Driving Home, page 58
Present-day Wasilla is Palin’s lasting monument. It sits in a broad alluvial valley, puddled with lakes, boxed in on three sides by saw-toothed Jurassic mountains, and fringed with woods of spruce and birch. Visitors usually aim their cameras at the town’s natural surroundings, for Wasilla itself—quite unlike its rival and contemporary in the valley, Palmer, eleven miles to the east—is a centerless, sprawling ribbon of deregulated development along a four-lane highway, backed on both sides by subdivisions occupied by trailer homes, cabins, tract housing, and ranch-style bungalows, most built since 1990. It’s a generic western settlement, and one sees Wasillas in every state this side of the hundredth meridian: the same competing gas stations, fast-food outlets, strip malls, and “big box” stores like Walmart, Target, Fred Meyer, and Home Depot, each with a vast parking lot out front on which human figures scuttle with their shopping carts like colored ants, robbed of their proper scale. (It has to be said that Pierre Poujade, champion of the small shopkeeper, would have been outraged by this sight.)
Wasilla is what inevitably happens when there are no codes, no civic oversight, no planning, when the only governing principle in a community is a naive and superstitious trust in the benevolent authority of the free market. Palin’s view of aesthetics was nicely highlighted in 1996, a few months before she ran for mayor, when a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News happened to light on her in an excited crowd of five hundred women queuing up in the Anchorage J. C. Penney to snag the autograph of Ivana Trump, who was in town to hawk her eponymous line of scent.
“We want to see Ivana,” Palin said, who admittedly smells like a salmon for a large part of the summer, “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”
The blot on the Alaskan landscape that is Wasilla is the natural consequence of a mind-set that mistakes Ivana Trump for culture.
Palin’s political gumption was never better exercised than it was five years ago, in a rather intricate sequence of maneuvers that reveals a lot about her. In 2002, toward the end of her term as mayor, she mounted an underfunded run for the office of lieutenant governor and came a close second in the Republican primary. She then attached herself to the gubernatorial campaign of Alaska’s junior U.S. senator, Frank Murkowski, speaking by his side at every possible opportunity. The reason? If Murkowski won the governorship, his Senate seat would be his to award, and Palin had set her heart on going to the District of Columbia. On the trail, she feted him, slathering on the butter and topping it with jam. Murkowski won, the vacancy in the U.S. Senate yawned, and Palin went to Juneau for an interview. After due consideration, the new governor—this being Alaska—decided that the person best qualified for the job was his own daughter, Lisa. He could hardly have delivered a more insulting blow. However, his largesse was not yet exhausted and he gave Palin the consolation prize of a seat on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a part-time job that paid $122,400 a year—good money, but not at all what she was after.
The aggrieved Palin reluctantly accepted. She now had Murkowski in her sights, and he might have been wise to consider the fates of the Wasilla police chief, city attorney, museum director, and others who had dared to cross her in the past. She chaired the Conservation Commission (in Alaska, the word “conservation” means something rather different from what it means elsewhere), on which she was joined by the chairman of the state Republican Party, Randy Ruedrich, a former oil-company manager, and Dan Seamount, a geologist. She kept a watchful eye on Ruedrich, and office gossip came back to her with the news that he was conducting Republican Party business on his state computer, on state time: an ethics violation with which she was intimately familiar, since she’d been caught doing the same thing back in Wasilla, where the mayoral letterhead, fax machine, and e-mail account had been used in her campaign for the lieutenant governorship a few months before.
Palin reported Ruedrich to Murkowski, but the governor, already mired in accusations of incompetence and worse, refused to take her calls. More Nancy Drew–style detective work suggested that Ruedrich was misusing his position as impartial regulator to shill for a coal-bed methane company. One would give a lot to have been a fly on the wall at commission meetings during the summer and early autumn of 2003, as the improbably well-named Mr. Seamount, a leftover from the previous Democratic administration, sat quietly by during the sulphurous confrontations between Ruedrich and Palin, who quickly made public both her complaints against Ruedrich and the governor’s failure to take notice of them. As she told the Anchorage Daily News on November 7, 2003, “It’s distracting, it’s confusing, it’s frustrating. It’s not fair to Alaskans to have these questions about a possible conflict hanging over the head of this agency.” Late the next day, Ruedrich resigned from the commission. Palin herself, forbidden by the governor to discuss the Ruedrich affair with journalists, resigned—to great acclaim in the Alaskan press—in January 2004.
The timing of these moves was immaculate. Murkowski was fast becoming the most unpopular governor on record, and the leaders of the state Republican Party, the “good ol’ boy network,” as Palin calls them now, had already attracted great public odium for their cronyism and underhanded dealings with the oil and gas companies. The FBI was preparing to move in. At the last count, at least fourteen public officials, oil-company executives, and Alaskan politicians (including the state’s senior U.S. senator, Ted Stevens, and its only U.S. congressman, Don Young) are now either on trial, indicted, under federal investigation, or in jail, and it’s probable that there are more charges and more suspects still to come.
After she left the commission, Palin told people that her whistle-blowing had “destroyed her political career”—a calculated disingenuity if ever there was one. But she came closer to the truth when, in an understandably cocky op-ed piece, published in the Daily News in April 2004, she wrote: “Success in the sports arena is essentially the same in the political arena … All I ever really needed to know I learned on the basketball court.” Following Murkowski’s appointment of his daughter to the Senate, Palin had taken possession of the ball, dribbled it brilliantly through the ranks of her slower-witted opponents, leaped for the hoop, and scored a clean slam dunk.
Alaskan journalists fawned on her. At a low point in the state’s political history, especially for Republicans, Palin had bravely stood up against the leaders of her own party and exposed corruption. She’d taken on the governor, the party chairman, and the oil companies, and unselfishly sacrificed her hopes of advancement in the process. At that time, it would have been unseasonable to suggest that simple jealousy and opportunism might have played as large a part in her actions as moral principle, and the Daily News bestowed on her the ultimate newspaper accolade when it used her first name only in a headline on the front page of its B section: “What Would Sarah Do? We’ll See Come the Next Big Election.” Eight years before, in her first appearance in the paper, she’d been a fishy-smelling nonentity in the crowd of fame-suckers at J. C. Penney; now she was a beloved statewide mascot.
It was as a mascot (“New Energy for Alaska!”) that she ran in the 2006 gubernatorial election, humiliating Murkowski in the primary and comfortably beating Tony Knowles, a former governor and the Democratic candidate, in November. When she took the oath of office in—appropriately—the Carlson Center sports arena in Fairbanks, the crowd of six thousand broke into a deafening chant of “Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!” and had to be silenced before the ceremony could go on.
Then she went back to Juneau and started sacking state officials, from the attorney general down, so she could replace them with malleable old friends from her church and Wasilla High.
Alaska is unique among the states in that every permanent resident without a felony conviction is entitled to a share in the proceeds from its oil and gas resources. Each autumn, eligible Alaskans receive payments based on the interest accrued by the state’s Permanent Fund during the previous year. In 2007, Palin again “stood up to Big Oil” when she successfully forced a bill through the legislature which raised the tax on oil companies’ net profits from 22.5 to 25 percent, ensuring a gush of money into the Permanent Fund and a hike in the size of checks sent out to the citizenry. The move was strongly resisted by the Republican establishment, always averse to taxing “windfall profits” and zealous in the defense of its cronies and contributors in the oil industry, but it was wildly popular among ordinary Alaskans, bred to expect handouts, whether from the federal or the state government. That year, Palin announced the biggest payment in six years, $1,654, with a whoop of “Oh, baby!” Late this summer, with oil prices still at around $125 a barrel, she was able to trump that number with an all-time record of $2,069, plus a further onetime payment of $1,200 to help Alaskans deal with the spiraling price of gasoline and heating fuel. For a hard-pressed family of four, that translated into $13,076—a jackpot figure, equivalent to forty-five weeks of pay at the Alaskan minimum wage rate of $7.15 an hour, enough to pay cash for a new Ford Focus or put down the deposit on a pretty nice house. (The federal poverty line for a four-person family is just over $20,000.)
It’s no wonder that Palin’s approval rating stands at more than 80 percent in her home state: populist leaders are rarely able to reward their constituents with lavish contributions to their personal bank accounts, and there’s nothing like money for making people feel generously bipartisan. (Imagine how the polls might change if every family in Britain received a check for a little over £7,000, personally signed, as it were, by Gordon Brown.) The Evita-like adulation that “Sarah” was gaining in Alaska began to spread as a rumor through the nation in February, when she was first tipped as a possible running mate for McCain, with Rush Limbaugh, the far-right radio rabble-rouser, as her noisiest fan. Her reputation for levying taxes on big business in order to fill the pockets of the common man—Alaska’s own Robin Hood—struck a profound chord in the hearts of the “dittoheads,” as Limbaugh’s faithful sheep describe themselves, and when McCain eventually nominated Palin, Limbaugh took to calling him John McBrilliant, having previously abused him as a traitor to the Republican cause.
Before Palin, McCain was lucky to draw a crowd of a few hundred; with Palin, he has been rallying Obama-sized turnouts of many thousands. Liberals have tried to comfort themselves by putting this down to her novelty value, a quality they hope will pass its expiration date well before the November election, and by dismissing her as another Dan “Potatoe” Quayle or Admiral “Who am I? What am I doing here?” Stockdale, two of the last century’s most memorably inept vice-presidential choices. Many hope that the present financial crisis will so deepen and darken that McCain’s cavalier attitude toward economics (“Not something I’ve understood as well as I should”) and Palin’s seeming total ignorance of the subject will scare American voters into electing Obama. They expect reason to prevail and disenchantment to set in as Palin’s many contradictions and untruths are exposed in the press and on TV. They believe that her views on abortion are alienating all but fervently Evangelical and Catholic women. The line to spin over the dinner table is that “she only energizes the base.”
But as politicians of both parties in Alaska have discovered, underestimating Palin nearly always turns out to be a fatal error. When on form, she has the ability to connect with that surly mass of occasional, floating voters who feel themselves to have been disenfranchised by more orthodox politicians, and who respond to her as a paragon of domestic good sense and decency in a world rendered ever more incomprehensible by the dark arts of the elites.
She belongs to no elite. After drifting through five colleges in six years, she eventually secured a degree in journalism at the University of Idaho, less Ivy than Sagebrush League. She could hardly have had a higher education less offensive to the Limbaughites. As Obama stands tarred in their eyes by his Columbia and Harvard connections, so Palin represents the healthy values of the church and the outdoors against those of the deeply suspect East Coast universities.
Importantly, she’s unimpressed by “science,” whether it’s the science of evolution, anthropogenic climate change, or the Endangered Species Act. In a period of stagnant wages and rising unemployment, science has been vilified as the enemy of working-class jobs in such industries as mining, timber, agriculture, and construction. It is also—especially in the phrase “best available science”—very widely seen as the cause of unpardonable infringements of individual property rights. When, for instance, Palin contentiously advocates drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she both promises well-paid jobs and champions the precious American liberty to do what the hell you like in your own backyard. Likewise, her fight against listing the polar bear as an endangered species even as the sea ice melts under its feet—which has entailed blandly denying the findings of her own state scientists—sits well with a large, disgruntled rural sector of the population which has seen jobs lost, mills closed, and property devalued in order to protect such critters as the northern spotted owl and the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly. The director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance says that her motto is “cut, kill, dig, and drill” and that she lives “in the Stone Age of wildlife management, and is very opposed to utilizing accepted science.” For many voters, that’s ample reason to see her as a folk hero.
She has nicely positioned herself for national consumption as the enemy of the effete and oversophisticated cities; a “gal,” as she says, from the remote provinces, untainted by the stain of the urban. In her convention speech, she managed to paint Wasilla as if it were the idealized small town of sentimental memory, complete with the drugstore soda fountain, barbershop striped pole, sociable Main Street, and rosy-cheeked postmistress. “Long ago,” she said, comparing her own rise with that of the thirty-third president,
a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri, he followed an unlikely path—he followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency. And a writer [Westbrook Pegler, the McCarthyite newspaper columnist] observed, “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,” and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I grew up with those people. They’re the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.
By implication, then, big city people are unpatriotic (Palin’s last phrase was a sneer at Michelle Obama, a lifelong Chicagoan); they are insincere slackers and draft dodgers—in a word, liberals. The passage reminded Republicans of their party demographics, their strength in the exurbs, and prepared the ground for an assault on the metropolitan manners and mores of their Democratic opponents, in a depressingly effective piece of hokum.
In Alaska, she has deployed her end-times fundamentalist beliefs with considerable adroitness, nimbly walking the tightrope between pleasing the church crowd and reassuring her secular constituency of her essential moderation. She appears to have learned from her early experience in Wasilla, when, pressed by her backers in the Assembly of God, she suggested to the librarian that such “unsuitable” books as Daddy’s Roommate and Pastor, I Am Gay be removed from the library, only to backtrack later with the claim that she was merely asking a “rhetorical” (she meant hypothetical) question. Since then, as governor, she’s handled such issues with impressive wiliness. When the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that gay partners of state employees must receive the same benefits as heterosexual spouses, the legislature passed a bill to block the payments. Palin made clear her sympathy with the bill’s intent, but refused to sign it on the grounds that to do so would be to “violate my oath of office.” Similarly, she endeared herself to Evangelicals during her gubernatorial campaign by saying that “intelligent design” should be taught alongside evolution in the state’s public schools. “Teach both,” she said, but then declined to back a bill which would have made that mandatory. Playing politics by the rules of basketball, improvising her moves according to the requirements of the moment, she is too opportunistic (some say pragmatic) to be an ideologue. While she likes to trumpet her narrow theology, with its stress on Calvinist predestination and the imminence of the Rapture (the Iraq war is “a task that is from God”), she simultaneously manages to embody her state’s peculiar brand of live-and-let-live libertarianism.
The unfolding details of “Troopergate” will probably not seriously damage her, because the nation seems to have decided that her ex-brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, is a low-life skunk (“He tasered the kid”) who deserved everything he got. Her various family troubles, including Wooten and her pregnant teenage daughter, help to underscore her authenticity as the people’s candidate; and so do such peccadillos as charging the state $60 per diem for living in her own house in Wasilla. Some politicians have the invaluable knack of reminding their constituents of their own easily forgivable improbities, and Palin appears to be one of them. Proven hypocrisy is another matter, but though her time as mayor and governor has been studded with incidents of bullying, meanness, and an unseemly thirst for personal revenge, no one has called her a hypocrite, so far as I can tell.
The most likely cause of her undoing will—strangely—be the McCain campaign. In St. Paul, unveiled as the goose who could lay for the Republicans the golden egg of the presidency, she brimmed with the inflated self-assurance of the small-world conqueror, and held a national audience in the palm of her hand as she recited the same confident platitudes that served her so well in Alaska. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and McCain and his advisers should have left well enough alone and let “Sarah” be her vote-winning self. Instead, they seem to be no less alarmed by her than liberals are, and have taken to force-feeding her, stuffing her gullet with “talking points” on foreign and domestic policy. Under their frantic tuition, Palin has recently looked less likely to lay the golden egg than to produce inferior goose-liver pâté.
