Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (7 page)

Volunteers extraordinaire Cathy Fredericks and husband Dave made thousands of campaign buttons in their living room, printing
out sheets of round designs on an ancient inkjet printer; our cost of 19 cents per button compared to $1.20 for those of lieutenant governor candidate Sean Parnell (later our running mate). The buttons bore simple logos like Sarah Gov or simply Sarah, but they got our name out the door and pinned onto coats and shirts. When we could afford to, we purchased a $350 machine and had volunteers stamp out more sophisticated buttons by the thousands. Truly, we were learning that necessity is the mother of invention—or in our case, the mother of low-cost innovation.

In most of the political world, media-buy decisions revolve around whether there is more bang for a million-dollar commercial on CNBC or on Fox News. Or the campaign controller might have to decide between taking out a half-page black-and-white ad in the
New York Times
at a cost of $35,000, and splurging on a full-page color ad for $100,000. But for the Rag Tag Team, when it came to advertising, we agonized over a $362 ad in a local newspaper announcing a campaign event. One insider fired off an email advising,
“That is an expensive ad and perhaps not the best use of our dollars.”
Literally, we were a campaign for which a $100 outlay might require the attention of Sarah, me, and as many as three or four others.

In the midst of all this financial caution, Sarah was keenly aware that her legitimacy as a candidate was, in some measure, dependent on showing the media (and by extension her rivals) that she had the ability to raise money. The amounts we're talking about seem trivial in an era where a Meg Whitman can spend more than $144 million of her own money in California's 2010 gubernatorial election. Our goal? On December 19, Sarah put her request in an email to staff:

We made that $15,000 with a few thousand to spare. Nonetheless, Binkley, the GOP hierarchy's favorite son, swamped us. Money, when
you're not in the party's good graces, is as hard to find as the end of a rainbow.

However, our seat-of-the-pants operation suited us. I believed that the way we operated was how government should run and
would
be run under Sarah Palin: cutting waste and chopping expenses to the bone; fiscal conservatism at its finest. Sell assets, reduce government, and simply do more with less. I didn't know much about government, but I did know that politicians spent a lot more of our hard-earned money than necessary. Sarah and I spoke the same language: Waste not, want not.

4
 

Thrilling Chaos

A
s crucial as funding was, the need for volunteers was equally important. Having people man phones, distribute flyers, and hold banners across a freeway overpass can make or break a candidate in our state.

When a new volunteer came on board, Sarah often personalized a note that might sound corny in most circles, but it played perfectly at this time, in this place. In one such note to Red Secoy, a Mat-Su Valley acquaintance of Sarah's who enthusiastically committed to the cause, she gushed,
“Right on Red! I'm excited about you being on board. You're a hoot . . . and a good worker & good man. Thanks so much!”

All of us cherished each willing body, and with Sarah's charisma, the body count grew rapidly.

Over time, our Rag Tag Team included Sarah's immediate family (especially husband Todd) as well as early arrivals like ever-loyal Ivy Frye (attacked mercilessly by her critics); father figure and decades-long Palin family friend Kerm Ketchum; tech guru Stephen (Stevie) Bailey, my baby brother; gas-line brainiac Bruce Anders, brilliant attorney Jeff Lowenfels, whom Sarah tried to recruit as running mate; my “sister from a different mister” and untitled campaign manager for the general election, Kris Perry; and early campaign spokesperson Curtis Smith.

Others joined our group after Sarah won the governorship, including
sometimes problematic and controversial spokesperson Meg Stapleton (with her pejorative nickname, Stapletongue), attorney Thomas Van Flein (ultimately private council to the Palins), eventual state attorney general Talis Colberg, radio host Eddie Burke (if we needed a story reported, Eddie was our local guy), and conservative radio shock jock Dan Fagan.

One person in particular epitomized what this wave of volunteerism was all about. Marvin Morrisett, a highly decorated veteran, was eighty-six years old during the '06 campaign. Marvin lived with his wife in a beautifully stained wood house in Chugiak, a bedroom community between Anchorage and the Mat-Su Valley. Shortly after he joined us, we noticed a sudden shortage of yard signs. When I caught Marvin on his third trip in and out of the office, loaded up with Palin-Gov posters, I realized he was hauling placards and hardware to his house, assembling the signs, and then walking house to house up and down Eagle River, Chugiak, and nearby Peter's Creek. This octogenarian single-handedly planted over two hundred signs. After that, whenever he showed up with his enthusiastic smile, we did our best to treat him like royalty. Standing eye to eye with me at about five foot seven, he would say, “Don't want to take up your precious time, Frank. I know you are so busy. I just need more signs.” Marvin was always humble and polite, as if I were doing him a service instead of the other way around.

People started calling in, saying, “Eagle River's all red, Frank! You guys are doing an amazing job there!” It was all Marvin. On top of that, when kids stole signs from an entire street, Marvin discovered them in a ditch, cleaned them up, and hammered 'em right back into the ground. His motivation for all this effort? “Sarah's so refreshing, Frank,” he used to say to me. “She's exactly what this state needs.”

While Sarah would gush her thanks in personal emails, when I repeatedly asked her to please pay a quick visit to Marvin, she never did. I didn't understand her unwillingness. My wife and I had the honor of visiting Marvin in his beautiful home filled with pictures of grandchildren and extended family. Sarah missed out on something special.

Sarah was sometimes dismissive of others as well. Bill Arnold,
working alongside two elderly volunteers from the Kenai Peninsula, spent ten hours a day pounding signs, lobbying voters, and doing communications work. In private, the candidate referred to them as the “crazy old men's club” on the peninsula. While that might sound endearing, Sarah's tone was belittling. After election night, Bill Arnold presented Sarah with his lucky fedora, festooned with campaign buttons, and told her to keep it through her reelection in 2010. Rather than being touched by the gesture, Sarah quickly tossed the beloved hat in the trash, explaining to me that it was “icky.” She seemed to have a callous streak and a way of trivializing others' efforts on her behalf. I began to wonder if Sarah didn't view relationships based primarily on what folks could do for her.

However, at the time, I convinced myself that I was merely misreading her intentions. Maybe in Marvin's case, Sarah didn't feel that visiting a single volunteer was the most productive use of her time. If so, she had a lot to learn about time management, as she spent countless hours on details that likely deserved delegation. If a request for bumper stickers came in, Sarah would typically handle it personally.

In yet another time gobbler, Sarah read and responded to hundreds of individual emails. For example, when a woman expressed concern that Sarah was in favor of a ban on bear baiting—luring bears with food, then shooting them as a means of predator control—Sarah replied personally:

Was this efficient? We didn't initially think in those terms. In her first campaign for Wasilla mayor, in 1996, she'd won by just 211 votes: 651 to 440. In even closer races, Mark Begich (now a US senator) won the mayorship of Anchorage by 14 votes in 2003, while the following year, Mike Kelly of Fairbanks won election to the US House of Representatives
by 4 votes. Wasn't this just a bigger Wasilla or Fairbanks campaign, with the results possibly hinging on a handful of votes? If there was a disgruntled voter, like Nahtalie, Sarah either responded directly or had staff do so ASAP on her behalf. Win that voter over, no matter how long it took or how inefficient that strategy would become. Unfortunately for our earliest efforts, this wasn't the Wasilla mayor's race and our candidate needed to woo an entire state, not just a handful of local voters.

By the end of February 2006, the volumes of email and paperwork began to swamp our primitive and inefficient systems. In classic understatement, I wrote to Kris Perry:
“Don't really like the idea of Sarah taking credit card stuff home, as I think she'll make lots of stops and would hate for that to get stolen out of her car.”
My suggestion that we hold contributions and records under lock and key instead of having them pile up in Sarah's backseat seems obvious, yet we went months without a solution.

As for controlling email traffic, Sarah felt overwhelmed. Five months into the campaign, I literally had to teach her how to cut and paste a Word Document, a technique she did not master easily (frequently having a patch-quilt email containing multiple font types and sizes as a result). Accessing email remotely was itself a new skill for Sarah. In February 2006 she asked me how to log on to the campaign email system to read her emails:

In late April '06, Sarah was still typing individual addresses onto emails when sending out policy pieces. In frustration, she wrote me,
“It would be great to have the email addresses so i could cut a paste 'em
on my op-ed submittals to news sources around the state.”
Only then did we get around to building an address book for media contacts so that she did not have to type individual names and addresses on each email.

Our lack of sophistication went well beyond computer efficiency. When a disgruntled voter asked if we had received a contribution from the union group AFSCME, Sarah wrote,
“Does anyone know what union group this guy is talking about in his attached message?”
I certainly didn't, nor did anyone else. In a minipanic—fearing that this might be an organization whose affiliation would tarnish our reputation—we researched and discovered that the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees was not only the largest employee union in Alaska, representing approximately 8,500 state and municipal employees, but also the largest in the United States. And we
had
received a contribution.

How could we not have been aware of this union? Sarah, along with the rest of us, was completely unaware that many of her future employees were members of AFSCME and that they were currently supporting us. There were many things we didn't know, but we'd learn, sometimes the hard way.

In one instance, we hit a financial landmine planted by a public relations firm that Sarah had hired. Given our monetary woes, it was the last thing we needed.