America by Heart
My husband, Todd, sums up the spirit of initiative and hard work behind the American dream when he repeats to our children the old adage: “God helps those who help themselves.”
As for myself, I have a dog-eared copy of a quote on my bulletin board from David Sarnoff, the visionary founder of NBC, that has followed me from the Wasilla City Council chambers to the mayor’s office to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and then to the Governor’s Mansion:
Remember: nobody owes you a living.
Don’t be misled into believing that somehow the world owes you a living. The boy who believes that his parents, or the government, or anyone else owes him his livelihood and that he can collect it without labor will wake up one day and find himself working for another boy who did not have that belief and, therefore, earned the right to have others work for him.
When human perseverance is combined with economic freedom, anything can happen. Miracles like Chris Gardner happen. At the heart of the American dream is the belief that anybody can succeed. We can, and do, fail as well. But we can brush ourselves off, get back up, and try to succeed again. No one but we determines who wins and who loses, how hard we work and how hard we try.
Since the financial crisis left so many of our pensions and IRAs in tatters, and so many Americans either looking for work or struggling to hang on to the jobs they have, there is no doubt that we need reform in part of our economy. But the federal government today is going further than just leveling the playing field for Americans who want to work hard and compete to get ahead. Government is now picking winners and losers.
Through the purchase of large chunks of Chrysler and General Motors, the bailing out of Wall Street banks, and putting union cronies ahead of other creditors in bankruptcies, government is taking over more and more of the role that the free market has traditionally played in America. The problem is that when government is calling the shots, it’s politics that matters, not good ideas, hard work, or perseverance.
It’s called crony capitalism, and it’s something I fought against as governor. In Alaska, we took on “Big Oil” and its allies in government who were taking the forty-ninth state for a ride. My administration challenged lax rules that allowed corruption and irresponsible resource development, and we even took on the largest corporation in the world at the time, Exxon Mobil. The state argued that it was not abiding by provisions in contracts it held with Alaska. When it came time to craft a plan for a natural gas pipeline, we insisted on transparency and a level playing field to ensure fair competition. Our reforms helped reduce politicians’ ability to play favorites and helped clean up corruption. “Big Oil,” including executives and lobbyists of BP, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, and others, didn’t pal around with me, but, then, that was a mutual decision.
Exactly the opposite is happening in Washington today as government burrows deeper into the American economy. It’s a vicious cycle. The more industries government owns, controls, and/or regulates, the more lobbyists these industries send to Capitol Hill. Inevitably, it’s the lobbyists who are at the table when the legislation or the regulations that affect their employers are being crafted. Before you know it, you have health care and pharmaceutical lobbyists cutting deals to benefit their industries under the guise of “reform.” Philip Morris shapes tobacco regulation. General Motors, BP, and other companies go along with job-killing “cap and trade” energy tax legislation in exchange for big subsidies for their products—the “green” ones government wants them to produce. The big corporations—the ones who can afford armies of lobbyists in Washington—win. We little guys lose.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m as angry at the Wall Street “fat cats” (in the words of our president) who have done so much to undermine our economy—and escaped so many of the consequences—as the next gal. But the answer isn’t to lose sight of the free market principles that have made America both the most prosperous and the most generous nation on earth.
Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago, has perhaps done more than any other academic to warn us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to our economy. Professor Zingales makes the crucial point that there is a difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Both political parties are at fault in failing to acknowledge this distinction. Our government should seek to promote free and open markets, not pick winners and losers among different businesses. To do otherwise, the economist warns:
is the path to big-business capitalism: a path that blurs the distinction between pro-market and pro-business policies, and so imperils the unique faith the American people have long displayed in the legitimacy of democratic capitalism.
Unfortunately, it looks for now like the Obama administration has chosen this latter path. It is a choice that threatens to launch us on that vicious spiral of more public resentment and more corporatist crony capitalism so common abroad—trampling in the process the economic exceptionalism that has been so crucial for American prosperity. When the dust has cleared and the panic has abated, this may well turn out to be the most serious and damaging consequence of the financial crisis for American capitalism.
The justification that supporters of greater government intervention in our economy use is that free market capitalism, left to itself, is unfair. As any poor, misguided viewer of Michael Moore’s movies “knows,” capitalists are greedy and self-interested. Government must therefore step in to regulate the free market in order to ensure a fair outcome.
This argument has been around for a long time. I remember back when I was studying the American economy in my high school history class, the late economist Milton Friedman had won the Nobel Prize in economics a few years earlier and he was all the rage. I wish he and his wife, Rose, were still with us today to defend free market principles from the likes of Michael Moore. In their many writings, they provided a powerful answer to the argument that government is necessary to get people to cooperate together for the greater good.
One of my favorite examples is also the simplest. In their fantastic television show Free to Choose (and their book by the same name), the Friedmans use a wonderful essay about the making of a pencil to illustrate the power of human economic freedom—and the damage government can do when it steps in to replace the collective energy and decision making of free individuals.
The essay “I, Pencil,” by Leonard Read, explains how thousands of people—from those who harvested the wood and mined the graphite to those who saved to invest in the pencil factory—cooperate to create this useful everyday object. Here’s Milton Friedman describing how, in the free market, individuals cooperate for the greater good (in this case, to produce a pencil) in a way government could never mandate or even plan:
None of the thousands of persons involved in producing the pencil performed his task because he wanted a pencil. Some among them never saw a pencil and would not know what it is for. Each saw his work as a way to get the goods and services he wanted—goods and services we produced in order to get the pencil we wanted. Every time we go to the store and buy a pencil, we are exchanging a little bit of our services for the infinitesimal amount of services that each of the thousands contributed toward producing the pencil.
It is even more astounding that the pencil was ever produced. No one sitting in a central office gave orders to these thousands of people. No military police enforced the orders that were not given. These people live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, may even hate one another—yet none of these differences prevented them from cooperating to produce a pencil.
We’ve all heard of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” which directs a free economy through thousands upon thousands of individual decisions that almost magically add up to create large systems of social cooperation—and social good. Read’s story of how a pencil is made is a perfect way to illustrate this pretty abstract concept. And it’s a timely reminder
of a critical part of the greatness of America: our economic freedom. You would think that after all the failed, blood-soaked attempts to create other, supposedly less “greedy” economic systems in the last century, the accusation that capitalism is evil would be on the ash heap of history along with those tyrannical regimes. Alas, some things never change, and capitalism seems to need defending these days more than ever.
Four
Raising (Small-r) Republicans
Like lots of moms, I have a tendency to mark time in terms of my family. When was I last in Ohio? That was with Piper, when she lost a top tooth. September 2008? That was when Track deployed for Iraq, and I experienced my first month on the campaign trail with John McCain. And the early spring of that same year? That was when we were working in Juneau on the Alaska natural gas pipeline, and our precious son Trig came into our lives.
My family is my true north. Todd; Track; Bristol; Willow; Piper; Trig; my grandson, Tripp; my mom and dad; Todd’s folks—they are what keep me sane, grounded, and focused on the future. They make all the bad stuff worth it and all the good stuff twice as good. I can’t imagine what I would do without them.
For me, the rule is put your family first, because our families are the most loyal friends and greatest blessings we have in life. I was blessed to grow up in a great family that was—and is—a tight-knit group. I’ve always known they have my back, that if I tried and failed, they’d be there to pick me up, and if I tried and succeeded, well, they’d be there to keep me down to earth.
When I was a kid, my family’s idea of a great vacation was to hike the Chilkoot Trail, the rugged thirty-three-mile path between southeast Alaska and British Columbia that the pioneers used to travel to seek their fortune back when we were just a territory. My parents wanted us to sense the history and pioneering work ethic in this part of America’s Last Frontier. We hiked the rugged, rocky terrain to see that history and to experience the rustic rain forest beauty. A sheep hunt nearby would be incorporated into the Southeast Alaska vacation, too.
It was on these trips that I learned about the unique mixture of sacrifice and reward that is family. We were too small to carry our week’s worth of outdoor gear and food on our own backs, so Dad did it all. He so wanted us to concentrate on what surrounded us that he carried literal and figurative burdens on his back, sacrificing his own comfort for his kids’. It occurred to me, while atop the peak of the famous Chilkoot Pass, looking down at the jagged black rocks we’d still need to conquer to get to the other side, that Dad had five sleeping bags on his back, both tents, most of the food, and the emergency gear, all packed in, on, under, and through his backpack. Mom carried most of the rest. We kids had our own backpacks with, no doubt, minimal weight to slow us down. Dad didn’t say a word about carrying the extra weight. All week he and Mom exercised this cumbersome commitment to our comfort, while sacrificing their own. So now, even in little things—such as packing the diaper bag that seems to have been banging against my thigh for more than twenty straight years now without many breaks, or lugging around bulky car seats while exchanging them from one rig to another, or packing the 4,000th peanut butter sandwich in the 4,000th brown paper lunch sack—it helps to picture Mom and Dad with their bulging backpacks, mile after mile on the Chilkoot, carrying a heavy load for their family.
Self-described feminists talk a lot about how family and children hold women back and limit their professional choices. Betty Friedan memorably called the family a “comfortable concentration camp.” And of course there was the famous rallying cry “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
But in my case, precisely the opposite is true. First of all, family isn’t just whom you’re born to. Family is whom you choose. And I lucked out when I met Todd Palin. He has been a partner to me in every conceivable way—in life, in love, and in doing battle with the New York Times. He is a wonderful father, a wise adviser, and the love of my life. Yes, I was fortunate to have met Todd. If you want to get anything done in this life, it’s helpful to have a First Dude.
Secondly, far from holding me back, my family is my main motivation. It’s the source of my energy as well as my optimism about America. During the vice-presidential campaign, people would ask me how I could expect to balance it all if we won the White House. I thought, They really don’t get it. I don’t balance anything. We do it together. And if we’d won, we would have done the White House like we do everything else: as a team. And, by the way, Ms. Reporter, I assume you’re asking all male candidates this same question.
Having a family gives you a gift that you might not recognize at first. It teaches you that the sun doesn’t rise and set around you. It forces you to realize something that will take you far in life, if you let it: It’s not about you. In our house, we pitch in and help each other out. Whether it’s work, or school, or sports, or competing in the Iron Dog snow machine race, it’s a family goal. If it’s important to one of us it’s important to all of us. And if it challenges one of us, it gets support from all of us.
As I travel around the country I see that everyone is battling something. Everyone has challenges and trials, and I can only imagine it is the very bored and unfulfilled person who describes herself as challenge-free. In fact, I find it suspicious to encounter someone who can passively consider him- or herself completely secure and comfortable. Not only do I think that’s not true, but also I think that not facing our challenges limits us. There’s no inspiration, energy, or ambition to grow when your head is in the sand. The Palin family is no different from others. We’ve had our challenges, but we’ve tackled them head-on, together, and we’ve ended up stronger for it.
When my then-seventeen-year-old daughter dropped the bomb on Todd and me with her announcement that her adolescence had been prematurely halted and, in most unfortunate circumstances, she was going to have a baby, our little world stopped spinning momentarily.
Bristol was a “good girl,” and this wasn’t supposed to happen. She was supposed to be playing basketball, chairing the Junior Prom Committee, and getting good grades while working in the local coffee shop. And she was doing all that, thankfully, so she would be too busy for anything else—or so I deluded myself.
I was in Alaska’s capital city, Juneau, during my oldest daughter’s junior year of high school. Preoccupied with the enormous job of being governor of the nation’s largest state, juggling schedules around Todd’s job fifteen hundred miles away in the North Slope oil fields, saluting (and worrying about) our son’s decision to enlist as an infantryman in the U.S. Army, and busy with our younger kids while wrapping my arms around the fact that we’d soon be joined by our newest family member, Trig, I assumed that Bristol was making only wise decisions while staying with my sister in Anchorage. I kick myself to this day for my selfish assumption. I made a mistake.
The night our beautiful, perfect, precious grandson, Tripp Easton Mitchell, came into the world was a cold one, as December nights in Alaska typically are. Because the new father wasn’t there until the end of Bristol’s labor, I helped deliver Tripp. And as I cut the cord between my daughter and her son, I was overwhelmed with warmth and wonder. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, but at the same time I knew it all should have been happening ten years from then. A contradiction? Perhaps. But Tripp is a dream; he’s the most beautiful baby I have ever seen.
It didn’t take long after that magical night, however, for both new parents to realize how much work—and how little fun—teenage parenting is. But my strong, beautiful Bristol reacted in a way that made me proud. She went to college. And worked full time. And took care of a needy, colicky baby through many, many sleepless nights, doctor’s appointments, and lonely, cold car rides to and from babysitters. She worked as hard as any young single mother could possibly work.
Of course we all had to bite our tongues—more than once—as Tripp’s father went on a media tour through Hollywood and New York, spr
eading untruths and exaggerated rhetoric. It was disgusting to watch as his fifteen minutes of fame were exploited by supposed adults taking advantage of a lost kid. But we knew him well enough to see how confused he was during that time, and our hearts broke for him and the price he would pay.
Along with our sorrow, of course, was some justifiable anger as well. The lies told about our family on national television were outrageous. It was excruciating for Track to read ugly things about his sisters, parents, and baby brother while he was in a war zone unable to do anything about it. There he was, half a world away, protecting everyone’s freedom of speech and securing America’s freedom of the press, while that freedom was being abused to perpetrate lies about his family. At this time I was actually thankful he was in Iraq. If he had been closer to home he would have wanted to clobber his former hockey teammate.
It was disheartening, too, for our young teen Willow to witness what her sister was going through. It broke our hearts to watch some of Piper’s innocence erode away. And I confess that I felt embarrassment, too. We were a “normal” family; this wasn’t supposed to happen to us. I hoped—and prayed—that my family would come through this challenge intact. There were times when I wasn’t sure; when it was everything Todd and I could do not to lash out at the forces threatening our family. More than once, I thought, How could this be worth it? Let’s just go back to Wasilla and stop feeding the media beast. Let’s give ourselves and our family a break.
And then I came across something written by an American who knew a little something about adversity: Helen Keller. She wrote, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
If I didn’t know before what she meant, I know now. The past couple of years have truly revealed character. We’ve all made mistakes. Tripp’s father went through a time of apologizing for his statements, and Bristol, with her characteristic generosity of heart, accepted that assumed-sincere apology. It’s been two years full of struggling to atone, trying to be patient, remembering to love each other, and watching in wonder as little Tripp grows up. I’m not saying I’d want to do absolutely everything again, but in the end, what Helen Keller said was right: we’ve emerged a stronger, more united family.