“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.”
Sarah was among those picking up on the vibrations of discontent. She’d been reelected to city council in 1994. During her first term, she’d sat silently in meetings, sometimes chewing gum, never asking questions, never reacting to proposals, never contributing ideas. “It was almost as if she wasn’t there,” Stein told me.
That began to change during her second term, when—in one of the weirdest alliances in the history of Alaskan, if not American, politics—the dopers and boozers combined with Wasilla’s evangelical Christians to form Sarah’s first political base.
On the secular side, she fell under the sway of two of Wasilla’s most outspoken and extreme right-wingers, Steve Stoll and Mark Chryson. They became friends with Todd through membership in the Alaska Independence Party, which advocated that Alaska secede from the United States and become an independent republic. Sarah attended the AIP’s biennial convention in 1994 and told friends she liked what she’d heard.
On the religious side—while continuing to attend Glazier’s prayer group—Sarah grew even more involved in the ongoing legal struggle over banning abortions at Valley Hospital. In 1993 a state judge issued a temporary injunction that prevented the hospital board from enforcing its abortion ban. On September 20, 1995, Superior Court judge Dana Fabe made the injunction permanent. Only an appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court could vacate the judicial order. In the meantime, despite the decision of its operating board and the wishes of a majority of its membership, Valley Hospital would have to continue to offer second-trimester abortions.
On one level, the whole fight was a very large tempest in an extremely small teapot. On average, no more than ten second-term abortions were performed at Valley each year, all for medically valid reasons, such as, in the opinion of a doctor, that the fetus was badly damaged and would be born dead or would result in a seriously deformed child, or because of knowledge of the mother’s heavy drinking and the likelihood that the child would suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome.
To abortion opponents, “medically valid” did not mean morally valid. Abortion was murder. To deliberately cause the death of a four-month-old fetus was as reprehensible as to cold-bloodedly murder a four-year-old child. A significant number of Valley residents, including Sarah, believed this.
She felt she had to do more to save the unborn. Her ministers and fellow worshippers at the Assembly of God told her she had to do more. Other fundamentalist preachers told her the same. The Ministers’ Prayer Group, a network of right-wing evangelical pastors in the Valley, urged her to run for mayor in order to “bring Christianity to city hall.”
Through Mary Glazier’s prayer group, Sarah was also hearing the voice of God directly. Years earlier, God had spoken to Glazier, she says on her website. He called her “Wind Walker,” and, she says, “revealed to me that he was teaching me to ride the wind with him.”
Glazier was no two-bit local prayer group leader. She was a member of the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders of C. Peter Wagner’s Global Harvest Ministries, based in Colorado Springs, an organization whose mission was “to train Christian leaders in prayer, spiritual warfare … prophetic ministries, signs and wonders [and] social transformation.”
Global Harvest Ministries was part of an extreme Pentecostal Christian movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, known also as the Third Wave of the Holy Spirit. Although the general council of the Assemblies of God, parent body of the Wasilla church, had declared the Third Wave a heresy, Sarah’s local Assembly of God remained closely linked to it and supported Glazier in her wide range of activities, one of which was to free Alaska from the spell of demonic witchcraft.
Glazier had already claimed one scalp. She said God had advised her that a particular applicant for a chaplain’s job in Alaska’s state prison system was a demon. She organized an “intercessory” prayer group that called upon the Holy Spirit to destroy the witch.
The result? “Her car engine blew up, she went blind in her left eye, and she was diagnosed with cancer,” Glazier told SpiritLed Woman magazine in 2003, adding that the chaplain/witch was forced to leave Alaska to seek medical treatment for the ailments Glazier had inflicted upon her in the name of God.
Having accomplished that, how hard could it be to make Sarah mayor of Wasilla?
Stoll and Chryson promised covert support from the Alaska Independence Party, while Larry Kroon, who had succeeded Paul Riley as pastor of the Assembly of God church, guaranteed an equivalent under-the-table effort from evangelicals.
By then, Sarah was occupying her time at city council meetings with doodling that turned out to be far from idle, as a reporter for The New Republic discovered in 2008:
Sarah was getting so antsy that one day in early April she actually drove to Anchorage just for a glimpse of Ivana Trump. She told Todd she was going to Costco to buy groceries. Instead, she went to JCPenney to see Ivana, who was peddling a line of perfume. She told the Anchorage Daily News that she was simply the wife of a commercial fisherman and she’d come to see Ivana “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”
Sarah realized th
at even in Wasilla she couldn’t mount a viable campaign against John Stein as the candidate of only secessionists and religious extremists. She needed a link to a more established political organization. The powerful right-wing Republican state senator from Wasilla, Lyda Green (a native of Texas), provided it.
Green offered Sarah the services not only of her son-in-law, Tuckerman Babcock, a Republican political strategist, but also of her staff member Laura Chase, whom she recommended as campaign manager.
A graduate of the University of Idaho, like Sarah, Chase had gained experience in public relations while working for Alyeska, the oil company consortium that built and operated the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. She’d also worked for the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce.
Chase liked and respected John Stein. Senator Green, however, urged her to work for Sarah instead. “She’ll bring fresh energy,” Green said. “She’s innovative. After nearly a decade of Stein, it’s time for a change.” Green also stressed that the job would be “great experience” for Chase.
At their first meeting, according to Chase, Sarah said her main goal was to build more bike paths in the city. That was it. No greater vision, and certainly no covert Christian extremist agenda. “Bike trails are my baby,” Sarah said.
She invited Chase to a meeting at her home. “Tuckerman Babcock was there,” Chase recalls, “with a big city map and a laminated Republican playbook. They knew I wasn’t comfortable, because John Stein and Nick Carney were my friends.”
Sarah eventually persuaded Chase to take the job by offering a personal inducement. “I can visualize you being deputy administrator,” she said. “You and I will run the city together. We can make it the kind of place we’ve always wanted it to be.”
Chase recalls no mention of any affiliation with the evangelical right. “She was very careful not to let me see that,” Chase says, “because if I’d gotten the slightest whiff of it, I’d never have gotten involved. For one thing, I’m very openly and actively pro-choice.”
Having assembled her campaign staff, Sarah announced her pro–bike path candidacy, making no mention of her real platform, an amalgam of Assembly of God and Alaska Independence Party ideals.
John Stein was in his office when a friend from the chamber of commerce told him that Sarah planned to run against him. “I was stunned,” he recalls. “I was astounded. Not just because I’d been her mentor, but because in her four years on city council she’d never said a word. She had not put forward a single idea.”
Stein now admits to having been naïve. “Municipal races in Wasilla had always been about sewers and roads,” he says. “The Mat-Su Borough, not the city, controls the fire department and the school system. The city is strictly nuts and bolts. It never occurred to me that a city race could be the vehicle for advancing extremist ideology.”
Until the 1996 race, not even party affiliation had been an issue. Stein was a Republican, but nobody had noticed or cared. What mattered, as a former city official recalls, was that “John Stein commanded loyalty, allegiance, and respect because he would carefully listen to people and actually consider what they had to say. You never came away from a meeting with John feeling you’d had anything less than a fair hearing.”
Nonetheless, after nine years in office, Stein was vulnerable to charges of cronyism. “Once I confirmed that Sarah was serious, I did some soul-searching,” he says. “I think most politicians succumb to arrogance eventually, and I certainly don’t exempt myself. I’d get together with my staff and socialize after council meetings, and that led to the charge that we were conducting business on the sly. I didn’t pay enough attention to appearances.
“In addition, there was a hard-core residue of anger about the police department and the sales tax. These extremists like Stoll and Chryson were looking for an excuse to detonate. And Chuck Heath was hooked up with them from the start.”
Even so, Stein wasn’t overly worried. Wasilla was growing according to plan: not the way urban aestheticians such as Jane Jacobs might have liked, but the old slogan “We Don’t Give a Damn How They Do It Outside” still resonated strongly in the Valley.
Ignoring the bike paths, Sarah focused the secular aspect of her campaign on two issues: closing hours for local bars and liberalization of Alaska’s already lenient gun laws.
In regard to the bars, the issue was whether to allow them to remain open until 5:00 AM or require them to close at 2:00, as did the bars in Anchorage. Both Stein and Wasilla’s first police chief, Irl Stambaugh, advocated the earlier closing.
“What was happening,” Stambaugh told me during the summer of 2010, “was half the drunks in Anchorage would drive up here at two AM and get drunker for another three hours and then try to drive home. We were getting kind of tired of scraping them off the Parks Highway. I was also concerned with the number of women who were calling our domestic abuse hotline just after five o’clock in the morning saying, ‘Help, quick, my husband just came in and he’s trying to kill me!’ ”
To Stein, a 2:00 AM closing “seemed like a no-brainer, what with the epidemic of drunk driving plaguing us, and especially in a city with such a strong Baptist and fundamentalist presence.”
You’d think an evangelical Christian mother such as Sarah would have agreed. You’d be wrong. The bar owners argued that the hours between 2:00 and 5:00 AM were particularly lucrative and that city government didn’t have the right to interfere with free enterprise. Sarah wholeheartedly agreed. She saw the bill that would mandate a 2:00 AM closing as a classic example of government interference with personal freedom.
The bar owners rivaled the right-wing Christian churches as the largest donors to Sarah’s campaign. Big jars into which Palin campaign donations could be placed appeared on all Wasilla bars and were filled to the brim nightly. In the same saloons, pictures of incumbent mayor Stein were placed inside the urinals.
The proposed changes to the state’s gun laws, which would allow the carrying of concealed weapons in bars and banks and on school grounds—they were already permitted everywhere else—seemed even less relevant. “It simply wasn’t a municipal issue,” Stein said. “The state legislature would decide that, and it didn’t matter how Irl Stambaugh or I felt about it.”
But it mattered to Sarah and her supporters. She accused Stein, a longtime member of the National Rifle Association, and Vietnam vet Stambaugh of being “anti-gun.” In Alaska—especially in the Valley—this was a more serious charge than pederasty.
Sarah’s campaign operated on two levels. On the surface—the Laura Chase level—she was the bubbly, energetic “hockey mom,” Chuck Heath’s daughter, a Wasilla High grad, and a member of the team that won the girls’ state basketball championship in 1982, which, even fourteen years later, was no small thing in Wasilla. She was a personification of the change long overdue at city hall.
But there was also the secret underbelly: the doper/boozer–charismatic Christian coalition, which spread rumors that because John Stein’s wife still used her maiden name professionally the two of them weren’t actually married, and—far worse—that Stein was a Jew!
“I’d been a Pennsylvania Dutch Lutheran all my life,” Stein told me when I talked to him during the summer of 2010. “I’d lived in Wasilla for twelve years and had been mayor for nine. Where was this suddenly coming from? I actually had to say in public, ‘I am not a Jew.’ As for not being married, my wife and I laughed. But the whispers grew louder, and pretty soon they weren’t whispers anymore. I actually had to produce a marriage license, and even then Stoll and Chryson said it was probably forged.”
Sarah also introduced innuendo about sexual harassment into the campaign. She encouraged gossip about Stein and Stambaugh acting inappropriately during an early-morning step-aerobics class that she occasionally attended. The two men, being less than svelte, had signed up for the class, along with the head of the department of public works, Jack Felton.
“It was a small room,” Stambaugh said, “and there were maybe twenty people in the class. U
s 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.