families, Stein formed Watch on Wasilla, a group whose purposes were to educate the public about the need for a police department and to find a means to pay for it. Jim and Faye Palin joined, and Faye, having recently lost her seat on the hospital board, was named president.

The city’s businesses were all for the creation of a police department, but Watch on Wasilla felt it also needed an advocate more attuned to the city’s growing number of young families—someone with the time and energy to run for and win a city council seat. They interviewed a number of potential candidates, including a young Wasilla Lake housewife named Sarah Palin.

After their first choice said she wasn’t interested, Carney and Stein took a second look at Sarah. “She wasn’t the brightest star on the horizon by any means, but at least I’d known her all her life,” Carney says. “She’d even gone to school with my daughter.”

Four years earlier, at the age of twenty-four, Sarah had joined a Wasilla prayer group led by a woman from Ketchikan named Mary Glazier. “God began to speak to her about entering politics,” Glazier told attendees at a religious conference in Everett, Washington, in June 2008. “We began to pray for Sarah. We felt she was the one God had selected.” Sarah viewed the invitation to run for city council as God’s answer to Mary Glazier’s prayers.

At twenty-eight, Sarah had three children, she belonged to the Iditarod Elementary School PTA, she’d played basketball at Wasilla High, and she was Chuck Heath’s daughter. “She also told us she was a born-again Christian, a lifetime member of the NRA, and a ‘hockey mom,’ which was not a phrase I’d ever heard before,” Stein says.

“The evangelicals had been storming into Wasilla—we even
rented the city council chamber to one of those groups for Sunday services—so I figured she’d have a strong base of support,” Stein says. “I didn’t care about her religion or her views on guns or abortion. All that mattered to me was that she’d vote for the police department and the sales tax. After all, what did you really have to know to serve on city council? You need gravel for roads, and sewage runs downhill—that’s about it.”

Stein mentored Sarah, and Nick Carney took her campaigning door to door. In October 1992, as the sales tax initiative passed, she easily won election to the council. Thus did John Stein open the gates of the city to the mother of all Trojan horses.

Knowing he could pay for a police department with revenue from the sales tax for which Sarah had campaigned, Stein hired Wasilla’s first chief of police. Irl Stambaugh was another lifelong Alaskan, and a Vietnam vet who had more than twenty years of experience with the Anchorage police department. Within six months, Stambaugh had an eight-man force up and running. The following year, after his officers arrested more than two hundred drunk drivers, he was named municipal employee of the year.

Stein was elected to a third three-year term in 1993, but a backlash was starting to develop. No small number of those two hundred drunk drivers were Wasilla voters. And while there were more jobs with the city—year-round jobs (with benefits) not dependent on the weather or on an oil company’s whim—they were government jobs. Many Wasillans saw them as evidence of government encroachment on private life. The bureaucratic mentality was incompatible with the free spirit of the frontier.

“Your typical female employee who had a job with the city as a secretary or clerk,” a former city official told me, “was married to a man who had only seasonal work. So the city job was necessary for the year-round income that could provide family stability. There hadn’t been a middle class here. There were slopers—guys who did
shifts on the North Slope—and other construction guys and disabled vets with drug and booze problems. And a bunch of teenagers learning how to be thieves. We were the imbecilic stepcousins of Palmer, which had been settled by the Midwestern farmers in the thirties, thanks to the New Deal. This was a rough-and-tumble place, not a good place to raise young children.”

Another longtime resident said, “There were a lot of people here who prided themselves on their misfit status. They had contempt for the stable middle class. They didn’t want to be citified. Suddenly we had a police department. Wal-Mart and the seniors in subsidized housing liked that, but the libertarian base didn’t. What did city cops mean to them? Suddenly you got busted for growing pot in your back shed. You got a ticket if you had a hole in your muffler. You got a ticket if your dog barked too loud. For a place that prided itself on being outside the conventional lifestyle, this was a lot to swallow, and it did not go down very well.”