Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (8 page)

Despite the occasional financial hiccup, we believed that there was nothing wrong with inexperience and learning on the job. In June I sent Sarah talking points for her to use if questioned about inexperience:

In sum, we believed that Sarah's common sense trumped factual knowledge and good-ol'-boy experience every dang time.

Despite the chaos of these initial months, we felt a thrill similar to the early days of a marriage, when pennies are pinched amid the promise of everlasting love. I once heard an older, wealthier, and not particularly happy couple say of their earlier life together, “Those were the best times, when we had nothing more than love and great expectations. Passion was enough back then.” That's where we were, in a place where passion seemed enough. Despite everything, Sarah
was
flying high. Her earlier confrontation with Republican Party chairman Rued rich and her stance against Governor Murkowski and his daughter were paying dividends. Big money didn't flow in, but small bites did, as did poll numbers. According to an early 2006 Ivan Moore Research survey, Sarah held a formidable 15-point lead in the three-way Republican primary, with 42 percent of polled voters preferring her over Murkowski (27 percent) and Binkley (16 percent).

We had a simple formula: work hard, trust in God, and stay true to
our principles. And while I'd have appreciated Sarah reprioritizing—especially when it came to the lack of attention she paid to volunteers—it was her feeling overwhelmed that ensured many of us an important role in the campaign. In some ways, her imperfections were perfectly fine with me.

5
 

Dark Clouds

E
ventually, those of us who doted on Sarah became known throughout the blogosphere as “Palin-bots,” and with some truth, I was the first of these. A second term of “respect” for her army of avid fans was “Palin Gremlins,” of whom it was said, “The more she's beat up, the stronger her gremlins come back, and they come back in ever larger numbers.” Nobody in his right mind ever suggested that our prior two governors had corps of “Murkowski-bots” or “Knowles-bots.” The terms applied uniquely to Palin devotees, those seeking her approval even as they were strapped to her personal and professional roller coaster.

And as we Palin-bots built our campaign, we simply overlooked, ignored, or rationalized signs that suggested things weren't as sanguine as we envisioned. Worse for me, behaviors I had previously considered myself incapable of condoning would become acceptable and commonplace. I slipped from passive observer to participant.

While I might suggest this unfortunate morphing began subtly, almost innocently, that's a weak excuse. I should have seen the creeping insanity.

Definitely should have seen, but blindly did not.

One of the things I noticed early on was that Sarah was unable or unwilling to separate her personal life from her political life.

At times, the Palins shared with me and staff moments of humor and love. In one instance, Sarah described oldest son and hockey star Track Palin's concerns over a “goofy” picture of Sarah playing hockey with him on the official Palin for Governor website:

Her subsequent thank-you for taking care of the matter was equally charming:
“Thanks so much for the quick work on deleting the hockey picture! My son says, ‘Sweet . . . thanks.' ”

At other times, the family sacrifices tore me apart. I often felt the kids, in particular, paid a stiff price for Sarah's political single-mindedness. With Todd traveling up to the North Slope for his union job with British Petroleum and Sarah focused intensely on her campaign, the four children were left on their own for large stretches of time. We heard that their school grades suffered. Sarah's concern did not, however—as near as I could tell—translate into hands-on action. She blamed coaches for not alerting her or school administrators for not providing enough resources or not contacting her often enough, but there was never a mention of taking a night off to help with homework or schedule additional parent-teacher conferences.

I recall one day when Bristol phoned from school crying while Sarah sat in my office. Sarah rolled her eyes and held the phone out, as if to say, “You wanna listen to this?” She responded to Bristol in clipped one-word answers meant to quickly wrap up the call. I felt pained for Bristol; whatever was going on, she was obviously upset, and Sarah's indifference made me uncomfortable. Her reaction felt
callous—a new facet of her personality that I hadn't noticed before. Later, in June 2006, as a throw-in line to a light-hearted string of emails, Sarah wrote something that struck me as similarly insensitive:
“Bristol's mad at me. Says this isn't fun. Too bad.”

I sought to rationalize my concerns over the children's welfare by assuming that the older kids were sufficiently mature to manage their days and occasional nights alone, and that Sarah and Todd surely had family members supervising them. The children had, after all, a mother whose moral compass I believed ran true at all times. And Sarah had abilities to juggle priorities in ways I could not possibly fathom. I simply wasn't seeing the whole picture. The Palins knew their children and I didn't. Maybe the way Sarah handled her daughter's earlier call was a tough love moment?

In contrast to these moments, there were times when she felt the mounting toll the campaign was taking on family, as when she wrote an email asking,
“Please pray for the Lord's guidance . . . I know you already are praying. Yikes, the attacks on family are not much fun.”
I understood that any criticism of family hurt, and I did pray: “God, please protect our future governor, take care of her family, and provide Your peace to her endeavors. As imperfect as I am, God, please hear my prayer for Sarah and the future of Alaska.” In moments like this, I came to feel sorry for all of us. I too was sacrificing time with family. That this vibrant woman was willing to dedicate so much for others simply meant that we all needed to do more and try to make up for lost time later, after we won the governor's race.

A month or so into the campaign, Sarah sent an email addressing a family matter that sent my jaw dropping:

When Sarah forwarded this message to a tight group of her inner circle, she added a final note:
“this is total crap that a candidate (me) and their family would have to put up with this garbage.”
Scott Hey-worth, to whom Sarah addressed her first email, was a reliable volunteer with substantial political experience. Whenever asked to, he offered seasoned advice and organizational skill but was not considered part of the inner circle and didn't receive many emails from Sarah. As one of the few, this was a doozy.

My initial response to the message was shock. Maybe 10 percent of me wondered if the assertion was true, but I didn't care. I felt as if I was back in the fifth grade, watching a bully pick on a helpless little girl. This was the very, very first moment where I felt that I needed to protect Sarah. With a knot in my stomach, I said something to her like, “That's junk. Let
us
”—as in, not you—“deal with stuff like that.” Naturally I had no inkling how to possibly deal with this “stuff,” as my repertoire did not yet include retributive strategic thinking.

Despite what most saw as justified anger, if we'd looked more closely and read between the lines, we would have seen Sarah's penchant for inflaming issues that, if left alone, might have disappeared. I knew nothing about this rumor nor did I care anything about it—until she brought me into the discussion, that is. When Sarah demanded to know
“NOW”
who'd said these things, I'd eventually
learn that her desire for names wasn't just idle curiosity—she wanted to know where to set her sights and counterattack.

Another aspect of this extraordinary exchange is that Sarah believed this to be
“DARK, UGLY POLITICS.”
When I spoke later with Heyworth, he observed, “Politics is tough. Sarah needs to be able to hear this crap because you know Binkley and Ruedrich will be coming at her with everything they've got.” I silently agreed with Heyworth. Sarah often spoke of Ronald Reagan's “steely spine,” and, as Heyworth implied, she'd need to find hers, or this would be a hard row to hoe. And did this actually constitute “
DARK, UGLY POLITICS
?” Disgusting, yes, but it seemed more like barroom gossip by ignorant individuals with eighty-proof mouths. Are idiots really worth the hassle? That's hard for me to say, as it wasn't my family, but for Sarah Palin, no slight, whether real or imagined, ever went unpunished.