Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (43 page)

“Going to be revealed pretty soon anyway”? “It is what it is”? Instead of having to live with a few thousand Alaskans knowing about her mistake, this sweet, sensitive girl was about to become the most recognized unwed mother in modern history, her life unfolding before at least five hundred million people worldwide.

As for failing to do their homework, that's not to say Culvahouse and senior advisor Schmidt did no due diligence. After the failed presidential campaign, when Sarah was complaining about being charged by the GOP for her own vetting costs, we learned that the vetting process hadn't actually begun in earnest until August 31, 2008—three days
after
the nomination. (And it was “coincidentally” the very next day Sarah and the campaign announced Bristol's pregnancy.) McCain and his campaign—by claiming in public that she was fully vetted—pulled a page from our playbook, apparently issuing misleading half-truths to hide their ineptitude. Vetted? Yes. Vetted in an intelligent and timely manner? No.

In simple terms, the woman who nearly became the second-most-powerful person in our country was chosen on a whim. Sarah didn't like McCain much during the primaries, believing that he was “weird” and “wishy-washy.” Regarding her choice as his running mate, she might have added “imprudently impulsive.” In their lack of planning
and attention to detail, it seemed that Sarah and McCain shared reckless madness and little else.

Sarah spent the first few days as the vice presidential nominee much as Chuck Kopp had as the commissioner of the Alaska Department of Public Safety: battling controversy. Naturally, Bristol's pregnancy was major. There was a silver lining to that cloud, unbelievably, in that it put to rest once and for all the notion that four-month-old Trig Palin was Bristol's child, and Sarah had faked a pregnancy to hide the fact. I knew the original rumors to be idiotic, as my family had gone for a weekend in the middle of March to the Palins' cabin at Safari Lake, after Sarah made her own announcement. Todd restricted Sarah's physical activity, and in one e-mail reminding her that
“your in no shape to ride a snow-maching.”
Later, Neen and I witnessed Todd sweetly describing “Sarah's glow and grow,” referencing the joy and girth of her being pregnant. And while the original false-pregnancy suggestion bothered Sarah, she resisted releasing medical records that would have quashed the story, so this new, shocking revelation of Bristol's would have to suffice.

The next first-week tempest was the suggestion that Sarah had been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), whose mission was to force a vote on Alaska's secession from the United States. On September 2, four days after McCain's announcement and one day after announcing Bristol's pregnancy, Sarah emailed me:
“Frank! Being accused of having been a member of Indp Party in the 90's. Not true but gotta prve it. Got voter reg lists? Talk to eddie burke
[
then proud fellow Palin-bot, whom after years of being used finally admitted he was merely “trash along the road, Frank, just trash along the road”
]
who'd know this? Very important!!!”
It turned out that while Sarah hadn't been a member, Todd had been
for seven years
until Sarah made her first bid for statewide office in 2002. To make matters a bit stickier, Sarah, while governor, taped a welcoming address for the AIP's 2008 convention. Eventually Sarah demanded that the McCain campaign address the issue and back up her claim that Todd had simply made a mistake when he checked the AIP box on his voter registration form. But McCain's people refused. Schmidt, in a scathing rebuke, wrote, “The
statement you are suggesting be released would be inaccurate. The inaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction.” To address the issue would, he suggested, take a political pimple and turn it into an infected wound. This was a matter that, left alone, would die under its own inconsequentiality. “Just tell whoever asks that Todd loves his country.” Sarah didn't care that Schmidt was correct in his assessment. She was furious then and likely remains furious to this day.

Unfortunately, other matters did not die their own unimportant deaths. As if she were wandering around in a fog as thick as a damp rag, Sarah kept blindly running into the wall that was Troopergate. Her one-sentence explanation to Culvahouse may have been sufficient to land the nomination, but as chow for a hungry press, it wasn't going to satisfy. “I'm cooperating fully” and “there never was a connection to Trooper Wooten” became push-button responses. Not long after, however, through her lawyers, Sarah refused to cooperate with Branch-flower. And Todd, along with a number of others, including Ivy Frye and Kris Perry, refused to comply with subpoenas issued by the state legislature after receiving questionable legal advice (that eventually led to formal legislative censure). On the side, she schooled all of us,
“Gotta change the term ‘Troopergate' to ‘Tasergate.' ”

In that regard, I notified Sarah that radio champion Eddie Burke
“ends his radio show every day by saying, ‘hug your kids, don't taze 'em!' ”
And I further won favor when I suggested,
“Also need to get Hannity a few more details on Wooten . . . Heard him talking about Wooten today saying, ‘well he might have changed his ways but he tazed the Governor's newphew.' ”

Unfortunately, not every news outlet had the “objectivity” of Fox News, and Sarah's denials did little to abate what would dog her throughout the McCain-Palin campaign as others piled on. Almost immediately, comic actress Tina Fey began a brutal parody of Sarah on
Saturday Night Live
. Sarah, in an unusual reaction to critics, actually endorsed the idea of appearing on
SNL
and wrote to us,
“I go on SNL and play Tina Fey, I interview her as she plays me. (The questions we'd ask ‘me' could reflect the ridiculousness of media's irrelevance.)”
While the satire was biting, Tina Fey's portrayal seemed not to have
any negative effect on Republican voters. What was more searing were the sound bites Sarah supplied by way of her painfully botched interviews with Charles Gibson of ABC and, especially, with Katie Couric of CBS. When Gibson asked her about the Bush doctrine, she blankly stared at the television camera. Now, probably 90 percent of the country wouldn't have known exactly what that meant, but Sarah's lost, fumbling look was at least as harmful as her knowledge gap. Then, when she said of Russia and her foreign affairs expertise, “They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska,” Tina Fey turned that into the infamous line, “I can see Russia from my house!” At least in the ABC interview, some loyalists found a way to put a happy face on the experience. Conservative commentator Phyllis Schlafly emailed,
“Please tell Sarah that her interview with ABC was a fabulous success.”

Worse than Gibson's grilling, during the Katie Couric interview, the following exchange proved humiliating to all of us:

Steve Schmidt, McCain's senior campaign strategist, later said of the interview and Sarah's failure to identify a single source of reading
material, “I think it was the most consequential interview from a negative perspective that a candidate for national office has gone through.” Why did Sarah not name anything, when we knew she spent a fair amount of time reading? The answer boils down to image management. Sarah's media diet came exclusively from local sources, including the
Alaska Journal of Commerce, Alaska Business Monthly
, and the
Anchorage Daily News
. In addition, various administrative assistants put together a compilation of stories from major Alaskan news sites each morning. This document, referred to as “Daily Clips,” ran in excess of thirty pages, and Sarah digested those capsulated reports by eight o'clock each morning. To suggest she didn't read is wrong. However, in her mind, admitting to this regional-only emphasis would have made her appear less interested in national and international events—which
was
absolutely the case. Instead of honesty, she panicked and, once again, made matters infinitely worse.

As I sat and watched this salt-in-the-wound interview, I raised my eyes and asked the ceiling, “Why can't she just tell the truth?” It's not as if she had to admit she spent nearly as much time reading negative bloggers as she did substantive news. Her interest in Alaskan affairs was totally appropriate for a governor. Instead she searched vainly for an answer that would cast an intellectual glow and wound up coming across as empty headed.

Naturally, the blame for this debacle fell not on Sarah but on the “Gotcha!” nature of the media, with Katie Couric allegedly being the biggest trap setter. The wound still festered in May, 2009 when Couric made a joke at Sarah's expense while speaking at Princeton University. CNN contacted the governor's spokesperson in an email and asked for a response to Couric saying, “Coming here was a real no-brainer! After all, I can see New Jersey from my house!”

Todd responded on Sarah's behalf by emailing,
“She's
[
Couric
]
another dead fish that is going with the flow.”

In June 2009, nearly a year after the dreadful interview, Sarah emailed her staff of Couric,
“She SUCKED in ratings before she stumbled upon her little gig mocking me . . . She did Almost lose her job before that VP interview.”
Confirming that Sarah held grudges in perpetuity (despite repeated denials), while on Sean Hannity's show, she was
asked if she'd ever do another interview with Katie Couric. Sarah replied, “As for doing an interview, though, with a reporter who already has such a bias against whatever it is that I would come out and say? Why waste my time? No.”

Officially, Couric's name was added indelibly to the enemies list.

Numerous lesser distractions crept in as well. Spokesman Bill McAllister sent a daily list in mid-September that included
“sundry questions
” such as did she believe dinosaurs and humans coexisted at one time. He was also being asked about her policy regarding forensic rape kits, and did Wasilla, while she was mayor, charge victims for these? The media, in light of Sarah's claim that she had military command experience as head of the Alaska National Guard, wanted to know how she shared decision making with the adjutant general of Alaska, Craig Campbell. Sarah's reaction to all of these queries was a frustrating reply:
“Dinosaurs even?! . . . I . . . continue to be dismayed at the media.”

The governor's tanning bed and who paid for it got play. Silly though it was, Sarah became furious:
“the old, used tanning bed that my girls have used a handful of time in Juneau? Yes, we paid for it ourselves.”
In what seemed to happen often, Sarah displayed a tin ear for cause and effect when, only a few months before installing this unusual item, she declared May
as Skin Cancer Awareness Month
in Alaska. In part, the press release read (emphasis mine), “Skin cancer is caused, overwhelmingly, by over-exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun and
from tanning beds
.” Sarah's anger only grew as blogs wrote, “What's the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom? Answer: A tanning bed.”