Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (6 page)

Late that afternoon, with my brand-new Levi's 501s speckled with paint, we wound down. While they were ruined, I never did toss those jeans; they remain a reminder of the best of our days together, the beginning of what Sarah would come to fondly call her “Rag Tag Team”—especially when she grew disappointed with the performance
of her so-called political professionals, as was often the case. The name, an immediate source of pride, stuck.

I'd return to this office and a second midtown office we opened in August 2006 regularly for the duration of the campaign, watching it fill with campaign detritus such as posters, bumper stickers, and Palin-Gov buttons, along with a growing army of volunteers and supporters. My initial job was to coordinate many of the early personalities through the upcoming campaign—when not responding to daily requests from Sarah for computer tutoring (
“Frank. I'm totally numb to the real world of computer technology. Glad you and Stevie know the language!”
) or dishing out the positive reinforcement she needed to sustain focus (
“Sarah. You are real and that's why everyone loves you”
). Within a few weeks, the sound of voices pitching ideas for an all-Alaska gas pipeline, spending cuts, and the elimination of waste, fraud, and “same ol', same ol' ” filled the rooms seven days a week. Nurturing emotions, soothing egos, and assigning wildly divergent personalities to daily tasks consumed my life as the campaign and Sarah's prospects grew from that first day forward.

By the time we closed the office in November 2006—just after our successful gubernatorial election—it had become as unrecognizable as the woman whose career it launched as well as those of us who marched in lock step alongside her.

Definitely different, but would it be better?

3
 

An Honestly Cheap Campaign

O
nly a few weeks after my volunteer debut, the campaign for the Palin GOP nomination was under way, and I was right in the thick of it.

“Frank, can you answer this guy's question about picking up campaign signs?” I'd answer that question, and the next one would be, “How do we send out this campaign message to everyone who's submitted an email address?”

Before addressing that issue, Sarah might say, “This is flippin' confusing. I just wrote a letter in Word, and now it's disappeared. Frank, where'd it go?”

For all the chaos, this was more nonfamily fun than I'd ever had.

While our message to the voters was simple and did not yet include major policy directives, Sarah's business-
unusual
tone, Reagan populism, and unwavering ethics resonated. Sarah didn't need to understand how to cut and paste in Word or how to save a document. When she spoke of God, home, family, “real Alaskans,” change, less government, and more accountability and transparency, she believed what she said, and so did we. Hope and ideology guided and motivated us—so much that I threw myself into this with every molecule
of my being. Nothing seemed half as important as the outcome of the next election.

By this time, I was commuting to the Anchorage headquarters on a full-time basis and assumed the duties of an office manager, a job that included setting up phone systems (initially cordless, then refurbished cell phones), a groaning first-generation fax machine (a loaner we called Smoky Joe because it literally did just that, smoke), secondhand computers, and discount laptops while also coordinating a growing legion of volunteers.

At both ends of the day, extending my hours to as many as twelve, I also fielded emails. As such, I soon discovered that for Sarah, not all advice was welcome. One concerned supporter wrote:
“Sarah, I am a Teamster, a family man, a Christian and I am angry. . . . Your name is not out there. If I were wealthy I would give you what you needed, but alas I am not. Fifty dollars is my commitment. I think you WILL bring honesty back to Alaska.”
Sarah snapped,
“Man, I get annoyed with messages like this one.”
Any criticism, in this case tiny and wrapped in support, did not sit well with her.

More than anything, issue number one in getting Sarah elected was money—or more precisely, the lack thereof, especially when compared to our GOP rivals: former state senator John Binkley and Governor Murkowski. In Binkley's July 24 filing with the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC)—the state agency charged with enforcing all campaign finance laws—he reported spending $794,000, with many of his 1,100 donors coming from his hometown of Fairbanks. He also tossed in $379,000 of his own money over a six-month period. Murkowski's 438 donors contributed $260,000, of which $50,000 was his own. Not surprisingly, most state department commissioners—many of them appointed by Murkowski—contributed the maximum $1,000, as did oil industry executives from VECO Corporation and Udelhoven Oilfield System Services. In contrast, Sarah's 1,200 contributors managed to raise $194,000, of which only $1,500 came from Palin bank accounts. The vast majority of our contributors gave less than $250, with many below $50. By typical election standards, we were scrapping for funds, and so I became preoccupied with making a loaf of bread and a fish or two feed the hungry masses of a gubernatorial
campaign. A financial number that might look small to the rest of the political world represented a fortune to us.

One of the first strategic goals was to create a sea of yard and building signs with Palin for Governor in white letters set against a blood-red background. In Alaska, these low-tech anachronisms mean something to voters in the same way they did in 1952, when the slogan I Like Ike appeared across the nation and helped elect Dwight D. Eisenhower president. And just as General Ike's name meant something important to his generation, to us the name Sarah Palin symbolized fearlessness in the face of huge corporate interests.

During each Alaskan election cycle, armies of volunteers with hammers pound signs into the ground—or on trees, if the ground is frozen. Each camp battles for prime location. The visuals along well-traveled roads, on lawns, and in the parking lots of local businesses, serve as indicators of public sentiment. Local businesses often display a favorite's sign. I even had a barge owner ask if we had a sign seventy feet long: he wanted to hang the biggest banner in Alaskan history from his vessel anchored off the Port of Anchorage in Cook Inlet. I laughed and told him we did not. He pledged to make one out of tarps and canvas. We needed these kinds of believers to offer up a window or a rooftop (or a boat) and join sides with our underdog upstart.

We knew the importance of primacy and wanted to be first in the race to generate and distribute pins, buttons, bumper stickers, wrist-bands, logoed Frisbees, and those glorious signs. Sarah felt this urgency acutely and wanted to get her signs out before the opposition got its out.

Her goal was to see
“a sweet splash of red all over the areas. . . . Rural AK needs them sooner rather than later.”
Somehow we'd figure a way to impress upon the state's seven hundred thousand residents this message:
A vote for Palin is a vote for change
. Conservatives, ironically, later compared our hero to Barack Obama: they both sailed the winds of change, just tacking in different directions.

The first batch of Palin signs arrived just prior to Christmas 2005, and that delivery of fifty small yard signs and four four-by-eight-foot signs confirmed for us that, wow, this was really official now! The freshly minted signs had a just-off-the-press smell that I associated
with our growing confidence, and a few were so new that the damp ink smudged (providing an excuse to haggle for additional signs at a reduced price). These early posters were plain with few variations. Later we added a photo of Sarah and the motto Take a Stand. The one thing that never varied was that signature shade of red—the same color that Sarah's high school girls' basketball team wore in 1982, the year that its star point guard, nicknamed Sarah Barracuda, led the Wasilla Warriors to a state championship. Eventually we constructed over 6,800 yard signs, a huge number by Alaskan standards. It made our rivals' signs look like random weeds in a countryside of red flowers.

As for the cost of distributing our handiwork, especially to remote rural communities, we had a plan for that too, as I shared with Sarah in an email:
“Love the idea of having people carry signs out when they go. Kerm is working on lightweight-sturdy packing to accommodate that.”

Sarah endorsed the human mule concept wholeheartedly:
“In fact people can transport them for free as carry ons or luggage when they travel to their communities.”

Strategic sign placement, we learned, was as important as volume. We targeted the properties along the most traveled roads. Each prime spot we found became a cause for celebration. In one instance, when we secured a spot on the Palmer Flats—a wide-open area that is the only north-south route between Anchorage and the scenic Mat-Su Valley, which includes Sarah's Wasilla—we took that as a coup. Since billboards are outlawed in Alaska, there was nothing to obstruct the view for the thousands of weekday commuters who zipped along Glenn Highway. Palin supporter and valley resident Don Benson, who owned a parcel of land on the inlet side of the highway, built a large riser and mounted one of our impressive four-by-eights surrounded by American flags and ribbons. Sarah, unable to contain her enthusiasm, wrote,
“Whoo Hoo!!! This is awesome!!! I saw it tonight on my way into town. It's the sweetest spot in the entire state of Alaska.”

Later, when future radio host Eddie Burke secured a building owner willing to hang a large sign, Sarah had a similar outburst:
“Oh baby—yeah!!! We'll owe Eddie for this one.”
If Sarah's
Whoo-hoo's
and
Oh baby's
made it sound as if we were easy to please, we were.

The larger signs cost $40 each, while the yard signs ran us around
$8. In the volume we desired—thousands—this represented a staggering sum. Saving money to buy these visuals meant soliciting donations of desks and chairs and shopping in thrift shops. We researched at length matters that were budgetary trifles for our opponents, such as calling around town to price out a four-drawer locking file cabinet that could be bolted to the floor. Of course, I'd do the bolting myself for free. In the meantime, Sarah noted,
“I'm looking around for a table or whatever . . . we can't purchase any furniture so we have to scrounge around for desk, table etc.”
We became great fans of Craigslist and the giveaway cyber-community known as the Freecycle Network. Since I lived much of my life on tight budgets, Sarah learned that if she wanted to run a campaign on the cheap, I was her guy.

For example, I devised a double-up scheme to cut down on parking costs in the Fifth Avenue Mall garage:
“For the garage behind us we can get a $54/mo rate per vehicle . . . if 2 people coordinated, one person could park, then exit, THEN somehow drop the card back in the office for the next person to use later that day.”

Sarah added this partial solution:
“And remember I have quarters for you now in the office—for those stinkin' parking meters.”

Not to belabor the point, but when I say we were not above collecting coins from sofa cushions, I am not exaggerating. I sent the following e-blast to our volunteers: