The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

  I open the front door and step out. “Can I help you?”

  He grins. He’s got a voice like a bear. “I came to see if I could help you.”

  His name is Jay Cross and he lives out beyond Big Lake, twenty miles to the west. He’s a part-Native lifelong Alaskan, a retired air force mechanic with a wife, grown children, and grandchildren. In 2006 he ran as a centrist independent for state senate against Republican incumbent Charlie Huggins and lost. I invite him in, telling him not to bother taking his shoes off.

  “I won’t stay long,” he says, “and I’m sorry to show up unannounced. But I’ve been reading about this bullshit you’re having with these people next door and it pisses me off. They’re not behaving like Alaskans. You know that. You’ve been here before.”

  “Thank you. It may start to die down.”

  “Well, I hope so. Now, I know everybody and his brother has been offering you guns, and I’ve got a whole bunch I could give you, but what I want to give you this morning are these.”

  He holds out a set of house keys. Then he unfolds a piece of paper.

  “These are the keys,” he says. “And this is the map. It’s got my address on top. It’s a little hard to find, so pay attention. Look, you turn down Big Lake Road and then on your right you’re gonna come to Beaver Lake Road. You take a right there and you go down to where you see a sign for Ryans Creek Drive, and you take a right there and you go over the little bridge and start up the hill and—”

  “Excuse me, but where am I going?”

  “You’re going to my house. Anytime you want. Whether I’m there or not. It don’t matter. Anytime this bullshit here starts to get on your nerves. Actually, most of the summer I’m not going to be there. My wife’s father is pretty sick down in Phoenix, and I’ll be going down to help her take care of him, but that don’t matter. If I am there, you’re not going to bother me. You’ll have your own entrance and a whole floor to yourself. You don’t even have to call me. That’s why I’m giving you the keys. You just head up whenever you want, and it don’t matter if I’m there or not.”

  “These are the keys to your house?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you don’t know me.”

  “Sure I do. We just met.”

  “But I can’t stay in your house.”

  “You can if you want to. I just gave you the keys.”

  “This is incredible. I mean, thank you.”

  “Don’t think nothing about it. And by the way, if I’m heading Outside, I’ll leave you some guns on the counter. Hell, I’ve even got an AK-47 you might like.”

  I stammered.

  “It just pisses me off,” Cross repeats. “A man comes up here to do a job, and people like them next door make life difficult. It ain’t right. It’s not the way Alaska ought to be.”

  Blogger and political commentator Shannyn Moore has an expression she uses when something particularly inexplicable by Outside standards occurs: TIA. “This is Alaska.” As Jay Cross climbs back in his truck and turns around, that’s all I can say. TIA. And God bless it.

  PERHAPS EVEN MORE remarkable is that the new edition of the Frontiersman contains an apology, of sorts, from T. C. Mitchell, who wrote the “deadly force” editorial. He writes, “In an effort to find a catchy ending, I was a bit too creative with the last paragraph. If I had it to do over again, I would have left off the last sentence … I certainly did not mean to suggest that McGinniss would or should be the victim of violence. For that matter, I didn’t mean to suggest that the Palins would do such a thing. All of which points to the power of words. I misused them on Saturday. I’ll try to have more respect for that power next time around.”

  Maybe sanity is regaining a foothold. Through drizzle, I drive to Anchorage in early evening. It’s my first time out of the Valley in twelve days.

  Nancy arrives at the Anchorage airport at 8:00 PM. In and of itself, that means the worst is over.

  SIX

  ON THE NIGHT of October 1, 1996, after learning she’d been elected mayor, Sarah thanked the dozens of people who had helped her. The one person she did not thank was Laura Chase, who had been led to believe she’d be appointed deputy administrator. “She never mentioned me,” Chase recalls. “Not the night she won and not even in interviews over the next few days.”

  Four days after the election, Sarah called Chase to say she wanted to meet for coffee. “Who do you think I should appoint as deputy administrator?” she asked.

  “You’ve been telling me all along it would be me,” Chase said.

  “Oh, I can’t do that. It wouldn’t look right if I appointed a friend.”

  And that was that. Chase learned only later that Sarah’s real reason for not following through with the promised appointment was that the religious right would not approve of a city official who was pro-choice. She also learned only later that Sarah had already filled the deputy administrator position by choosing John Cramer, an evangelical Christian who’d also worked as an aide to state senator Lyda Green.

  On her first day in office, Sarah changed the screen saver on the mayor’s official computer to read GOD LOVES YOU SARAH PALIN.

  Then—as a local radio station proclaimed, “Wasilla has a Christian mayor!”—she set about firing non-evangelicals or forcing them to resign. The first head to roll, on the morning of her first day in office, was that of John Cooper, the head of Museum and Recreation Services.

  “As soon as I was summoned to appear,” Cooper recalls, “I warned my museum staff as to what probably was up.” Museums were not a priority for Sarah, but getting rid of Cooper was, because her ardent supporter Steve Stoll wanted him gone.

  Cooper was suspected of being “progressive.” To Sarah and Stoll, this meant he might use museum exhibits to contradict the version of the history of the earth, mankind, and Wasilla preached by ministers at the Assembly of God and other right-wing evangelical churches in the Valley.

  As the new deputy administrator Cramer looked on, Sarah told Cooper she wanted his resignation. “I told her I refused to comply until I knew what my rights were.” She told him to consult a lawyer. When he did, Cooper was advised that department heads were “at will” employees and served at the pleasure of the mayor. He typed a resignation letter and delivered it to Cramer. As he accepted the letter, Cramer said sheepishly, “I have a family, too.” It turned out that the money used for Cramer’s salary had come from Sarah abolishing Cooper’s position. A few days later, Cooper saw Steve Stoll in a parking lot. Stoll made a pistol-firing motion with his thumb and forefinger and said, “Gotcha!”

  In the months that followed, Cooper was unable to find a new job. Wherever he turned he was told that to hire him would be to risk the wrath of Sarah, and no Wasilla employer was willing to do that. Eventually Cooper and his wife moved to Hawaii.

  At her first city council meeting as mayor, Sarah attempted to appoint Stoll—who belonged to the John Birch Society as well as to the Alaska Independence Party—to her vacated city council seat and to appoint another political ally to a second open seat. Nick Carney’s “no” vote stopped her that night. The city attorney, Richard Deuser, stopped her permanently, pointing out that the mayor had no authority to appoint council members. She wrote Deuser’s name in her little red book.

  The Frontiersman was not amused. “Wasilla found out it has a new mayor with either little understanding or little regard for the city’s own laws … Sarah Palin failed in a blatant attempt to confuse and circumvent the law Monday night in order to pack the city council with candidates favored by her and her supporters.”

  At the end of that first council meeting, a friend of Sarah’s who had voted for her but who worried that her lack of knowledge—especially in the field of economics—might pose a problem, stepped up to hand her a copy of The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, by Robert L. Heilbroner. Sarah would not even look at the cover of the book. The friend tried to hand the book to her, but she would n
ot take it. When he put it on the table in front of her, she pushed it to the edge with the back of her hand, saying, “I never read anything that might conflict with my beliefs.”

  She didn’t want to hear anything that conflicted with her beliefs, either. One of her first acts was to institute what the Frontiersman called a “gag order,” demanding that department heads get her approval before speaking to reporters.

  Without council approval, Sarah used city money to lease a new gold Ford Expedition (“The Mayormobile,” as it came to be known) and took $50,000 that had been budgeted for road improvement and repair and used it to redecorate her office at city hall. She favored a red wallpaper motif that left the office looking, in the words of Nick Carney, “like a bordello.”

  Carney, though no longer a political ally, didn’t want to see Sarah make needless trouble for herself. He thought she actually might not understand that a mayor cannot appropriate portions of the city budget for her own use without council approval. “I told her it was against the law,” he told David Talbot of Salon in 2008. “She said, ‘I’m the mayor and I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me to stop.’ ”

  Having disposed of John Cooper, Sarah began to operate the city’s parks herself. “One of the first things she did,” a former city employee told me in the summer of 2010, “was give Assembly of God complete access to any park in the city to sing the Gospel and give out flyers. I received many, many calls from irate mothers who didn’t want their young children exposed to this at a city park. And, of course, at Christmas the parks department was instructed to set up a nativity scene in the park, along the Parks Highway coming into town.”

  Someone who left her city job and moved out of Wasilla told me, “Every day, department heads and secretaries feared for their jobs. If anyone had shown open support for John Stein they were fired immediately, and Sarah brought in her high school friends to fill those positions.”

  On October 24, on the advice of Todd’s father, Jim Palin, Sarah requested letters of resignation from the four department heads who remained in the wake of John Cooper’s dismissal. She said it was a test of their loyalty and that she’d decide later which resignations to accept. Police chief Irl Stambaugh refused. His contract with the city, he said, made it clear he could only be fired for cause.

  On the afternoon of her first day in office, Sarah had reassured Stambaugh that despite his support of John Stein and their differences on issues such as bar closing hours (which remained at 5:00 AM) and the right to bear arms inside a school, bank, or bar (the bill passed the state legislature but was vetoed by Governor Tony Knowles), she would retain him as chief as long as he agreed to support her. He agreed.

  Two days later she told Stambaugh she was dissolving Wasilla’s Liquor Task Force, a group formed to combat the epidemic of drunken driving in the city. Her bar-owner supporters, such as Ted Anderson, who owned the Mug-Shot, considered the group a nuisance. Sarah agreed: it was just one more example of a quasi-governmental agency inhibiting the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of Americans.

  But when the Frontiersman asked her, on October 23, if she had disbanded the group, she said no. The newspaper then presented her with Stambaugh’s description of the meeting six days earlier. “Confronted with these conflicting stories Wednesday afternoon, Palin dropped the denials she had made earlier in the day,” the newspaper wrote.

  Sarah was furious that Stambaugh had given the press an account of their meeting about the Liquor Task Force that conflicted with her own. In late October she told him that the NRA, which had supported her, did not like him. “They want change,” she said, “and I was elected to bring change.” She also said she’d heard that he and the city librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, were “acting sad and unhappy” at a post-election chamber of commerce meeting and that she did not intend to surround herself with unhappy faces, because unhappiness indicated lack of support.

  “I knew she’d promised the bar owners she’d get rid of me,” Stambaugh told me, “but I was with her at a chamber of commerce breakfast at the Windbreak and she said, ‘I’ve decided not to fire you.’ I said thank you. A couple of days later, in the hallway at city hall, she said the same thing.” Stambaugh trusted these face-to-face assurances. That would turn out to be a mistake.

  Sarah spent November tending to other matters. Having made short work of museum director Cooper, she wanted to get rid of the museum itself.

  THE DOWNTOWN building that housed the museum was built in 1931 as a community hall. For more than thirty years it was home to dances, political meetings, and basketball games. After extensive renovation, it became Wasilla’s first museum in 1967. In 1989 it was renamed the Dorothy Page Museum in memory of the former Wasilla mayor who helped create the 1,161-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome, first run in 1973.

  The museum’s home page states, “It has preserved and shared a growing collection of treasures with the people of Wasilla and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. Today, the Museum continues to educate and inspire through exhibitions, programs and lectures, while preserving an expanding collection representing the most comprehensive assemblage of Wasilla artifacts in the region.”

  To Sarah, this was a bunch of hooey. She’d never been a museum kind of gal. She saw few lessons to be learned from the past. God had created the earth six thousand years earlier and had populated it with mankind and dinosaurs. Mankind had survived, dinosaurs had not. End of story.

  She considered the museum a blight on downtown Wasilla, a rebuke to her values, and an affront to her vision of the future, which seemed to be mostly about better shopping. If she couldn’t demolish it outright, she could do the next best thing: move it away from the center of town. She proposed just that to the city council in early November. The outcry in response was immediate, long, and loud. Linda Beller, a member of the Wasilla Historical Society, later remembered her reaction as “Oh my God, who is this little punk?”

  When she saw she couldn’t surmount the opposition, Sarah retreated, reloading only to the extent of announcing that the museum’s hours would be drastically curtailed and its staff reduced. Her people wanted roads and sewers and commercial development, she said, not museums.

  With Cooper gone and Stambaugh on the ropes, Sarah turned her attention to a third thorn in her side, the city librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons. One of Wasilla’s most respected and popular civil servants, Emmons had been librarian since 1989. Sarah’s distaste for Emmons dated from her second term on city council, when she learned from fellow Assembly of God members that the library had a copy of a book about gay parents, called Daddy’s Roommate, illustrated and written by Michael Willhoite.

  When the book was published in 1990, Publishers Weekly said, “This picture book is an auspicious beginning to the Alyson Wonderland imprint, which focuses on books for and about the children of lesbian and gay parents. [The] text is suitably straightforward, and the format—single lines of copy beneath full-page illustrations—easily accessible to the intended audience (Ages 2–5.) … Willhoite’s cartoony pictures work well here; the colorful characters with their contemporary wardrobes and familiar surroundings lend the tale a stabilizing air of warmth and familiarity.”

  Sarah was outraged that the library had a copy and she told Emmons she wanted it removed. Emmons brought a copy to the next council meeting and suggested that Sarah look at it. Averting her eyes and pushing it away, Sarah said, “I don’t need to read that kind of stuff.”

  Wasilla’s evangelicals already had an ad hoc censorship mechanism in place: They would scour the library shelves looking for materials they considered objectionable. Then they would check the books out, sometimes returning them with pages torn out and other offensive passages blacked out with Magic Marker, and sometimes not returning them at all.

  This informal policing was not good enough for Sarah. Within days of her election, even before assuming office, she told Emmons she expected cooperation in censoring books that some Wasillans found objectio
nable. Emmons said she opposed censorship in any form and would not remove books because of citizen complaints.

  Sarah raised the issue again at the close of a city council meeting on October 28, a few days after she’d requested letters of resignation from all department heads. She said there were books in the library that should not be there. “What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?” Sarah asked. Emmons, who in addition to being Wasilla librarian was president of the Alaska Library Association, said she would refuse.

  “So you would object to my censorship?”

  “Yup,” Emmons replied, “and it wouldn’t be just me. It would be a constitutional question, and the ACLU would probably get involved.”

  “But suppose people were circling the library protesting about a book?”

  “I will fight anyone who tries to dictate what books can go on the library shelves,” Emmons said. “And if people are circling the library in protest, then the ACLU would definitely get involved.”

  For Sarah, the issue was far from hypothetical. Daddy’s Roommate had been bad enough, but that was only a picture book for preschoolers. Now a more dangerous threat lurked: Pastor, I Am Gay by Howard Bess, pastor of the American Baptist Church of the Covenant in Palmer.

  Bess was a leader of the pro-choice movement that had successfully sued to force Valley Medical Center to continue to perform legal abortions. A graduate of Wheaton, the Christian liberal arts college in Illinois, he came to the Valley in the mideighties after his uncompromising support of gay rights wore out his welcome even in Santa Barbara, California.

  Bess was a happily married heterosexual and the father of three grown children, one of whom was head of the graduate school of architecture at Notre Dame. He began to focus on the difficulties of gays in Christian churches in the 1970s, after a member of his Santa Barbara congregation came to him and revealed his anguish as a closeted gay man and a Christian. Bess’s thinking evolved to the point where, in Pastor, I Am Gay, he posited a special position for gays in the Christian hierarchy: “Look back at the life of our Lord Jesus. He was misunderstood, deserted, unjustly accused, and cruelly killed. Yet we all confess that it was the will of God, for by his wounds we are healed … Could it be that the homosexual, obedient to the will of God, might be the church’s modern day healer-messiah?”