The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (9 page)

“It was a small room,” Stambaugh said, “and there were maybe twenty people in the class. Us big guys stood in the back so nobody would have to look at us, because, to tell you the truth, it wasn’t a pretty sight. One day Sarah shows up. She goes right to the front and she puts on this incredible demonstration—three risers, double steps, I don’t know what all, but it was a hell of a routine. Afterward, I complimented her on her incredible stamina.”

Before the next class, the instructor approached the three men. “Sarah Palin says she’s uncomfortable,” the instructor said, “because she thinks you guys are ogling her butt. She wants me to move you to the front of the room so you won’t be able to watch her during class.”

The men agreed. But that didn’t work either. “You guys are so big,” the instructor said, “that when you’re in the front of the room you block everybody’s view of me.”

And that was that. Neither the mayor nor the police chief nor the superintendent of the department of public works wanted to make Sarah or any other woman in Wasilla uncomfortable in exercise class. So they stopped going. Too late: Sarah’s supporters had something else to whisper about.

A friend offered a different perspective. “One morning,” she told me during the summer of 2010, “Sarah came back in her workout stuff—her outfits were very provocative—and she’s singing, ‘I like big butts and I cannot lie,’ and she’s dancing around the kitchen. Todd comes in from the garage, and Sarah starts going on about how the guys are checking her out at the workout place. The way she’s saying it is totally antagonizing Todd, and he finally says, ‘Well, why don’t you put some fuckin’ clothes on?’ ”

AT ONE POINT in the campaign, Sarah claimed her tires had been slashed and implied that Stein supporters had done it.

“If it happened, which I doubt,” Stein says, “it was probably related to the domestic turmoil she was going through at the time. We were hearing a lot of scuttlebutt, and Todd was certainly notable by his absence. He and Brad Hanson broke up their snow machine business in Big Lake and we were hearing that was because Sarah was having an affair with Brad. She was apparently telling people, ‘I’m not sure Todd’s my man.’ And I do remember that her wedding ring was coming off and on a lot.”

Sarah’s affair with Hanson, which was revealed nationally by the
National Enquirer
during the 2008 campaign, was apparently common knowledge in Wasilla. Hanson was a property developer and businessman whose parents were friends of Chuck and Sally Heath’s. He would go on to become a Palmer city councilman and coach of the Palmer High School hockey team.

“It was known,” a friend of Todd’s told me in 2010. “For example, Todd knew that I knew. He was embarrassed. It wasn’t something he talked about a lot.”

Both Sarah and Hanson have denied that they ever had an affair. People who claim to be aware of the affair—six months is a common estimate of its duration—believed that Sarah was using Hanson to show Todd that two could play the game she suspected he’d been playing for years in Dillingham.

“Todd was basically spanked and put back in his box,” a friend of his says. “The marriage was never right before and it was never right after.”

IT WAS NOT in Stein’s nature to fight dirty. “I didn’t want any part of any of that,” he told me. “In fact, when I heard that Sarah was afraid I’d get nasty, I actually called her and went to her house to assure her that if any information about her personal life came my way I would not use it in the campaign. That didn’t stop her, of course, but I stuck to my promise and I don’t regret it. No office is worth holding if you have to win it by spreading slime. I will tell you, though: right up to Election Day, they were really afraid.”

Campaign manager Chase recalls no fear. Indeed, her biggest shock came from learning the extraordinary nature of Sarah’s ambition. “We were sitting at my kitchen table at about eleven o’clock one night, and I said, ‘Sarah, you’ll be governor in ten years.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to be governor, I want to be president.’ ”

She ran as if she truly believed she was God’s chosen candidate. “I’ll never forget a speech she gave to the chamber of commerce,” a Wasilla lawyer recalls. “She was so nervous her voice was quavering, but she said, ‘Anyone who thinks faith has no place in government has no place in government himself.’ I said, ‘Where in the hell did that come from?’ I’d never known her to be religious. But then it all started: guns and God and abortion-is-evil and all gays are perverts on one hand and man’s divine right to drink himself into roadkill until five
AM
on the other. Sarah was off to the races.”

For at least ten years, since first learning about it at Mary Glazier’s prayer group and at the Assembly of God, Sarah had subscribed to an evangelical Christian ideology frequently referred to as dominionism. The goal of dominionists is to put Christian extremists into positions of political power in order to end America’s constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Dominionists believe that America was founded as a specifically Christian republic and that Christians should control all levels of government.

Although she’d been reluctant to discuss her beliefs with Laura Chase at the start of the campaign, before it was over, Sarah grew so
open about her dominionist affiliations that she even bused in members of right-wing extremist Jerry Prevo’s Anchorage Baptist Temple to go door to door campaigning for her.

And just as her father had used threats to try to get his way in his fight against the women on the school board, Sarah and her supporters did not shy from intimidation.

“I was renting an apartment,” Carolyn Johnson, a former resident of Wasilla now living in Texas, recalls, “and I put a Stein sign in the window. My landlord told me to take it down. He had the vending machine account at the Wasilla Bar and he was told he’d lose it if anyone saw a Stein sign in his building. I said no. Then the threats started, late at night, always by phone. ‘Watch what you’re doing … it’s gonna get ugly … you’d better watch your back … it would be too bad if something happened to your daughter.’ My daughter was a small child at the time, and I was living alone with her. I took down the sign.”

Although Stein was also a Republican, the party fervently supported Sarah. Republicans sponsored fund-raising dinners for her, and she appeared in newspaper ads and on television commercials alongside Republican state legislators.

“I just don’t get the big full-court press that the Republicans are pushing,” Stein told the
Frontiersman
. “I find it pretty offensive in a local election.”

He ran on the slogan “Protect the Progress” and emphasized his experience. He stressed that under his stewardship Wasilla had created a police force, had attracted new business, and, because of the 2 percent sales tax, now had not only a balanced budget but more than $3 million in reserves.

Sarah stuck with the not particularly original slogan she had first doodled at a council meeting: “Time for a Change.”

Given the intensity and acrimony of the campaign, one might have expected massive voter turnout, but on Election Day, October 1, 1996, fewer than one third of Wasilla’s eligible voters cast ballots.

It would not be unreasonable to suppose that among the more motivated were those who favored keeping the bars open until 5:00
AM
and/or those whose Pentecostal ministers told them that failure to vote for Sarah would invite perdition. Puritanical oldster John Stein had no such threats in his arsenal.

In what the
Anchorage Daily News
called “an upset victory,” Sarah won 661 to 440.

As vote totals were posted at the Mat-Su Borough offices in Palmer, she shouted, “We won! We won!” and jumped up and down. The next day, she told the
Daily News
that the lessons she’d learned playing basketball for Wasilla’s state championship team in 1982 had carried her to victory.

“This really sounds hokey, but that was a turning point in my life,” she said. “We were supposed to be the underdogs big-time. You see firsthand anything is possible and learn it takes tenacity, hard work, and guts.”

She gave no credit to either the Alaska Independence Party or Mary Glazier, or, for that matter, to God himself. To be fair, she didn’t credit the owners of the Mug-Shot or the Wasilla Sports Bar either.

She was sworn in on October 14. Within hours, she launched what many Wasillans today remember as nothing short of a reign of terror.

S
ARAH’S OLDER BROTHER, Chuckie Heath, who lives in Anchorage, tells The Daily Caller that because I am living next door, Sarah fears for the safety of her children. I make a cup of coffee and take it onto the deck to greet yet another brilliant spring day. By midafternoon, the temperature might even hit seventy. I realize I need to buy sunblock.

The new fence is up, and I’m grateful for it. I feel not quite so exposed to prying eyes. Chuckie says my deck “looks right down into her kitchen and into the bedrooms and the upstairs, too.” He’s wrong on all three counts. Even before the new fence went up, no one sitting on my deck—or sitting anywhere inside my house—could see into any of the rooms next door.

How did my living next door get to be about the safety of Sarah’s children? And why do the mainstream media, which treat every other utterance out of Sarah’s mouth as preposterous, deceitful, or meretricious, now accept her allegations about me as factual?

A right-wing radio commentator broadcasts my e-mail address. I’m inundated with thousands of threats and pieces of hate mail. I create a new account and share it with everyone I need to stay in touch
with, and delete all the messages from the old one unread. But it’s another sign of how a wink from Sarah gets the attack dogs slavering.

Greta Van Susteren calls me “the Wasilla stalker.” Movie actresses on
The View
say I’m going through the Palins’ garbage. In
Slate
, Christopher Beam addresses the question of whether Palin could get a restraining order against me. The piece is headlined “The Stalker Next Door.” The threats continue to pile up. From Craigslist:

Mayor Rupright assures me that Wasilla police are keeping a round-the-clock watch on my house. I call Catherine Taylor and advise her to increase her fire insurance. At 10:30
PM
a friend calls from the stop sign at the Best Western to say she’s about to drop off the television set I’m borrowing in order to watch the World Cup. I go down to unlock the chain. Her car approaches. Right behind it is a state police car that has apparently been sitting in the Best Western lot, alert to anyone heading in my direction.

The wind dies down at dusk. At 1:00
AM
—not quite total darkness even yet—there is the most extraordinary full moon shining on the lake from over the mountains, its light reflected brilliantly by the still waters. I bask in the moment. Just sitting here in this magical light and silence—except for the grebes, who squawk round the clock—makes me fall in love with Alaska all over again.

NORMALLY, FOR A news story to continue beyond the first twenty-four-hour cycle, something newly newsworthy must occur. A story pertaining to Sarah is the exception to this rule. It’s now been four days since she first took to Facebook, and absolutely nothing has happened. I’ve exchanged neither a word nor a glance with anyone across the fence. So by today, Friday, maybe things will start to calm down?

Twenty minutes on my laptop kills that hope. In this Internet age, when anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can broadcast it to a worldwide audience within seconds, news-cycle projections become irrelevant.

At some point we reached critical mass. Now the fission process has blown us into an alternate universe. Maintaining what I’d considered a prudent silence has led only to slander, and some highly specific and graphically expressed threats on my life, as well as threats against my family, even my grandchildren.

So today I respond. I talk by phone to David Carr of the
New York Times
and to Dave Weigel at the
Washington Post
and in person to a
Wall Street Journal
reporter who’s been sent up from San Francisco. I also talk to a producer at the
Today
show to arrange a live interview from my deck at 3:45
AM
next Tuesday.

I’ve known David Carr for several years. Therefore, I listen when he warns me to get out. “What’s the upside compared to the downside,” he asks, “when the downside is you get killed?”

He has a point. He continues: “Some of these people she’s inflaming are certifiable lunatics who’ve got guns. All it takes is one who thinks he’s proving his love for Sarah by blowing you away. I’m serious. Your life is in danger. Go somewhere else. You don’t need to be there to write your book.”

“If I leave, she wins. And the crazies win.”

“And they lose if you’re dead?”

Carr is a savvy guy who has been around a few different blocks. He’s not a hysteric. I don’t like what he says, but I take it seriously. I resolve to think about it as soon as I get the chance.

On the other hand, the cable guy comes to hook up my TV for World Cup viewing. Mayor Rupright stops by, just to check in. He’s still not worried. He says his cops have my back. A Wasilla Police Department sergeant calls to say that while I might not be aware of it, they are having regular patrols check on my house throughout the night. And I know the state police are involved.