But that was a minority view. A week before the primary, a poll showed her leading Binkley 40 to 29 percent, with Murkowski trailing at 17. In the campaign’s final days, Murkowski tried to turn the ethical tables on Sarah, charging that, Ruedrich-like, she had used her mayor’s office to conduct political business. She responded by charging Murkowski with running a “smear campaign.”
On August 22, Sarah won the primary with 51 percent of the vote to Binkley’s 30 and Murkowski’s 19. In November she would face former two-term Democratic governor Tony Knowles and conservative independent Andrew Halcro, a former state legislator whose family operated the Avis franchise in Anchorage.
There was to be no stopping her. She was a fresh face—and a very pretty one—at a time when the Alaska media were starved for fresh faces. Where once she’d sought “glamour and culture” by driving to Anchorage to watch Ivana Trump sell perfume, now she personified at least the first of the two. The Daily News said she emerged from the primary “with a Joan of Arc glow,” and soon thereafter the paper christened her “the Joan of Arc of Alaska politics.” She was uncorrupted and incorruptible. She had fought her own party’s decadent power structure and had won. How could she not be heaven sent?
As the general election campaign began in September, Anchorage Voice of the Times columnist Paul Jenkins, as diehard a conservative as could be found in the Alaskan press, described the media’s embrace of Sarah as “nympholepsy,” a frenzy induced by nymphs.
He wrote about the “breathless, incredibly embarrassing fawning” over her, pointing out that her most prominent supporters, former governor Walter Hickel; former state senator Rick Halford; and her personal attorney, Wayne Anthony Ross, an avid gun collector who drove a Hummer with a license plate that read WAR, were members of the very faction Sarah had sworn to overthrow.
“The pseudo-coverage has gotten so bad that we are treated to stories about her winning smile,” he wrote. “And women, the talking heads now tell us, nowadays are dressing just as she does. The entire state, they blubber, is all atwitter over the lovely Ms. Palin. Oh, my.”
Any prospect that the media might recover its wits vanished with the explosive news, made public in early September, that the FBI had raided the offices of seven Alaskan legislators, all but one Republicans, seeking evidence that they’d accepted bribes from Veco, the oil services company founded by former welder and now multimillionaire Bill Allen.
That there was a corrupt coterie of Republicans in Juneau had been an open secret in Alaska for years, although no one in the timid media had ever revealed it. They even had a name for themselves, The Corrupt Bastards Club, and printed T-shirts and baseball caps with the slogan.
The FBI investigation eventually led to guilty pleas from or convictions of eleven Republicans, including the later overturned conviction of Alaska’s greatest living icon, U.S. senator Ted Stevens. The scandal colored the entire gubernatorial campaign. The Democratic candidate, Tony Knowles, was not implicated in the Veco scandal, but he had served eight years as governor, which was enough to make him a charter member of the privileged “good old boys” structure that Sarah was vowing to dismantle.
Given that climate, scant attention was paid to the fact that Sarah herself, while running for lieutenant governor, had accepted contributions from Veco. It was only $5,000, but that represented 10 percent of the money she raised for her lieutenant governor campaign.
Tony Hopfinger would later write in the Dispatch that she’d personally solicited a contribution from Allen in 2001, driving to his Anchorage home and sharing a bottle of wine with him. Following her charm offensive, Sarah received a total of ten five-hundred-dollar contributions from Veco executives and their wives.
As with her improper use of her Wasilla mayor’s office for political purposes, this blemish was ignored by media outlets more eager to sanctify her than report on her. Knowles, sixty-three, who’d run for the U.S. Senate and lost to Lisa Murkowski only two years earlier, was not a fresh face. In fact, in the aftermath of the FBI raids, the accomplished and affable Knowles was a dead candidate walking.
EVEN THOSE at the highest levels of Sarah’s campaign knew that she was not qualified to be governor. But they rationalized, and they hoped. As John Bitney told me in the summer of 2010, “We had a corruption issue. That’s one of the main reasons I worked on her campaign. I was pissed off. Watching Bill Allen float around the halls of my state capitol: it was disgusting. What I thought was, okay, we had this woman who couldn’t stick to a schedule and couldn’t make a decision about anything, and we had this cadre of crazies that were her circle, but if we get her into the governor’s office we can scissor off all the nut jobs, get a professional staff, and she will grow into the job and it will mold her.”
Sarah herself never slowed down long enough to let doubts about her abilities catch up to her. Other than scheduling—“a nightmare that not even Kafka could envision,” Bitney says—the hardest job her staff had was to keep her quiet about her religious beliefs. This wasn’t Wasilla, this was all of Alaska, and not everyone had a taste for her evangelical Kool-Aid.
Knowles sent a letter to voters who’d expressed support for abortion rights, pointing out Sarah’s opposition. As John Stein choked on his oatmeal, Sarah said with a straight face, “I think it’s a shame that anyone would try to make this a banner issue in the campaign when it’s not.”
A month before the election, Sarah had an eleven-point lead over Knowles, with Halcro trailing in single digits. But she didn’t hide. She enjoyed taking on Knowles and Halcro in televised debates. Using index cards, a dazzling smile, and short, snappy answers, and—having studied video of Ronald Reagan—often responding to Knowles by saying, “There you go again,” in what the Daily News called “the sing-songy voice she uses when trying to score a zinger,” Sarah won the hearts, if not minds, of most viewers. The Daily News credited her with “classic schoolyard one-upmanship.” Her gift for it was not surprising, given that in so many ways she remained a tenth-grade Mean Girl.
Toward the end of the campaign, a despairing Halcro said, “We’re going to elect a candidate who never truly answered any questions.” Alaskans, as it turned out, didn’t want answers: they wanted Sarah, however imperfect she might have been. “The voters aren’t looking for perfection,” she said. “If they are looking for perfection, they should vote for God.” Clearly she was the next best thing.
She slipped up once, when she said that public schools should make creationism part of their curriculum as a valid alternative to evolution. Toward the end of a televised debate on October 25 she said, “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information … I am a proponent of teaching both.”
Bitney pulled her aside immediately.
“You just fucked up, girl.”
“I was just saying there needs to be both.”
“No, that’s wack! People think that’s wack.”
“I don’t see the problem,” she said.
“Trust us on this one,” Bitney said. “You’re way out there, too fucking far, you’re going to freak people out, Sarah. Don’t do that.”
After a heated backroom discussion, “We got her to backpedal and we couched it down as best we could,” Bitney told me. In an interview the next day, Sarah said that all she’d meant to say was, “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”
“Even so,” Bitney recalled, “we still barely skated. Mostly she did a good job in the campaign of not letting that stuff seep out, but that’s who she is. She believes that stuff.”
It didn’t matter. In the climate of the time, nothing mattered except the image that Sarah presented to the voters. As the Daily News said in late October, “Her campaign has sometimes struggled this fall to put ideas and positions into clear focus. But they seem almost secondary. The main product Palin is selling this year, as in Wasilla ten years ago, is Palin herself.”
As Election Da
y neared, Bitney—like Sarah herself—was already looking beyond Juneau. “I was telling her in October, ‘You’d better be thinking of running for vice president,’ ” he said. “Here was a gorgeous young reformer, a woman, a fresh face with an intriguing story that could be developed. I thought, we can have this woman in the limelight going into the 2008 convention. So we need to be mindful of framing the story.”
She beat Knowles 48–41, with Halcro receiving 9 percent of the vote. But even before she moved in, Sarah saw the Governor’s Mansion as only a way station en route to her true destination, the one that God had always envisioned for her: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.
THIRTEEN
ON THURSDAY, June 24, I drive to Fairbanks. From Wasilla, on a fine summer’s day, it should take less than six hours to get there.
For me, Fairbanks evokes. In 1975 it gave me my first exposure to serious subzero cold. Forty below was normal, with ice fog, a phenomenon you don’t want to know about unless you’re considering moving to Fairbanks. But I was also there in July 1976, when the temperature was uncomfortable in a different way.
I drove to Fairbanks with my older three children, then aged nine, eight, and five. I was divorced from their mother, with whom they lived in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. They’d been out for a two-week summer visit. In those days, there was a direct flight to Philadelphia from Fairbanks, but not Anchorage. Undoubtedly, it had to do with Fairbanks’s brief and not-so-shining status as the epicenter of oil pipeline development.
I decided to drive the kids to Fairbanks so they could have a nonstop flight home. They’d get to see a bit more of Alaska, at least from a car window, and we could stop overnight at a roadside cabin halfway.
My first mistake was buying a used car in Anchorage for the trip. I thought I’d be okay because, I told myself, the dealer was a friend of a friend. It turned out that the dealer was a friend, or maybe acquaintance, of someone who turned out to be my acquaintance, not my friend. It was a battered blue station wagon of indeterminate vintage, which would have been fine, except the radiator leaked.
I mean leaked. I had to stop every fifty miles and refill it from a five-gallon water jug. It was like a trip through Death Valley. My kids never saw the scenery: they were on the lookout for sources of water.
It was still light out when we pulled into a roadside cabin at about 10:00 PM. This was my children’s first experience with the concept of no running water, which meant no indoor toilet, which meant an outhouse. Because it was only for one night, they decided to treat it as an exotic adventure.
I unloaded the car and cooked dinner. As I recall, we ate bacon and eggs and grilled cheese sandwiches. After they went to bed, I put what I hadn’t cooked in a cooler on the porch.
It was dark out—and it wasn’t dark for long, so this must have been about 2:00 or 3:00 AM—when my eight-year-old, Suzy, woke me up to tell me she’d seen a bear.
“I was coming back from the bathroom by the woods,” she said, “and I saw him. He was eating all the stuff you left on the porch. Can you get my camera out of my backpack? I want to go back and take his picture. He’s so cute.”
Thus was I almost responsible for the mauling or premature death of sweet Suzy, now the mother of three of my grandchildren. It was Suzy, in fact, who’d been thinking of bringing her husband and children to Wasilla to stay with me on Lake Lucille for a couple of weeks this summer, until the Andrew Breitbart commenter wrote, “can’t wait for your grandkids to show up and play in the woods and water.” After that I told her to forget it.
In the morning, we drove on to Fairbanks. Even with the water stops we got to the airport in plenty of time. I spotted a bank thermometer registering ninety-two degrees. My nine-year-old, Chrissy, said, “I can’t wait to get out of Alaska: it’s too hot.”
Now I’m heading north again, in a Toyota Rav4, rented from Andrew Halcro’s Avis franchise in Anchorage. The radiator works. Even in summer, in daylight, it is still one hell of a drive. I encounter a half-hour delay due to road construction between Willow and Talkeetna. Just outside the entrance to Denali National Park, I come upon the astonishing apparition of “Glitter Gulch,” an explosion of private-enterprise resorts. There’s even a traffic light!
Cruise ship passengers who have arrived by bus wander from hotels on one side of the highway to restaurants and souvenir shops on the other. I sit at the red light, stunned at all this construction thrown up in the middle of what had been nowhere. Glitter Gulch is a good name for it, however unofficial. It’s like the sudden, shocking sight of Las Vegas in the middle of the desert, and it’s every bit as artificial.
I reach Fairbanks at 4:00 PM. My first appointment is at 5:00. I need a place to stay and I head for the most obvious, Pike’s Waterfront Lodge, on the Chena River, near the airport. Holland America and Princess cruise line tour buses are parked in front. As unlikely as it seems, even Fairbanks has become a summer tourist destination. I get one of the worst rooms in the joint, and it costs nearly $200. The hotel is owned by a Republican state legislator, Jay Ramras, who’s currently running for lieutenant governor. Ramras used to be known as Chicken Man because he’d stand in front of his chicken wing restaurant dressed up like Big Bird from Sesame Street, hoping to entice customers.
The people I’ve come to see tell me they can’t make it at five, but they’ll call back by six thirty. They don’t call. I call at seven and seven thirty and eight and get only voice mail. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s too magnificent a night to waste worrying about it. (It turns out to be a medical emergency, and I see them in August.)
It’s only three nights after the longest day of the year and in Fairbanks there’s literally midnight sun. Even with the smell of smoke from forest fires in the air, how sweet it is to sit at Pike’s Landing with a glass of white wine and feel the warmth of the sun and enjoy the sights on the river.
I’m reminded of what my old Alaskan friend Ray Bane said during our Brooks Range hike in August 1976: “All this is a lie. A beautiful lie. Winter is the truth about Alaska.” Ray and his wife, Barbara, I should note—after many winters of running dog teams in Bettles, where the average lows from November through March are below zero—now live in Hawaii.
I have breakfast with Jim Whitaker, former mayor of Fairbanks. Whitaker, fifty-nine, is a Republican who served as mayor from 2003 until 2009. In his final run for reelection, in 2006, he received more than 75 percent of the vote. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
“It was an easy choice,” he tells me over buffet-line scrambled eggs at Pike’s Lodge, “and it had nothing to do with Sarah. I simply felt Obama was better suited to lead the country than John McCain. I spoke at the convention before the choice of Sarah was even announced. But I must say I was surprised by the choice, and also disappointed.”
“Why?”
“Surprised because I had spoken to her in March, right here at Pike’s Landing, at the finish of the Iron Dog. I’d heard that she’d been trying to promote herself as a vice-presidential candidate and I asked her if it was true. ‘Absolutely not,’ she told me. ‘I have a job and I intend to see it through.’ I was disappointed because I realized she’d lied to me, and also because I’d persuaded myself that she’d meant all the other things she said: about caring for the state and about the need to rise above political considerations. She fooled me like she fooled a lot of others.”
Whitaker had been impressed by Palin’s exposure of Ruedrich’s improper conduct at the oil and gas commission. “I knew Ruedrich from when I was first elected to the statehouse in 1999,” he tells me. “I was one of four newly elected Republicans. As soon as we got to Juneau, Ruedrich brought us into a room with two guys from Bill Allen’s company, Veco, and told us, ‘These are the guys who put you in office. I wanted you to listen to what they say.’ ”
Whitaker shakes his head, as if still in disbelief more than ten years later. “This shit really does happen,” he says.
/> He was convinced Sarah would be different. “The real rub,” he says, “relates to her failure to uphold the public trust. I really believed that she would subordinate her personal interests. In the end, she didn’t. But I was also surprised and disappointed when she resigned. It was a cut-and-run to take the big money she knew was out there. Profiteering, pure and simple. I never thought she would do that.”
Nonetheless, Whitaker is quick to praise her political abilities. “She really understands the phrase ‘the theater of politics.’ I’ve never seen a person who could connect with thousands of people the way she can. It’s just too bad she’s unwilling and unable to understand issues. She can’t seem to grasp that there are situations out there that are bigger than her.”
He recalls a visit he made to her Anchorage office soon after she’d been elected governor. “I thought we’d have a discussion about substantive matters. Instead, I had to listen to a forty-five-minute diatribe about what was being said about her on talk radio.”
Some months later, after Track had enlisted in the army, Whitaker was with Sarah in the lobby of the Princess Hotel in Fairbanks. “There were about half a dozen of us, just having an informal chat about policy, when someone came in and told her that Track was outside. He’d just finished basic training and was on his way back to Fort Wainwright and she hadn’t seen him for several months. I said, ‘Well, I guess that’s our cue to wrap things up.’ But she said, ‘No, no, he can wait. Let’s keep going.’
“I said, ‘Governor, you need to go see your son.’ She wouldn’t do it. For at least another half hour we kept going, really just talking about silly stuff.”
The strongest and most disturbing recollection Whitaker has about Sarah comes from her appearance at the Fort Wainwright deployment ceremony on September 11, 2008, while she was campaigning for vice president. Track was among those being deployed.