Spring arrived. As daylight increases and the cold and snow diminish, people throughout Alaska tend to mellow. Although Sarah maintained her stranglehold on city hall, passions faded, and the move to recall her died a quiet death. In June the forced resignations of city planner Duane Dvorak and public works director Jack Felton caused little stir.
Also in June, Sarah gave a commencement talk to a group of homeschooled children at the Assembly of God. Although her own children attended Wasilla public schools, she strongly supported both homeschooling and Christian private schools in which students were taught that the creationist theory about the origins of mankind was God-given truth. The Mat-Su College Community Band played music at the event. Afterward, the band’s leader, Phil Munger, spoke to Sarah. Munger, who would later become known for his Progressive Alaska blog, had come to Alaska in 1973 and taught music at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Through his wife’s friendship with John Stein’s wife, Munger was aware that Sarah’s religious views were unorthodox. He asked her about them.
She said she was a “young earth creationist,” convinced that the earth was no more than six thousand years old and that humans and dinosaurs had once walked it together. She knew this was true, she said, because she’d once seen pictures that showed human footprints inside dinosaur tracks.
Sarah also told Munger that civilization had reached the “end-times” and that Jesus would return to earth “during my lifetime.” She said the signs of his imminent return were obvious. “Maybe you can’t see that,” she said, “but I can, and it guides me every day.”
She celebrated Fourth of July 1997 by signing an administrative order that allowed the open carrying of weapons in the library. Cynics said this was an attempt to put Mary Ellen Emmons in the crosshairs, so to speak, but Sarah noted that the order also permitted guns to be carried or worn in city hall.
There was a slight kerfuffle in August when Sarah told the three women who had been left to run Wasilla’s museum after the termination of John Cooper that one of them would have to go and that it would be up to them to decide which one. In response, all three, ages seventy-seven, seventy-four, and sixty-five, quit their jobs. They’d worked at the museum for fifteen years, but decided to resign together in protest against “a city that doesn’t want to preserve its history,” as they put it in a letter to Sarah.
“We hate to leave,” one of them said. “We’ve been together a long time. But this is enough. If the city were broke, it would be different. If they were even close to being broke.” Far from it, Wasilla’s cash reserves had grown to more than $4 million. Even so, Sarah had found it necessary to force a senior citizen making $32,000 a year from a long-held job. The women’s joint resignation left the museum with no staff, a circumstance that Sarah was in no hurry to change.
In September she ridded herself of city attorney Richard Deuser, replacing him with a friend who also was serving as general counsel to the state Republican Party. “Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Deuser said. By midwinter she had replaced all but one of the department heads who had helped to administer the city under Stein, hiring in their places either high school friends or evangelical Christians, none of whom had any experience in public administration.
The one man who stayed on, budget director Erling Nelson, told acquaintances he did so despite, not because of, Sarah, and only because he cared about the city’s well-being.
Emmons lasted until 1999, when Sarah’s relentless cutting of the library budget finally forced her to take a job in Fairbanks. Even in 2010 she remained so scarred by Sarah’s treatment of her that she could not bring herself to discuss it.
Sarah might not have been able to inspire people, but she never had trouble inspiring fear.
AS FOR her own job, she was known for coming in late and leaving early. “It’s not rocket science,” she once said about being mayor. The job was particularly untaxing for her because, unlike her predecessors, she had someone, John Cramer, to do the day-to-day work of running the city.
“She didn’t really give a shit about her job,” says someone who knew her well at the time. “I remember she’d say, ‘I have to go to a fuckin’ meeting tonight.’ And she’d be like, ‘I got on my biggest push-up bra. I’m gonna get what I want tonight.’ Like she had some motion before the city council and she was gonna use her titties to get their votes.”
It was not as if Sarah found it hard to make time for city business because she was immersed in her duties as housewife and mother. Her distaste for domestic chores was well known within her circle. One friend from the time recalls visiting the Palin home only to have Todd ask her to vacuum and clean the toilets and then go out and buy groceries.
Another frequent visitor recalls, “Sarah would just be a bitch. She’d literally come home, scream at everyone, yell at Todd for a while until he’d walk away, and then she’d go to bed. She’d go to bed. Literally. I can remember times she’d come in the door at four o’clock and go to bed. Todd would sleep on the couch. He always slept on the couch; it was an old cream-colored leather thing. Oh, it was filthy from the kids—so nasty—but that’s where he slept. Just like Levi told that magazine Vanity Fair. Everything that boy said in that story was true.”
A friend of Todd’s says, “Sarah would get up early and she’d go work out and then she’d come home with her drive-thru mocha. The children would have no breakfast, they’d live off of whatever, and she’d spend an hour getting fourteen pounds of makeup on. She liked that brand called MAC. We’d say, ‘She’s got her MAC Force Field on, look out!’ ”
Catherine Mormile, the physical therapist and dog musher whom Sarah befriended in 1996, called Sarah several times during her first term as mayor, hoping to arrange a hiking date or other type of get-together. But the Sarah at the other end of the phone sounded very different from the woman who’d reached out to her at Carrs.
“There was always screaming and hollering in the background, like I’d just interrupted a terrible fight. When she’d come to the phone, it was hard to talk to her because she’d be yelling at her kids. ‘Shut the fuck up! I’m on the phone!’ and ‘You little fuckers! Shut up!’ ”
A Palin family friend and occasional houseguest tells me that Mormile’s phone calls, more likely than not, did interrupt a fight. “First thing in the morning, Todd and Sarah are screaming at each other, ‘Fuck you. I want a fuckin’ divorce!’ ‘Fuck you. I’m gettin’ divorce papers!’ I probably have heard that five hundred times. It was a daily conversation. Every morning. No ‘Hey, baby, here’s a cup of coffee.’ Always doors slamming. And in front of the kids. ‘Fuck you. I’m divorcin’!’ ‘I’m gonna divorce you. I don’t have to take your shit!’ Always, always, it was always like that.
“Todd and Sarah have never been happy. It didn’t matter which lake they were living on. That home? It was an unhappy place.”
Acquaintances were struck by Sarah’s frequent and extreme mood swings. “You never knew what Sarah you were going to meet,” one told me in 2010. “You never knew if it was going to be happy Sarah. It could even be super, super manic-happy Sarah, like if it was a day that she hadn’t eaten in two days and her boobs were sticking out good and her pants were good and tight and she was feeling good and slim and her hair was good. Or you could go all the way to the level of, walk in, look at you, and walk into a room and slam the door. You never knew who you were gonna meet. You never knew. She was a different person every ten minutes.”
In public, however, Sarah continued to appear cheerful and energetic. She could be charming in superficial social situations. She had the knack of making people feel they knew her, even if all they ever glimpsed was the façade. This was no small talent. “She was a rock star, no doubt about it,” John Stein said.
Having slain all the obvious dragons, Sarah was free to enjoy the fruits of victory, not the least of which was a city council—now minus Nick Carney, who had retired—that gave her unanimous support. With her close friend Judy Patrick producing
ideas for which Sarah could take credit, and with John Cramer doing all the scut work that had previously been the mayor’s responsibility, Sarah’s duties were largely ceremonial. One highlight was performing a wedding at Wal-Mart for two store employees. “It was so sweet,” Sarah said in a newspaper interview afterward. “It was so Wasilla.”
Sarah almost literally paved the way for the Fred Meyer department store on the shore of Wasilla Lake. Despite concerns from the state’s Department of Fish and Game that runoff from the twenty-two-acre site would pollute the lake, Sarah hailed the arrival of Wasilla’s newest box store as an unmistakable sign of the city’s progress. “I live on this lake and I would not support a development that wasn’t environmentally friendly,” she said. Shortly afterward, she moved to Lake Lucille.
By the end of her first term she was riding so high that the only candidate willing to challenge her was Stein, and he did so with great reluctance, and with no illusions about what the outcome would be.
Whatever your view of Sarah, you have to give her credit for what she learned on the job during her first term, not about issues—she was still not going to read The Worldly Philosophers instead of People or Runner’s World—but about the one skill most invaluable to an upwardly mobile politician: public relations. To go from the brink of a recall petition to being an odds-on favorite for reelection was no small feat. Sarah managed it primarily by curbing her tendency to lash out and pick needless fights. She also benefited from Wasilla’s robust financial health—a condition attributable chiefly to the 2 percent sales tax John Stein had put in place.
“Stay the course” was her reelection slogan. “We’ve continued to take care of the needs,” she said. “Roads, water, and sewer are the foundation upon which Wasilla will continue to grow.”
The 1999 mayoral race was part of a “broader struggle,” the Anchorage Daily News reported. “That struggle—part politics, part ideology, and part personality—has to do with competing visions for the Valley. One side advocates minimal government and holds the more conservative view on social issues, while the other pushes for more planning and land-use regulation and believes that social issues like abortion and gun rights are irrelevant to local elections. Stein and Palin have represented opposing sides in this political schism.”
During her reelection campaign, Sarah no longer hid either the intensity of her religious convictions or her close ties to the Valley’s right-wing evangelicals. Internally, she’d purged city hall of those who she felt were insufficiently Christian and had begun to use her office time to lead staff prayer meetings. A former director of development recalls driving to work one day and seeing a dozen people standing outside the city hall building leaning forward and pressing their hands against the wall. When he asked a receptionist inside what was happening, he was told, “Oh, those are people from Sarah’s church. When they know she’s in the office, they come over to communicate the word of God to her through their hands.”
Outside her office, Sarah became an ever-more-visible cheerleader for God and country. A former resident recalls that before Wasilla High football games, “She’d walk out in front of the stands and lead the crowd in prayer, then in the Pledge of Allegiance.”
By Election Day of 1999, Stein felt he was up against not only a popular incumbent, but also God. Although voter turnout was only 17 percent, God won 909–292.
GIVEN SUCH a mandate, Sarah wasted no time accelerating the conversion of Wasilla from rough-and-ready Alaskan frontier town to a city that Jesus might be happy to call home when he returned.
In April 2000, at city expense, she traveled to Indianapolis to attend a conference at the International Training Center of the evangelical Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP). The conference had been organized by the International Association of Character Cities (IACC), an affiliate of the Character Training Institute (CTI), an organization that sought to end the separation of church and state.
Among the speakers she heard was seventy-year-old evangelist Bill Gothard, who had founded IBLP, according to the organization’s website, “for the purpose of giving individuals, families, churches, schools, communities, governments, and businesses clear instruction and training on how to find success by following God’s principles found in Scripture.”
Gothard’s goal, as described by Silja J. A. Talvi in In These Times magazine, was “to rebuild American society according to biblical mandates.” He believed that America’s failures stemmed from a lack of personal character, which led to acts of disobedience against “God-ordained jurisdiction” represented by four types of authority: “parents, government, church leaders and employers.”
IBLP literature distributed at the conference said, “God gives direction, protection, and provision through human authorities. If we rebel against them, we expose ourselves to destruction by evil principalities … This is why ‘rebellion is the sin of witchcraft.’ ”
That was a concept in which Sarah must have taken particular delight: in the eyes of God, Mary Ellen Emmons and Irl Stambaugh were witches!
The Character Training Institute sought to instill civil institutions with forty-nine biblically based “character qualities,” which it conveniently listed and defined on laminated, pocket-size cards that also used pictures of the animal that represented each trait. For example, “Obedience: Quickly and cheerfully carrying out the direction of those who are responsible for me,” was accompanied by an illustration of a mother duck and her ducklings.
Sarah also watched a video presentation by David Barton, an evangelical minister who served as cochair of the Texas Republican Party and who had founded WallBuilders, an organization that emphasized “the moral, religious and constitutional foundation on which America was built.” In his talk, Barton proclaimed that the United States had been founded as an explicitly Christian nation and that continued separation of church and state in America was an affront to the Lord.
At the conference, Sarah learned that Wasilla could become a designated “City of Character” if the city council passed a resolution pledging to uphold each of the forty-nine “character qualities” specified by the IBLP.
She returned home enthused, and in short order a pliant city council approved her plan to declare Wasilla a City of Character. It became the only such city in Alaska. The five states with the most Cities of Character are South Carolina (thirty-four), Oklahoma and Texas (twenty-one each), Arkansas (eighteen), and Florida (fifteen). By contrast, there are none in the New England states.
In the real world, the impact of Wasilla’s new designation was minimal. A couple of posters went up for a while, and city utility bills and employee paychecks carried the slogan “Wasilla: A City of Character!” but otherwise, life continued as before. Nonetheless, an IACC official praised Sarah’s “boldness” in having Wasilla declared a City of Character.
Oddly, for all her public manifestations of religious zeal, there was little evidence of Christian faith inside Sarah’s home. “There was no religion in that house,” a longtime friend told me. “There was nothing about God. There was no Christ. Nobody prayed. There were no Bibles, there were no Christ Is in This Home signs. There were no crosses. None of that was ever there. Never.”
The abortion issue that had propelled Sarah into politics had been resolved a year into her first term when the Alaska supreme court ruled unanimously that Valley Hospital could not ban the procedure. The hospital was also required to pay more than $100,000 in legal fees incurred by the pro-choice group that had filed the original suit. The court’s ruling heightened Sarah’s awareness of the need for state and federal officials to appoint Christians to fill judicial vacancies.
New term limits prevented a Wasilla mayor from serving for more than six consecutive years, so Sarah felt free to be bold in her second term. Not long after she pushed the City of Character resolution through the council, she had police chief Fannon boldly criticize a new state law that ensured that rape victims would not have to pay for the kits needed for forensic me
dical exams. The chief said the new law would “further burden taxpayers.”
Sarah continued to expand her horizons. She traveled to Washington several times to lobby for increased federal aid to Wasilla in the form of earmarks. She even hired a congressional lobbyist, Steve Silver, former chief of staff for Alaska’s U.S. senator Ted Stevens. Very much the Washington insider—with close ties to both Stevens, who was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and to Alaska’s lone congressman, Don Young, a senior member of the House Transportation Committee—Silver soon got the federal tap flowing.
During Sarah’s last four years as mayor, Wasilla received $26.9 million in federal earmarks, or more than $4,000 per resident, based on Wasilla’s 2002 population of 6,700. It was an impressive haul for someone who later would complain loudly and frequently about big government, and who would speak so stirringly about the need for self-reliance.
Knowing that her second term would be her last, Sarah wanted to do something big to be remembered by. She decided on a multimillion-dollar sports arena. Despite her supposed aversion to big government, big spending, and taxation, she pushed through a half-cent increase in the city sales tax to finance the project.
First estimates were that the 102,900-square-foot sports complex would cost $14.7 million. It would contain a 17,000-square-foot artificial turf field, an 835-foot rubber jogging and walking track, and the centerpiece: a National Hockey League regulation-size indoor ice rink, surrounded by bleachers with seating for more than 1,500. Spending $15 million to build a sports arena when the entire Wasilla city budget was only $20 million? The hockey mom was thinking big.