Sarah Palin and family

[doug]

Sarah Palin’s daughter gives birth to son
The 7-pound, 4-ounce baby was born Sunday and is named Tripp

Levi Johnston, left, is seen Sept. 3 with his girlfriend Bristol Palin, daughter of then Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.
The Associated Press
ANCHORAGE - The teenage daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has given birth to a son, People magazine reported Monday.

Bristol Palin, 18, gave birth to Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston on Sunday, the magazine said. He weighed 7 pounds, 4 ounces. Colleen Jones, the sister of Bristol's grandmother, told the magazine that "the baby is fine and Bristol is doing well."

The governor's office said it would not release information because it considers the baby's birth a private family matter.

The father is Levi Johnston, a former hockey player at Alaska's Wasilla High School.

Palin announced on Sept. 1, the first day of the Republican National Convention, that her unwed daughter was pregnant. The campaign issued a statement saying Bristol "and the young man" would get married.

Levi Johnston's mother eventually disclosed that her 18-year-old son was the father. The following week, the young man attended the convention in St. Paul, Minn. when Palin accepted the nomination as John McCain's running mate.

The announcement that Bristol, 17 at the time, was pregnant immediately drew concerns that it could damage Palin's credibility as a religious conservative. It also foreshadowed a troubled campaign for Palin, who drew large crowds at rallies but was criticized for her composure in news interviews and for her experience level.

Summer wedding?

Sherry Johnston, Levi's mother, said in October that Bristol and her son were considering a summer wedding.

Levi Johnston told The Associated Press that month that he and Bristol loved each other and wanted to get married. Johnston, who dropped out of high school to take a job on the North Slope oil fields as an apprentice electrician, said he was a little shocked to learn that Bristol was pregnant but quickly warmed to the idea of being a father.

He said the two had planned to get married even before Bristol became pregnant.

Johnston, an avid hunter, hinted at the time that they were expecting a boy. He said he was already looking forward to taking the boy hunting and fishing.

Johnston's mother was arrested on felony drug charges this month after state troopers served a search warrant at her Wasilla home. According to authorities, she sent text messages to two police informants in which she discusses making drug transactions involving OxyContin, a strong prescription painkiller.

Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, have five children ranging in age from Trig, 7 months, to Track, 19. In between are Willow, 14; Piper, 7; and Bristol.

© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[doug]

Back in Alaska, Palin finds cold comfort
Scrutiny has been so intense since election that she’s ‘feeling beaten up’

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is reportedly "feeling beaten up" since returning to her duties in Juneau, including this news conference on Feb. 11.
By Michael Leahy
The Washington Post
JUNEAU, Alaska - A couple of weeks before the Alaska legislature began this year's session, a bipartisan group of state senators on a retreat a few hours from here invited Gov. Sarah Palin to join them. Accompanied by a retinue of advisers, she took a seat at one end of a conference table and listened passively as Gary Stevens, the president of the Alaska Senate, a former college history professor and a low-key Republican with a reputation for congeniality, expressed delight at her presence.

Would the governor, a smiling Stevens asked, like to share some of her plans and proposals for the coming legislative session?

Palin looked around the room and paused, according to several senators present. "I feel like you guys are always trying to put me on the spot," she said finally, as the room became silent.

Gone was the self-assurance that Alaska had come to know in its young Republican governor, well before her life and career were transformed by Sen. John McCain's selection of her as his vice presidential running mate. "She looked ill at ease, more defensive than we've been accustomed to seeing her," said one legislator who was there and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he said he might need to work with Palin.

A number of factors seem to have contributed to the bumpy homecoming: a residual anger among Democrats for the attack-dog role Palin assumed in the McCain campaign, lingering resentment from Republicans for the part she may have played in McCain's defeat, and a suspicion crossing party lines that the concerns of Alaska, at a time of economic crisis, will now be secondary to her future in national politics.

'Feeling beaten up'

Nearly every move that Palin makes or does not make, acknowledges Joe Balash, one of her closest aides, is analyzed through a new political prism, scrutinized for its effect on a possible 2012 presidential candidacy. "There's nothing we can do to stop it," he said. "People wonder why she's doing something or not doing something."

The result of all this scrutiny and second-guessing, says one Republican ally, is that "the governor has been feeling beaten up."

The lists of her doings and not doings include a growing leeriness of the media -- she declined requests for an interview for this article -- as she pursues an aggressive strategy on the national political front.

She has established a political action committee, SarahPAC, designed to fund her national appearances. She sat for a lengthy interview with a conservative documentarian exploring the reasons behind President Obama's election, during which she reiterated her belief that she was unflatteringly exploited by such TV personages as Katie Couric and Tina Fey, and suggested she was mishandled by the McCain campaign.

She has taken sides in a war for the soul of the newly beleaguered Republican Party in Texas, where that state's senior GOP senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, plans to challenge Republican Gov. Rick Perry in a primary fight that may serve as an early indicator of social conservatives' strength in the GOP nationally. In a written statement, Palin said Perry "walks the walk of a true conservative. And he sticks by his guns -- and you know how I feel about guns."

Constantly asked about Palin's future, Balash says that she has no timetable for making up her mind about 2012 and that she hasn't even told him whether she'll run for reelection in 2010.


While her once sky-high job approval ratings in her home state have dropped a little, Palin is still liked by more than 60 percent of the Alaskan electorate, the sort of number that most politicians can only dream about. Still, the anonymous sniping that portrayed her during the campaign as a flighty and demanding running mate continues to resonate with some legislators. Among both Republicans and Democrats, the view persists that she and those closest to her have overstepped their authority on occasion.

Most recently, her appointed state attorney general, Talis Colberg, attempted to block subpoenas issued by the legislature to Palin administration officials during an investigation of "Troopergate" -- an inquiry into a string of events that began with Palin's effort to have her sister's ex-husband dismissed from his job as a state trooper. Colberg's moves culminated with his resignation last week.

Some of the resentments that have surfaced in Alaska are the same ones confronting her elsewhere, problems born of a campaign that saw her set aside the mantle of a pragmatic, bipartisan-minded reformer in favor of serving as a loyal partisan who aggressively trumpeted the Republican Party's differences with Obama.

A pragmatist no more?

Early in her term, her staunchest allies on state ethics reform and pivotal energy issues included several liberal Democrats. Alaska's current House Democratic leader, Beth Kerttula, joined Palin in successfully arguing for the adoption of a controversial oil tax increase that the industry resisted. "She was . . . completely a pragmatist," Kerttula recalls. "She knew she had to work with Democrats."

Now, two abortion-related bills that Palin had made little effort to promote have been reintroduced, and another Republican legislator has pushed for the state's adoption of a death penalty, something last seen in Alaska during its territorial days. Palin has voiced support for all three bills, but there have been no signs yet of any hard push from the governor's office.

Some Alaska Democrats and Republicans wonder whether Palin, given her new stature among social conservatives who are urging her to run for president, will feel compelled to invest more political capital in the two abortion-related measures.

Balash indicates that this is unlikely. "It'd be great if we could consider every issue in a vacuum, but we can't. That doesn't please everyone."

Amid the questions over her public agenda, her family continues to make headlines. In an interview with Fox News, her 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, who gave birth to a son late last year, said that the decision to go ahead with her unplanned pregnancy was hers alone and that teaching abstinence to teenagers, a concept supported by her mother, is "not realistic at all."

According to a new book, the governor decided against telling family members of her own pregnancy with son Trig until its final weeks, as she privately coped with worries about rearing a child with Down syndrome.


The late news of the governor's pregnancy surprised longtime associates, one of whom privately said colleagues had learned not to expect details of Palin's family life. Many legislators believe that the only lasting intimate in her inner circle is an adviser without an official title -- her husband, Todd. "She keeps all of us at arm's length because she's not afraid to drop the hammer on any of us and hold us accountable," said Balash, an unabashed admirer of her leadership style.

Despite the distractions and speculation over Palin's future, her advisers say she is singularly focused on her work as governor, pointing out that of the seven days she has spent outside Alaska since the election, six have been spent on official business for the state, including a January weekend in Washington.

The official explanation for the weekend was that Palin would be conveying Alaska's needs to Congress and the new administration. But Fred Malek, the McCain campaign's deputy national finance chairman, had called Palin after the election and invited her to be his guest, along with Republican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, at the Alfalfa Club banquet, an annual congregation of the city's political luminaries. The night before, Palin attended a private dinner at Malek's home.

Malek is one Palin ally who makes no effort to hide his anger at the "anonymous attacks" Palin has seen from McCain campaign insiders.


Not everyone is sympathetic. "There are few political performers in her league, in her ability to draw crowds and stand in front of 10,000, 20,000 people and excite them," said one prominent GOP strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "But the campaign also demonstrated that there is a lack of gravity to her that has hurt. She needs to mitigate her weaknesses. She needs to prepare more, know more. She should try to disappear for a while and be an indisputably effective governor."

Palin's greatest problems in Alaska, as in the rest of the country, seem to be with her fellow Republicans. "What did I say about her during the campaign when somebody asked me if she was qualified?" asked state Rep. John Harris, taking a moment to ponder his own question, smiling. "Oh, I said something like 'She's old enough and a registered voter.' " Another smile.

A former speaker of the state House, Harris believes that Palin and her team need to improve relationships with legislators.

"A lot of people around here see it as the Eva Peron syndrome -- Sarah being Evita," said Larry Persily, a top aide to Mike Hawker (R), co-chairman of the state House's Finance Committee. "She doesn't care about the political establishment, but the people in the streets love her."

Yet some Republican observers privately wonder whether Palin will be burdened by her divisive impact on people -- and possibly dismissed as someone with a formidable base who is too polarizing and parodied to win nationally. Just recently, the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund enlisted actress Ashley Judd for a video attacking Palin by name for her support of an Alaska program that permits hunters to shoot wolves from aircraft to pare their numbers. The reference to Palin meant that overnight, the issue became ample reason for cable news stories about her and the controversy.

‘It’

Asked how Palin deals with the perception that months of ridicule have irreversibly turned her into what one Alaskan GOP legislator calls "Dan Quayle with a ponytail," Balash confidently responds that she displays political skills that no other Republican on the national scene has shown an ability to match. "She walks into a room, and things change," he said. "She just has that 'it' -- whatever that 'it' is."


The "it" was on display one night last month when Palin appeared inside the modest chamber of the Alaska House of Representatives to deliver her annual State of the State address. An audible buzz served as a reminder of the asset that Malek believes will keep her at least on Republicans' minds for elections to come.

Reading from a teleprompter, Palin called for a state hiring freeze to address a looming budget deficit, reasserted her commitment to "the culture of life," alluded to the past campaign and urged listeners "to fight for each other, not against, and not let external, sensationalized distinctions draw us off course."

At the speech's conclusion, she left the building, as is her norm these days, without answering questions, biding her time -- waiting, according to Balash, for the right moment.


© 2009 The Washington Post Company

[doug]

Levi Johnston says breakup was mutual
19-year-old dad says engagement ended ‘a while ago’; has access to Tripp

Johnston and Palin, who have a baby boy named Tripp were considering a summer wedding before their engagement ended.
TODAY staff and wire
Contrary to tabloid reports, Bristol Palin is allowing her ex-fiance to see their 2½-month-old infant son, Tripp, Palin told NBC News.

The daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin issued the statement after PEOPLE magazine confirmed on its Web site a report in the tabloid “Star” that she and the boy’s father, Levi Johnston, had split.

“It is true that Levi and I are no longer together; however, I am absolutely committed to being the best mom to Tripp Easton,” the 18-year-old Bristol Palin wrote in a statement to NBC.

Johnston, 19, told The Associated Press that he and Palin mutually decided “a while ago” to end their relationship. He declined to elaborate as he stood outside his family's home in Wasilla, about 40 miles north of Anchorage.

Palin also said that she was devastated about a report on Star magazine's Web site that quoted Johnston’s sister, Mercede, as saying Bristol "makes it nearly impossible" to visit Tripp, who was born on Dec. 27.

Sharing the caring

Lorenzo Benet, assistant editor of PEOPLE, confirmed in an interview that aired Thursday on TODAY that both Levi Johnston and his mother still have access to the infant.

“They’re still sharing with child care, but he’s no longer there as a regular fixture at the Palin home,” Benet said.

The Star article said that the Palins referred to Johnston and his mother, Sherry Johnston, as “white trash.” Sherry Johnston was arrested in December and charged with selling prescription painkillers.

“We have not been able to substantiate that,” People.com’s executive director, Patrick Rodgers, told TODAY’s Natalie Morales in reference to the “white trash” allegation.

“There have also been reports that she was not allowing Levi’s mother to see the child. We have heard that is not the case, that Levi’s mother was seeing Tripp,” Rodgers added. “It’s obviously very clear that they’re upset. Both of them have come out and said, ‘Don’t believe everything you read.’ ”

“Unfortunately, my family has seen many people say and do many things to ‘cash in’ on the Palin name," said Bristol Palin’s statement, which was issued through her mother’s political action committee. "Sometimes that greed clouds good judgment and the truth."

Sweethearts in the spotlight

Sarah Palin had just been introduced to the nation as Arizona Sen. John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential campaign when news broke that Bristol, who was then 17, was pregnant and that Johnston was the father. The couple became a fixture on the campaign trail, often seen sitting together while Sarah Palin and McCain addressed rallies. Cameras quickly found Bristol’s name tattooed on Johnston’s ring finger.

As recently as a month ago, Bristol Palin told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that she and Johnston still planned to get married this summer. She called Johnston a “hands-on dad” who was devoted to his son. Both teens said they were working to finish their high school diplomas through online courses, and Johnston was said to be employed for a time in the Alaskan oil fields. The latest reports say that Johnston is now unemployed.

Rodgers said that the break-up apparently happened “a few weeks ago,” not long after the Fox interview.



“It was somewhat common knowledge around Wasilla, the town that they live in,” Rodgers told Morales. “As for why it happened, neither of them has spoken about that, and I don’t know what the actual cause was. We have heard that it was mutual and that Bristol is OK, and that the baby is fine, and that they’re going to try to make it work for their kid.”

Rodgers said the split shouldn’t be surprising. “I think there was pressure on them to remain a couple. If you factor in that her mother is the governor of a state, his mother’s been arrested on drug charges, you can see that pressure is coming at them from all sides,” he said. “We do know that they really made an effort, however, to make a go of it after the birth of their son, and Levi is still seeing Tripp and plans to have a role in the life of this child.”

Morales asked Rodgers what plans Bristol Palin has now that marriage is not on the horizon.

“She’s spoken recently about wanting to get on with college next year. She’s spoken in the past about wanting to be a pediatric nurse,” Rodgers replied. “It’s the very beginning of her life. She’s got a lot to do, but she’s determined to get these things done while she’s raising a baby.

— Mike Celizic, with additional reporting by the Associated Press

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[doug]

People.com
Bristol Palin graduates from high school
‘I’m so proud of her ... really relieved,’ says Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin
PEOPLE.com
Looking like a lot of her classmates — giddy and irreverent, wearing a silly necklace of Blow-Pop lollipops strung together with curly gift ribbon — Bristol Palin stepped toward the stage in Wasilla Sports Complex Thursday night to receive her high school diploma, more a worried mom than a jubilant teen.

"Where's my baby?" Bristol mouthed, searching the two front rows where her family sat until she finally spotted son Tripp near the backstage door, where Bristol's Aunt Heather was feeding the infant a bottle. With a wave to the little one she alternately calls "Handsome" and "My Guy," Bristol crossed the stage — and crossed "graduate high school" off her to-do list.

"I knew it would be hard work, but I knew I was going to do it," Bristol, 19, tells PEOPLE.

Her mom, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential nominee, was not always so sure. Palin said in an interview that one of her first thoughts when Bristol announced her surprise pregnancy last spring was, "Oh, there goes her education." "And that's why I'm so proud of her … really relieved," Palin says. "It's been a challenging and exciting year — her senior year — and I'm just so pleased that we are where we are today."

Bristol boasted a 3.497 G.P.A., regretting only that she was "point zero-zero-something" away from graduating with Honors. A budding activist in the cause to prevent teen pregnancy, she says she hopes to go to an area college for a two-year business degree and then a job, possibly in real estate.

© 2009 MSNBC Interactive

[doug]

Television
Palin accepts Letterman’s apology for ‘bad’ joke
Palin accepts ‘Late Show’ host’s apology ‘on behalf of all young women’
The Associated Press
NEW YORK - Sarah Palin says she accepts David Letterman’s apology for the joke about her daughter.

The Alaska governor, in a statement issued Tuesday, said the apology was accepted “on behalf of all young women, like my daughters, who hope men who ‘joke’ about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve.”

On his CBS’ “Late Show” on Monday night, Letterman said his joke about one of Palin’s daughters being “knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez can’t be defended.

He said the joke referred to 18-year-old Bristol Palin, not her 14-year-old sister Willow. But Letterman said it’s his responsibility that people believed that he intended to target Willow, who had attended a New York Yankees game with her mother.

“I’m sorry about it, and I’ll try to do better in the future,” he said.

Letterman last week tried to make light of the joke after the first indications that it fallen flat. Palin had called the comments “sexually perverted,” and her husband, Todd, said that “any jokes about raping my 14-year-old are despicable.”

Palin said Tuesday that Letterman has the right to joke about whatever he wants to, and “thankfully we have the right to express our reaction.”

“This is all thanks to our U.S. military men and women putting their lives on the line for us to secure American’s right to free speech,” she said. “In this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect.”

Although Bristol, an unwed mother, was the target of his joke, Letterman didn’t name her when it was originally made on June 8.

It was “a coarse joke,” “a bad joke,” Letterman told viewers. “But I never thought it was (about) anybody other than the older daughter, and before the show, I checked to make sure, in fact, that she is of legal age, 18.”

“The joke, really, in and of itself, can’t be defended,” he declared.

If there’s a misconception that he was making the joke about a 14-year-old, Letterman said he understands why people are upset. “I would be upset myself,” he said.

“I feel that I need to do the right thing here and apologize for having told that joke,” he said. “It’s not your fault that it was misunderstood, it’s my fault that it was misunderstood.”


Letterman made several references to the issue during his monologue, introducing himself as “Dave Letterman, good will ambassador.” He said he got a call from his mother earlier in the day telling him she was siding with Palin.

When he began a joke about Bernard Madoff, whom he called “the most hated man in America,” he then amended that to a list of two.

“Me, Bernie Madoff,” he said. “He was waaay out in front until a couple of days ago.”

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[doug]

Palin to resign as Alaska governor
Former VP hopeful says she'll work for change from outside government

Former U.S. Republican Alaska Governor Sarah Palin announces that she will resign this month and will not run for re-election as governor in Wasilla, Alaska, July 3, 2009
NBC News and news services
WASILLA, Alaska - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin abruptly announced Friday she is resigning from office at the end of the month, a shocking move that rattled the Republican party but left open the possibility she would seek a run for the White House in 2012.

Palin, 45, and her staff kept her future plans shrouded in mystery, and it was unclear if the controversial hockey mom would quietly return to private life or begin laying the foundation for a presidential bid.

Palin's spokesman, David Murrow, said the governor didn't say anything to him about this being her "political finale." He said he interpreted Palin's comment about working outside government as reflecting her current job only.

"She's looking forward to serving the public outside the governor's chair," he said.

And Pam Pryor, a spokeswoman for Palin's political action committee SarahPAC, said the group continues to accept donations on its Web site, with an uptick in funds after Palin's announcement.

The announcement caught even current and former Palin advisers by surprise. Former members of the John McCain campaign team, now dispersed across the country, traded perplexed e-mails and phone calls.

But personal pressures have been mounting — scrutiny on her family, legal bills, ethics investigations and a running, public fued with McCain's camp that has flared up again.

In a hastily arranged news conference at her home in suburban Wasilla, Palin said she will formally step down July 26, and Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will be inaugurated at the governor's picnic in Fairbanks. She said she had decided against running for re-election as Alaska's governor, and believed it was best to leave office even though she had two years left to her term.

No 'lame duck'

"Many just accept that lame duck status, and they hit that road. They draw a paycheck. They kind of milk it. And I'm not going to put Alaskans through that," she said.

The 2008 vice presidential nominee was seen as a likely presidential contender in 2012 and had proved formidable among the party's base. But the last week brought a highly critical piece in Vanity Fair magazine, with unnamed campaign aides questioning if Palin was ever really prepared for the presidency. The backbiting continued with follow-up articles recounting the nasty infighting that plagued her failed bid. Her advisers sniped with other Republicans, underscoring the deeply divided GOP looking for its next standard bearer.

Meghan Stapleton, Palin's personal spokeswoman, shot down speculation that ranged wildly from Palin dropping out of politics altogether to eyeing runs against fellow Alaska Republicans U.S. Rep. Don Young and U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Palin's comment about serving outside government refers to the present, she said.


Stapleton, however, said it's too early to say whether Palin would seek the presidency. In the meantime, the governor will continue to work "toward affecting positive change as a citizen without a title right now," she said.


"Her vision is what's best for Alaska, which translates into what's best for America," Stapleton said.

Palin's resignation, timed on the eve of the July 4 holiday when many Americans had already begun a three-day weekend, seemed designed to avoid publicity. She alluded to how she could help change the country and help military members — code that she didn't think her time on the national stage was over.

One senior Palin adviser, who spoke to the family in recent days, described the governor and her husband as tired of the constant media scrutiny. Nevertheless, the adviser was shocked to hear Palin's announcement Friday.

A longtime confidant who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, the adviser counseled the Palins that leaving government was politically unwise, but the governor was resolute.

Sources told NBC's Andrea Mitchell that it appears Palin is out of politics for good.

Though the announcement touched off a flurry of speculation among Democrats and Alaska political bloggers that Palin had been drawn into one of the many criminal investigations that have upended Alaska politics in recent years, the adviser reported seeing no evidence of such an investigation and said if one is under way, then Palin has kept it to herself and it would be yet another surprise to supporters.

Professor: 'Smart move'

Jerry McBeath, a veteran political science professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, called the pending resignation a "smart move," both for Palin and the state.

But political analyst Larry Sabato, in Charlottesville, Va., said Palin's announcement left many confused. "I think it eliminates her from serious consideration for the presidency in 2012."

Palin said her family weighed heavily in her decision.

"I polled the most important people in my life, my kids, where the count was unanimous," she said. "Well, in response to asking, 'Hey, you want me to make a positive difference and fight for all our children's future from outside the governor's office?' It was four yeses and one 'Hell, yeah!" And the 'Hell, yeah' sealed it."

Palin's decision not to seek re-election was a familiar one for a potential presidential candidate. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney chose not to seek another term as he geared up for an unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has announced he won't seek another term, giving him plenty of free time ahead of a potential 2012 bid.

Palin emerged from relative obscurity nearly a year ago when she was tapped as then Republican presidential candidate John McCain's running mate.


Controversial from the start

She was a controversial figure from the start, with comedian Tina Fey famously imitating her elaborate updo and folksy "You betcha!" on "Saturday Night Live."

In the presidential race, Palin became the butt of talk-show jokes and Democratic criticism after news broke that the Republican Party had spent $150,000 or more on a designer wardrobe, accessories and hair and makeup services for her. The high-end spending spree contrasted with the down-to-earth image she sought to craft for herself and became an unwelcome issue for the McCain campaign.

She didn't leave the limelight once McCain lost the presidency. She recently led a public spat with "Late Show" host David Letterman over a joke he made about one of her daughters being "knocked up" by New York Yankees baseball player Alex Rodriguez during the governor's recent visit to New York. Palin's 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, is an unwed, teenage mother. Letterman later apologized for the joke.

Palin also complained that her 14-month-old son, Trig, who was diagnosed with Down's syndrome, had been "mocked and ridiculed by some mean-spirited adults recently." She didn't elaborate.

Fred Malek, a Republican strategist who has advised Palin over the past year, said Palin was "really unhappy with the way her life was going."

"She felt that the pressures of the job combined with her family obligations and the demands and desires to help other Republican candidates led her to decide not to run again. Once that decision was made, she realized, why not do it now and let the lieutenant governor take over and get a head start on his election," Malek said.

Palin's move also prompted speculation among bloggers and critics that the governor was facing a looming political crisis or embarrassment.

Something below surface?

"There's got to be something below the surface that's about ready to come to the surface that quite potentially she just didn't want to deal with as governor," said Andrew Halcro, a Palin critic who lost the 2006 gubernatorial race to her.

There is, for example, a pending public records request from Linda Kellen Biegel, an Anchorage blogger who is seeking e-mails showing an effort by the Palin administration to smear her critics including those filing ethics complaints against the governor. Biegel, whose own ethics complaint was dismissed, also is seeking an investigation into the financial profits to the Palin family from racing sponsors of Palin's husband, Todd, in the 2,000-mile Iron Dog snowmobile race.


"There may be embarrassing things in there. I don't know," Biegel said. "I'm just as baffled as a lot of people."

Stapleton, Palin's spokeswoman, dismissed the rumors of damaging news on the horizon.

"No truth whatsoever. Period," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "Just more nonsense from the same people who choose to waste state resources."

Palin was first elected in 2006 on a populist platform. But her popularity has waned as she became embroiled in partisan politics following her return from the presidential campaign. Her term would have ended in 2010.

Palin expressed frustration with her current role as governor.

"I cannot stand here as your governor and allow the millions of dollars and all that time go to waste just so I can hold the title of governor," Palin said, referring to the alleged impact of multiple ethics complaints against her, most of which have been dismissed.

Palin remaining as governor is not good for Alaska, given the "political bloodsport" by her critics, Stapleton said. Stepping down is a "fighter's move," Stapleton said, essentially Palin stepping around political barriers in her way and pursuing her vision.

GOP woes

Palin's announcement comes after several recent blows to the Republican party. Ensign, a member of the Christian ministry Promise Keepers, stepped down from the Senate Republican leadership last month after admitting he had an affair for much of last year with a woman on his campaign staff who was married to one of his Senate aides. Ensign later disclosed he had helped the woman's husband get two jobs during the affair.

A government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, wants the Senate ethics committee and the Federal Election Commission to investigate.


Just days after news of Ensign's affair broke, Sanford admitted an affair with a woman in Argentina. Some lawmakers are now calling for his resignation. Before the admission, Sanford had been missing from the state for five days visiting his lover. He had slipped his security detail, lied to his staff about where he was and failed to transfer power to the lieutenant governor in case of a state emergency.

The party's troubles seem to have left two prominent 2012 prospects, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and 2008 presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, unscathed, however.

Palin has the potential to make far more money in the private sector than the $125,000 or so she has been making as governor.

Palin already had a deal with publisher HarperCollins to produce her memoirs, with publication planned for next spring. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Six-figure book deals are common for high-profile political figures.


© 2009 msnbc.com

[doug]

Analysis: Yet again, Palin plays by own rules
Even some GOP strategists were baffled by Alaska governor's decision

Former U.S. Republican Alaska Governor Sarah Palin announces that she will resign this month and will not run for re-election as governor in Wasilla, Alaska, July 3, 2009 By Dan Balz
The Washington Post
Sarah Palin demonstrated once again yesterday that she is one of America's most unconventional politicians, following an unpredictable path to an uncertain future.

That Alaska's Republican governor has a flair for the theatrical — and plays by her own rules — was underscored anew by her stunning announcement that not only will she not seek reelection in 2010, she will resign her office this month.

But are Palin's rules those of someone with the capacity to seek and win her party's presidential nomination in 2012, as many believe is her ultimate goal, or of someone who has flashed like a meteor across the political skies but with limited impact? That question was at the center of the discussion yesterday among Republican strategists who were baffled by what they had just heard from Alaska.

Palin's decision to exit the governorship was as sudden and unexpected as her arrival on the national stage when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) defied all predictions and selected her to be his 2008 running mate. From that day in August to yesterday's announcement, she has been one of the country's most compelling and controversial politicians — and almost always one of the most enigmatic.

Palin's statement was ambiguous with regard to her future. "We know we can effect positive change outside government at this point in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities," she said, hinting at larger ambitions. But she also expressed weariness over what she called "superficial, wasteful, political blood sport." Was that a hint that she intends to turn away from elective politics?

Certainly, after a week when she was the target of new attacks over her performance in the 2008 campaign — attacks that sparked a war of words between prominent Republican strategists — slipping into the background might be a welcome tonic for Palin and her family.

'Puzzling'

But even if that were her first instinct, she will feel the tug of her passionate supporters to remain in the forefront of the debate over the party's future, and many of them will push her to run for president.

One strategist who assumes she has presidential aspirations called the decision to resign her office "puzzling," and another described it as "nutty." "If this is about running for president, it's about as odd a way as we've ever seen," said John Weaver, a Republican strategist.

Their reasoning followed conventional assumptions about what it takes to mount a national campaign — that, in surrendering the governor's office in Alaska and ending her brief tenure in statewide office, she leaves behind a thin record on which to base a national bid.

Yet it has been obvious that Alaska is a difficult place from which to participate in the national debate, both because of its physical distance from the rest of the United States and because of its culture and identity. Freed of the constraints of her office, Palin could become a more engaged participant in the national debate.

"My contrarian take is, almost everyone I talk to thinks it's crazy, but I wonder maybe it's crazy like a fox," said Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, who has been defending Palin this past week.

Kristol's view is that spending another 18 months in office in Alaska will not convince skeptics that Palin is ready to be president. Instead, he said, she can use this time to travel the country and the world, to immerse herself in policy issues and to campaign for Republican candidates, without facing questions every time she leaves the state about whether she is shirking her responsibilities.

"It's a heck of a gamble, but it might pay off," Kristol said.


Few who have watched Palin doubt her ability to attract attention, command a following and make herself a force, should she choose to run for president. Democratic and Republican strategists agree that she has charisma and a personality that connects with people.

"The skills she has are formidable and unteachable," Mark Salter, who was one of McCain's top advisers, said after he heard the news of her resignation.

But along with those skills have come a host of questions, which began in the days after her vice presidential selection and have continued. They include whether she has the experience and knowledge of the world required of a successful national candidate.

At critical moments in the campaign last year, she stumbled on this front, particularly in her interviews with CBS News anchor Katie Couric. Though she held her own in the vice presidential debate with Democrat Joseph R. Biden Jr., doubts about her expertise dogged her throughout the campaign. By the end of the contest, she had lost support among independents, many of whom judged her not ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.



The questions also include the soundness of her judgment and the quality of the advice she receives from those around her. Veterans of the 2008 campaign who became close to her have felt shut out of her circle this year. She created a needless controversy this spring over whether she would be the keynote speaker at a Republican fundraising dinner in Washington, causing grumbling among GOP insiders.

Still another set of questions focuses on her reliability. Those came back this past week with a lengthy Vanity Fair article in which former McCain advisers went after Palin. Other Republicans rose to her defense, but yesterday's announcement is certain to bring new questions about why she needs to step down 18 months before her term ends.

'She commands attention'

All of that may mean little to the supporters who flocked to Palin during the presidential campaign and who remain loyal to her. She had far more appeal than McCain last year and drew far bigger crowds than he ever could. How they will see yesterday's announcement is not known, but they have tended to be both protective and forgiving of Palin as she has charted her unusual course through national politics.

A Republican strategist who got to know her over the past year, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to offer a candid opinion, said this: "She has a base in the party that's motivated like no one else's, and this decision won't bother them. I don't know if she'll run. I don't know if she could win if she ran. But I'm sure she has a shot.

"If she runs, she'll face a skeptical press and a fairly stark division between her supporters and skeptics. But she commands attention, she connects with voters better than most, and she's one of the toughest-minded people I've met."

He added in conclusion something with which those on both sides of the Palin divide would agree. "I imagine," he said, "she'll continue to surprise us."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

[doug]

Politics
It Came from Wasilla
Despite her disastrous performance in the 2008 election, Sarah Palin is still the sexiest brand in Republican politics, with a lucrative book contract for her story. But what Alaska’s charismatic governor wants the public to know about herself doesn’t always jibe with reality. As John McCain’s top campaign officials talk more candidly than ever before about the meltdown of his vice-presidential pick, the author tracks the signs—political and personal—that Palin was big trouble, and checks the forecast for her future.
By Todd S. Purdum August 2009


The pattern is inescapable: she takes disagreements personally, and swiftly deals vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. Illustration by Risko.



The crowds begin streaming into the Evansville Auditorium and Convention Centre a couple of hours before the arrival of the “special guest speaker” at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner on a soft Indiana spring evening—nearly 2,200 people in the banquet hall, 800 more in an adjacent auditorium watching the proceedings on a live video feed. The menu is thick slices of roast pork and red velvet cake, washed down with pitchers of iced tea, and when Sarah Palin finally enters, escorted by a phalanx of sheriff’s deputies and local police, she is mobbed. The organizers of the dinner, billed as “the largest pro-life banquet in the world,” have courted Palin for weeks with care packages of locally made chocolates, doughnuts, barbecue, and pastries, and she has requited by choosing Evansville, a conservative stronghold in southern Indiana, as the site of her first public speech outside Alaska in 2009. Like Richard M. Nixon, who chose the coalfield town of Hyden, Kentucky, for his first post-resignation public appearance, Palin has come to a place where she is guaranteed a hero’s reception. She is not only a staunch foe of abortion but also the mother of a boy, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome just a few months before John McCain chose Palin as his running mate. The souvenir program for this evening’s dinner is full of displays for local politicians and businesses, attesting to their pro-life bona fides. An ad for Hahn Realty Corporation reads, “If you need commercial real estate, call Joe Kiefer! Joe is pro-life and a proud supporter of the Vanderburgh County Right to Life.”

As Palin makes her way slowly across the crowded ballroom—dressed all in black; no red Naughty Monkey Double Dare pumps tonight—she is stopped every few inches by adoring fans. She passes the press pen, where at least eight television cameras and a passel of reporters and photographers are corralled, and spots a reporter for a local community newspaper getting ready to take a happy snap with his pocket camera. For a split second she stops, pauses, turns her head and shoulders just so, and smiles. She holds the pose until she’s sure the man has his shot and then moves on. A few minutes later, the evening’s nominal keynote speaker, the Republican Party’s national chairman, Michael Steele, who has been reduced to a footnote in the proceedings, introduces the special guest speaker as “the storm that is the honorable governor of the great state of Alaska, Sarah Palin!”

Just where that storm may be heading is one of the most intriguing issues in American politics today. Palin is at once the sexiest and the riskiest brand in the Republican Party. Her appeal to people in the party (and in the country) who share her convictions and resentments is profound. The fascination is viral, and global. Bill McAllister, until recently Palin’s statehouse spokesman, says that he has fielded (and declined) interview requests from France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Germany, Bulgaria, “and probably other countries I’ve forgotten about.” (Palin, keeping her distance from most domestic media as well, also declined to talk to V.F.). Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

In the aftermath of the November election, the conventional wisdom among Palin’s supporters in the Republican establishment was that she should go home, keep her head down, show that she could govern effectively, and quietly educate herself about foreign and domestic policy with the help of a cadre of experienced advisers. She has done none of this. Rather, she has pursued an erratic course that, for her, may actually represent the closest thing there is to True North. Her first trip to Washington since the election was to attend the dinner of the Alfalfa Club, an elite group of politicians and businesspeople whose sole function is an annual evening in honor of a plant that would “do anything for a drink.” Some of her handlers first said she had accepted—though she then went on to decline—an invitation to speak at the annual June fund-raiser for the congressional Republicans. She created a political-action committee—Sarahpac—with the help of John Coale, a prominent Democratic trial lawyer. But just months into its existence the pac’s chief fund-raiser, Becki Donatelli, a veteran of Republican campaigns, suddenly quit. One person familiar with the situation told me that Donatelli could not stand dealing with Palin’s political spokeswoman in Alaska, Meghan Stapleton, who has drawn withering fire from Palin friends and critics alike for being an ineffective adviser. Also with Coale’s help, Palin formed the grandiosely named Alaska Fund Trust, to defray a reported half million dollars in legal expenses arising from a slew of formal ethics complaints against her in her home state—prompting yet another formal complaint, that the fund itself constitutes an ethical breach. Onetime supporters have become harsh critics. Walter Hickel, 89, a former two-term governor and interior secretary, and the grand old man of Alaska politics, who was co-chair of Palin’s winning gubernatorial campaign, in 2006, now washes his hands of her. He told me simply, “I don’t give a damn what she does.”

Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life—neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.

Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen.

Soon Palin will take a crack at her own story: she has signed a book contract for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum, and has chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir, which is to be published next year not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house, that may include supplemental material on faith. During the presidential campaign, Palin’s deep ignorance about most aspects of foreign and domestic policy provided her with a powerful political reason not to submit to interviews. The forthcoming book adds a powerful commercial reason.

Palin is a cipher by choice. When she chooses to reveal herself, what she reveals is not always the same thing as the truth. Her singular refusal to have in-depth conversations with the national media—even Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney, among the most saturnine political figures in modern American history, each submitted to countless detailed interviews over the years—has compounded the challenge of understanding who she really is. There has been Hollywood talk that Palin could star in a reality-TV show about running Alaska, but nothing has come of it yet. Recently, Palin did star in a week-long seriocomic feud with David Letterman over some of his borderline jokes. Meanwhile, she has begun sharing insights several times a day on Twitter, with chipper reports on her own doings and those of her husband, Todd, and the rest of what she calls the “first family.” “Look forward to today’s staff discussion re: my 3rd justice appt to highest court in 3 yrs. Supreme Court truly effects AK’s future,” reads one. And another: “Picking up my handsome little man to rtrn to Juneau, Trig got 1st haircut so my little hippie baby’s ready for AK sunshine on his shoulders.”


Page 1 of 6 > >|

Vanity Fair
© 2009 Condé Nast Digital. All rights reserved.

[doug]

Palin turns her debate with Joe Biden into a winkathon.

Little Shop of Horrors
The caricature of Sarah Palin that emerged in the presidential campaign, for good and ill, is now ineradicable. The swift journey from her knockout convention speech to Tina Fey’s dead-eyed incarnation of her as Dan Quayle with an updo played out in real time, no less for the bewildered McCain campaign than for the public at large. It is an ironclad axiom of politics that if a campaign looks troubled from the outside the inside reality is far worse, and the McCain-Palin fiasco was no exception. As in any sudden marriage of convenience in which neither partner really knows the other, there were bound to be bumps. Palin had been on the national Republican radar for barely a year, after a cruise ship of conservative columnists, including The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, had stopped in Juneau in 2007 and had succumbed to her charms when she invited them to the governor’s house for a luncheon of halibut cheeks. McCain had spent only a couple of hours in Palin’s presence before choosing her, and she had pointedly failed to endorse him after he clinched the nomination in March. The difficulties began immediately, with the McCain team’s delivery of the bad news that the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter Bristol, which was already common knowledge in Alaska and had been revealed to the McCain team at the last minute, could not be kept secret until after the Republican convention.

By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.” Many of the details that led to such assessments have remained obscure. But in a recent series of conversations, a range of people from the McCain-Palin campaign, including members of the high command, agreed to elaborate on how a match they thought so right ended up going so wrong.

The consensus is that Palin’s rollout, and even her first television interview, with ABC’s Charles Gibson, conducted after an awkward two-week press blackout to allow for intensive cramming at her home in Wasilla, went more or less fine, though it had its embarrassing moments (“You can’t blink,” Palin said, when Gibson asked if she’d hesitated to accept McCain’s offer) and was much parodied. At least one savvy politician—Barack Obama—believed Palin would never have time to get up to speed. He told his aides that it had taken him four months to learn how to be a national candidate, and added, “I don’t care how talented she is, this is really a leap.” The paramount strategic goal in picking Palin was that the choice of a running mate had to ensure a successful convention and a competitive race right after; in that limited sense, the choice worked. But no serious vetting had been done before the selection (by either the McCain or the Obama team), and there was trouble in nailing down basic facts about Palin’s life. After she was picked, the campaign belatedly sent a dozen lawyers and researchers, led by a veteran Bush aide, Taylor Griffin, to Alaska, in a desperate race against the national reporters descending on the state. At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small. By late September, when the time came to coach Palin for her second major interview, this time with Katie Couric, there were severe tensions between Palin and the campaign.

By all accounts, Palin was either unwilling, or simply unable, to prepare. In the run-up to the Couric interview, Palin had become preoccupied with a far more parochial concern: answering a humdrum written questionnaire from her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman. McCain aides saw it as easy stuff, the usual boilerplate, the work of 20 minutes or so, but Palin worried intently. At the same time, she grew concerned that her approval ratings back home in Alaska were sagging as she embraced the role of McCain’s bad cop. To keep her happy, the chief McCain strategist, Steve Schmidt, agreed to conduct a onetime poll of 300 Alaska voters. It would prove to Palin, Schmidt thought, that everything was all right.

Then came the near-total meltdown of the financial system and McCain’s much-derided decision to briefly “suspend” his campaign. Under the circumstances, and with severely limited resources, Schmidt and the McCain-campaign chairman, Rick Davis, scrapped the Alaska poll and urgently set out to survey voters’ views of the economy (and of McCain’s response to it) in competitive states. Palin was furious. She was convinced that Schmidt had lied to her, a belief she conveyed to anyone who would listen.

The next big milestone for Palin was the debate with Joe Biden, on October 2. An early rehearsal effort in Philadelphia found 20 people sitting in a stifling room with hundreds of sample questions on note cards. Palin just stared down, disengaged, non-participatory. A disaster loomed, so Schmidt made the difficult decision to leave campaign headquarters, in Virginia, and fly to McCain’s vacation retreat in Sedona, Arizona, where it was thought that Palin might be able to relax and recharge, and accept the assistance of a voice coach and a television coach. For three full days—at the height of the campaign—Schmidt dropped virtually all other business to help Palin prepare.

He also enlisted some extra help. By this point, Palin’s relations with Nicolle Wallace—a veteran of the Bush White House and a former CBS News analyst who had tried to help Palin get ready for the Couric interview, and whom Palin blamed for the result—were so strained that campaign aides cast about for someone who could serve as a calming presence: Palin’s horse whisperer. They settled on Mark McKinnon, a smart, funny, soft-spoken former Democrat from Texas. McKinnon had long admired McCain, and had begun the Republican primary season helping him out—though warning that he would never work against Obama in the general election. But now McKinnon, whose role in helping prepare Palin has not been previously reported, and who declined to elaborate on it to V.F., changed his mind and quietly signed on. Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide, says that McKinnon was picked because “he’s got a lovely manner You sort of want a guy who’s very easygoing, gives good advice, and doesn’t add to the natural nervousness.”

Palin worked hard, and the results were adequate. Palin’s winking “Can I call you Joe?” performance against Biden was nothing like a disaster. In fact, it seems to have emboldened her enough that the next day she openly voiced disagreement with the McCain team’s decision to pull out of active competition in Michigan. When orders or advice from McCain headquarters began to conflict with her own impulses, aides told me, she simply did what she wanted to do. “The problem was she came down from Alaska with basically Todd as a sort of trusted bellwether adviser,” one McCain friend says. “She was given this staff of 20. It was probably too big a staff. To be real honest with you, I don’t think she could figure out who to trust.” All the while, Palin was coping not only with the crazed life of any national candidate on the road but also with the young children traveling with her. Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.) Palin maintained only the barest level of civil discourse with Tucker Eskew, the veteran G.O.P. operative who had been made her chief minder. A third party had to shuttle between them to convey even the most rudimentary messages. “She started to hedge her bets,” the same McCain friend says. “Frequently, she would be concerned about how something would play in Alaska. What? You’re worried about your backside in Alaska when there are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent?” One longtime McCain friend and frequent companion on the trail was heard to refer to Palin as “Little Shop of Horrors.”

Election Night brought what McCain aides saw as the final indignity. Palin decided she would make her own speech at the ticket’s farewell to the faithful, at the Arizona Biltmore, in Phoenix. When aides went to load McCain’s concession speech into the teleprompter, they found a concession speech for Palin—written by Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, who had also been the principal drafter of her convention speech—already on the system. Schmidt and Salter told Palin that there was no tradition of Election Night speeches by running mates, and that she wouldn’t be giving one. Palin was insistent. “Are those John’s wishes?” she asked. They were, she was told. But Palin took the issue to McCain himself, raising it on the walk from his suite to the outdoor rally. Again the answer was no.

Vanity Fair © 2009 Condé Nast Digital. All rights reserved.

[doug]

Polar Disorder
There is virtually nothing about Palin’s performance in the fall campaign that should have come as a surprise to John McCain. Had he really attempted to learn something about her before the fateful day of August 29, 2008, when he announced that she was his choice for running mate, he would easily have discerned all the traits that he belatedly came to know.

The narrative that the McCain campaign employed to explain Palin’s selection and to promote her qualifications—that she was a fresh-faced reformer who had taken on Alaska’s big oil companies and the corrupt Republican establishment, governing with bipartisan support—was never more than superficially true. In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”

The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.

So, of all the puzzling things that Sarah Palin told the American public last fall, perhaps the most puzzling was this: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

Believe me, it is not.

But Sarah Palin herself is a microcosm of Alaska, or at least of the fastest-growing and politically crucial part of it, which stretches up the broad Matanuska-Susitna Valley, north of Anchorage, where she came of age and cut her political teeth in her now famous hometown, Wasilla. In the same way that Lyndon Johnson could only have come from Texas, or Bill Clinton from Arkansas, Palin and all that she is could only have come from Wasilla. It is a place of breathtaking scenery and virtually no zoning. The view along Wasilla’s main drag is of Chili’s, ihop, Home Depot, Target, and Arby’s, and yet the view from the Palins’ front yard, on Lake Lucille, recalls the Alpine splendor visible from Captain Von Trapp’s terrace in The Sound of Music. It is culturally conservative: the local newspaper recently published an article that asked, “Will the Antichrist be a Homosexual?” It is in this Alaska—where it is possible to be both a conservative Republican and a pothead, or a foursquare Democrat and a gun nut—that Sarah Palin learned everything she knows about politics, and about life. It was in this environment that her ambition first found an outlet in public office, and where she first tasted the 151-proof Everclear that is power.

The second thing McCain could have discovered about Palin is that no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is “conservative,” whatever that means, but she can be all over the lot in the articulation of her platform. In a June interview with Sean Hannity, she sounded like a New Dealer when she proudly proclaimed that “a share of our oil-resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources—imagine that.” In the next breath, sounding like a “starve the beast” conservative, she said she hoped the price of oil, the principal variable of state revenue, would not rise too much. “The fewer dollars that the state of Alaska government has, the fewer dollars we spend, and that’s good for our families and the private sector.” Palin has always been a party of one. She gained the mayoralty of Wasilla in 1996 by turning against the incumbent, John Stein, who had been one of her mentors when she was on the city council, and injecting sharply partisan issues such as gun rights and abortion into what had previously been a low-key local contest. She fired the police chief, eased out the museum director and the city planner, and fired and then rehired the librarian (who had opposed book censorship). Palin was entitled to make the dismissals, and she variously justified them on the grounds of budget difficulties or the need for a team that she could be sure would support her efforts. But the Frontiersman accused Palin of confusing her election with a “coronation.”

Even in broad outline the story of how a small-town mayor became the youngest governor in Alaska history seems improbable. There was her long-shot campaign for lieutenant governor, in 2002, in which she came in second against a veteran state senator in a five-way race; her appointment as chair (and ethics supervisor) of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees drilling and production; and her resignation from that post, charging that a fellow commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, the chair of the Alaska Republican Party, was conducting political business on state time. In a climate where the sitting Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, had become the most unpopular figure in the state, and where the F.B.I. was swarming over Alaska, pursuing the corruption probe that later ensnared the state’s senior U.S. senator, Ted Stevens, Palin seemed like a breath of fresh air.

Yet Palin herself cut corners. Ruedrich, Palin’s target on the Conservation Commission, was forced to resign, but in 2006, as Palin was beginning her campaign for governor, a conservative columnist dug up e-mail messages showing that she too had conducted campaign business from her mayoral office. Confronted by the columnist, Palin acknowledged that she had erred. Then she turned around and issued a press release, demanding to know why the columnist was publishing smears.

Palin won the crucial support of Walter Hickel in her campaign for governor in part by supporting one of his longtime hobbyhorses, an “all-Alaska” natural-gas pipeline that would pump gas to the port of Valdez for export worldwide. As the campaign wore on, Palin backed away from that idea. “I helped her out, she got elected,” Hickel says now. “She never called me once in her life after that.”

Palin’s 2006 campaign for governor relied at first almost wholly on a ragtag band of true believers. “She had this little grassroots group that was going around the state on a wing and a prayer, talking up her platitudes,” says John Bitney, an old friend of Palin’s from junior-high band in Wasilla, where he played the trombone and she played the flute. Bitney at the time was a lobbyist and veteran legislative aide in Juneau, and he began passing political intelligence and advice to Palin. When Palin routed Murkowski in the Republican primary, she still had no real professional campaign staff. Bitney signed on, forming a triumvirate with Curtis Smith, a veteran Anchorage media consultant, and Kris Perry, another old friend of Palin’s from Wasilla, who functioned as her personal assistant and also held the title of campaign manager. Palin began preparing for a general-election campaign against Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, a former Republican legislator who was running as an independent.

She apparently didn’t like preparing for debates back then either. “In the campaign for governor, they’re prepping her for debate,” Curtis Smith’s former business partner, Jim Lottsfeldt, told me recently in Anchorage, “and Curtis says, ‘The debate prep’s going horribly. Every time we try to help her with an answer, she just gets mad.’” (Smith himself says, “Unfortunately, I don’t recall having that exact conversation with Mr. Lottsfeldt, nor do I recall my experience, including debate prep, with Governor Palin in the light he portrayed.”) But Palin’s lack of knowledge turned out not to hurt her. Andrew Halcro later remembered that he and Palin once compared notes about their many encounters, and she said, “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”

Palin’s victory that November was one of the flukiest successes in modern American politics. Rebecca Braun, the publisher of the Alaska Budget Report, a respected nonpartisan newsletter, describes the result as something “far beyond anything you could explain in terms of intellect or training.” But Palin had promised three big things, and with the help of Bitney, who became her liaison with the legislature, and Mike Tibbles, her chief of staff, she achieved them. She increased oil taxes; she won the legislative framework for a gas pipeline, though not the one Hickel wanted; and she signed significant ethics reforms. In all three efforts she won strong cooperation from Democrats. “She had an easy go of it,” says Larry Persily, a former editorial-page editor of the Anchorage Daily News, who went to work in Palin’s Washington office but is now a critic of the governor’s. “The Democrats were in love with her. She slew the oil-company Gorgon, and came in on the magic carpet of oil-tax reform and ethics. The Democrats were intoxicated because she wasn’t Frank Murkowski.” Rising oil prices provided an added lift. Palin was able to increase the annual distribution from the state’s Permanent Fund to about $3,000 per resident, almost double the amount received the previous year. She could be a fiscal conservative and a big spender all at the same time.
(from condenast.com)

[doug]

Palin and Cindy McCain, never soulmates.

But there were ominous signs—indications of an erratic nature. This is the third thing McCain could have discovered about Palin—a woman, after all, who kept a pregnancy secret for seven months, flew all the way home from Texas to Alaska with a near-full-term baby while leaking amniotic fluid, and then finally drove the 45 minutes from Anchorage to a hospital in Wasilla, all so that the child could be born in the 49th state. Palin was for the infamous Gravina Island “bridge to nowhere” before she was against it, and reversed herself only when such pork-barrel projects prompted a nationwide backlash. As governor, she hired several old high-school, hometown, or political friends with minimal qualifications for important state jobs. One friend, a former mid-level manager for Alaska Airlines, headed the department that reviewed candidates for state boards and commissions; another became director of the state Division of Agriculture, citing a childhood love of cows as one qualification. Palin communicated with legislators and her staff mainly by BlackBerry, sometimes using a personal e-mail account to avoid having to disclose documents under the state public-records laws. (The one time Meg Stapleton, who handles Palin’s personal and political public relations, ever answered multiple e-mails was when I wrote her and Palin’s gubernatorial office at the same time, and she replied: “Thank you for emailing. I will email you separately so as to remove us from the state account.”) Palin’s anti-politician stance had worked so well in her campaign that she carried it over into her dealings with actual politicians in Juneau, who didn’t take kindly to the practice. After one meeting between the governor and legislators in 2007, Lyda Green, then the president of the state senate, returned to her office to catch up on some paperwork. She caught Palin on the news. “And she comes on TV and says, ‘I want to once again confirm that neither I nor my staff ever holds closed-door meetings.’ Well, we had just been in a closed-door meeting for an hour and a half!” Representative Les Gara, an Anchorage Democrat who often worked with Palin, told me that he had at first thought that some of Green’s sharp criticism of Palin amounted to Republican infighting, or maybe just sour grapes that Wasilla had produced a new political figure whose star far outshone Green’s. But he came to realize, he said, that Green had a better handle on Palin than he did. “She didn’t work very hard. You would speak to her on particular issues, and it was like she didn’t know anything about them and she never seemed very engaged.” That said, “if your priorities happened to be her priorities, you could build a coalition.”

On the other hand, if your priorities happened to differ from hers, you could pay a terrible price. Only weeks after Palin praised John Bitney for doing so much to make her first legislative session a success, she summarily fired him—because, he says, he had had the bad luck to fall in love with the wife of one of the Palins’ best friends (a woman he has since married). At the time, Palin’s office cited what it called “personal” reasons for an “amicable” departure. But when The Wall Street Journal called Palin’s office during last fall’s presidential campaign to ask about the case, a spokeswoman for Palin said that Bitney had been “dismissed because of his poor job performance,” and refused to elaborate.

Not quite a year after Bitney’s departure, Mike Tibbles abruptly resigned as chief of staff, for reasons that neither he nor Palin has ever explained. Jim Lottsfeldt, a friend of Tibbles’s, says that the chief of staff was worn down “by the steady drumbeat of her not consulting with him.” She replaced Tibbles with Mike Nizich, a part-time taxidermist, who over 30 years had served seven governors of both parties, most of that time as director of the state Division of Administration—a man who made the trains run on time in the governor’s office but had nothing to do with policy issues. Palin’s effectiveness was never again the same. The brutal reality is that many people who have worked closely with Palin have found themselves disillusioned.

More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

Perhaps no episode of Palin’s governorship has drawn more attention than the one that came to be known as Troopergate. For more than a year of her tenure as governor, Palin and her husband and aides repeatedly and aggressively complained to Walt Monegan, the former Anchorage police chief whom Palin had named to head the state’s Department of Public Safety, about Mike Wooten, a state trooper who had been involved in a messy divorce from Palin’s sister Molly. Wooten was no angel. Before Palin ever took office, he had been disciplined after drinking beer in his patrol car, Tasering his stepson, illegally shooting a moose, and making threatening remarks about Palin’s father. But Wooten had already been disciplined, and Monegan believed that further action was unjustified if not impossible. The final straw may have been Monegan’s June 30, 2008, e-mail warning to Palin that an unnamed state legislator had complained that she’d been seen driving with her newborn son, and that the infant had not been strapped into an approved car seat. “I have never driven Trig anywhere without a new, approved car seat,” Palin fired back. “I want to know who said otherwise—pls. provide me that info now.” Twelve days later, Nizich fired Monegan on Palin’s orders. Forty-nine days after that, John McCain announced that Palin would join him on the ticket.

Arrows in the Back
In Alaska, there has never been a gubernatorial tradition of pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving, but Palin decided to stage such a ceremony last November all the same, at the Triple D Farm & Hatchery, outside Wasilla. After granting the lucky bird its reprieve, she stopped to talk to a local television reporter about what she had learned in the campaign just concluded. “I don’t think it’s changed me at all,” she insisted, clutching a cup of coffee as her breath steamed into the frosty air. “You know, it’s pretty brutal, the time consumption there, and the energy that has to be spent in order to get out and about with the message on a national level, a great appreciation for other candidates who have gone through this, but also just a great appreciation for this great country. There are so many good Americans who are just desiring of their government to kind of get out of the way and allow them to grow and progress, and allow our businesses to grow and progress. So, great appreciation for those who share that value.”

As Palin spoke, a grisly scene unfolded behind her. A worker hefted one squirming white turkey after another into a metal funnel, slit its throat, and bled it out in full view of the camera. The clip was replayed tens of thousands of times on YouTube and seemed an all too apt metaphor for how Palin’s political fortunes had changed in the wake of her great national adventure, even if her personality had not. A career that thrived for years on extraordinarily good luck seems to have known nothing but trouble since November 4. In December, Bristol Palin gave birth to Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, her son with her boyfriend, Levi Johnston, and for a time there was talk of a wedding. But by early spring the couple had split up, and their families fell to trading charges on talk shows and in the tabloids. After Levi told Tyra Banks that he had often spent the night in the Palin home, in the same room as Bristol, and assumed that the governor knew they were having sex, Palin, through her spokeswoman, released a blistering statement expressing disappointment “that Levi and his family, in a quest for fame, attention, and fortune, are engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion of their relationship.” On the CBS Early Show, days later, Johnston seemed resigned. “They said I didn’t live there. I ‘stayed there,”’ he said. “I was like, O.K., well, whatever you want to call it. I had my stuff there.” Although Bristol initially told Greta Van Susteren that teen abstinence is “not realistic at all,” by springtime she had signed up as an ambassador for the Candie’s Foundation to promote abstinence as the way to avoid teen pregnancy.

Meantime, Levi’s mother, Sherry, agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of possessing OxyContin with intent to sell it, in exchange for the state’s agreement to drop five other drug-related charges against her. Her lawyer has conceded that she will draw an automatic jail sentence, but hopes to minimize the time she spends behind bars, because she suffers from chronic pain. In April, Todd Palin’s half-sister Diana was arrested on charges of twice breaking into a house in Wasilla to steal money from a bedroom cabinet, under circumstances that remain unexplained.

(from vanityfair.com)

[doug]

Because Palin had taken particular umbrage in the fall campaign at any effort to criticize her children or invade their privacy, her willingness to mix it up in public with an 18-year-old, who is after all the father of her only grandchild, struck many in Alaska as odd. So did Palin’s suggestion, at a time when declining oil prices have thrown the state budget into the red, that she did not want to accept about a third of the $930 million in federal stimulus money available to Alaska, because it would come with too many big-government strings attached. The move seemed calculated to burnish her national conservative credentials. In the face of bipartisan outcry, Palin’s aides insisted she had never meant to say she wouldn’t take the money, only that she wanted to review the matter carefully. That was news to former aide Larry Persily. After the first meeting on the stimulus money, Persily told me, “Everyone in the room left thinking she’d said no. Then her staff said, ‘She didn’t say no. She just didn’t say yes.”’ Palin wound up taking all but about 3 percent of the $900 million available to Alaska. The consensus even among the Republicans I spoke to was that she rejected the last $28 million—for energy assistance—mostly to save face.

The ever shifting sands of Palin’s sensibility were also on display after former senator Ted Stevens’s conviction on corruption charges was set aside, in April. Palin’s old nemesis, the Alaska Republican Party chair Randy Ruedrich, called on Stevens’s Democratic successor, Mark Begich, who had defeated Stevens just days after the original conviction last fall, to step down and allow a new election. Palin told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in an e-mail, “I absolutely agree.” Days later, at a news conference, Palin insisted she had never called on Begich to step down.

Perhaps nothing has caused a bigger stir than Palin’s nomination of Wayne Anthony Ross to be Alaska’s attorney general. Ross is a two-time gubernatorial candidate and a board member of the National Rifle Association. He had sown controversy over the years by referring to gays and lesbians as “degenerates” (he later sought to downplay the remark, saying his aversion to homosexuals was no different from his aversion to lima beans) and for staunchly opposing subsistence-hunting preferences for native Alaskans. A flamboyant divorce lawyer who drives a big red Hummer with the vanity license plate war, Ross is a good old boy of pithy expression and considerable charm. (“In Alaska,” Ross told me, “a liberal is someone who carries a .357 or smaller.”) The final vote against Ross—with the Republican leaders of both chambers joining to defeat him—came just as Palin was speaking in Evansville. It was the first time in Alaska history that a cabinet nominee was rejected. “If I wince a little, it’s from the arrows in my back,” Ross told me a few weeks later. “I think there were a number of people who were trying to show her who the boss was.”

A year ago, 80 percent of Alaskans viewed Palin very favorably or somewhat favorably; by this spring, just 55 percent had a positive opinion. All this has given rise to speculation in Alaska that Palin may not run for re-election next year. She does not have to declare her candidacy until June 2010. Most politicians of both parties in Alaska with whom I spoke assume she could win, though not as persuasively as she did in 2006, which would hardly help her standing in a 2012 presidential campaign. Though Palin’s spokeswoman has said she does not intend to challenge Senator Lisa Murkowski, the former governor’s daughter, who is also up for re-election next year, Palin has changed her mind without warning in the past, and becoming a senator would keep her in the national spotlight. Surveying the landscape of political and policy troubles in Alaska, Gregg Erickson, an independent economic consultant in Juneau, concludes, “Everything she’s doing seems to be saying that there’ll be a problem in the future owing to her inattention, but she won’t be here to deal with it.”

“Just Make It All Go Away”
As Palin has piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. “You nailed it.” Another key McCain aide summed up his attitude this way: “I guess it’s sort of shifted,” he said. “I always wanted to tell myself the best-case story about her.” Even now, he said, “I don’t want to get too negative.” Then he added, “I think, as I’ve evaluated it, I think some of my worst fears … the after-election events have confirmed that her more negative aspects may have been there … ” His voice trailed off. “I saw her as a raw talent. Raw, but a talent. I hoped she could become better.”

None of McCain’s still-loyal soldiers will say negative things about Palin on the record. Even thinking such thoughts privately is painful for them, because there is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired—and as reflecting, too, an unsettling willingness on their own part to aid and abet him. They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job. To ask why none of them dared to just walk away is to ask why Colin Powell did not resign in protest over the Bush administration’s foreign policy, or why none of Bill Clinton’s disillusioned aides resigned after he lied to them about Monica Lewinsky. The question cannot comprehend the intense bonds that the blood sport of modern politics produces. To leave a campaign—especially a struggling, losing campaign—is akin to desertion in wartime, and even as they began to understand her limitations, plenty of McCain aides still saw Palin as the campaign’s best hope. Some still believe that, simply in terms of the electoral math, she helped at least as much as she hurt, and maybe helped more.

McCain has delivered his own postmortem on Palin with the patented brand of winking-and-nodding ironic detachment that he usually reserves for painful political questions, an approach that simultaneously seeks to confess his sin and presume absolution for it. In November, he told Jay Leno he was proud of Palin and did not blame her for his defeat, but by April, when Leno asked him about who was running the Republican Party, McCain declined to mention Palin: “We have, I’m happy to say, a lot of choices out there: Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, Huntsman, Romney, Charlie Crist—there’s a lot of governors out there who are young and dynamic.” McCain went on, “There’s a lot of good people out there, and I’ve left out somebody’s name and I’m going to hear about it.” When I ask Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter and co-author, about that comment, he says simply, “McCain always talks unscripted,” and adds that he has heard “not one word of regret” about Palin ever pass McCain’s lips. McCain’s daughter Meghan, who has continued the blog she began on the campaign last year, has said that Palin is the one topic on which she will have no public comment.

Palin herself has alternately shied away from the spotlight and injected herself into public debate on questions dear to conservatives, as she did when she issued a statement defending the former Miss California, Carrie Prejean, for opposing gay marriage despite “the liberal onslaught of malicious attacks.” Palin’s speech in Evansville was her first major post-election foray into the national media, and she followed it up in June with a trip to New York State, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Alaska’s entry into the union, visiting Auburn, the hometown of William H. Seward, who bought the Alaska territory from Russia, and making appearances at events supporting families with autism and developmental disabilities. But the biggest headlines the trip produced were those about Palin’s feud with David Letterman, who joked that Palin had gone to Bloomingdale’s to update her “slutty flight-attendant look” and made a tasteless sexual jibe about one of the Palin daughters. Letterman eventually apologized, though Palin fanned the flames in ways that were not necessarily to her advantage.

In Evansville, though, Palin concentrated on the task at hand: an emphatic defense of the anti-abortion cause. But in doing so she made a startling confession about what she thought when she learned she was pregnant at 43 with her youngest child, Trig, who arrived in April 2008, as the world now knows, with Down syndrome. “I had found out that I was pregnant while out of state first,” Palin told the crowd. “While out of state, there just for a fleeting moment, I thought, Nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, Wow, it is easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances and no one would know—no one would ever know. Then when my amniocentesis results came back, showing what they called abnormalities—oh, dear God—I knew, I had instantly an understanding, for that fleeting moment, why someone would believe it could seem possible to change those circumstances, just make it all go away, get some normalcy back in life.” It is almost impossible not to be touched by the rawness of her confession, even if it is precisely this choice that Palin believes no other woman should ever have, not even in the case of rape or incest.

(from vanityfair.com)

[doug]

Sarah Palin is a star in Evansville and all the many Evansvilles of America, but there is a big part of the Republican Party—the Wall Street wing, the national-security wing—in which she cuts no ice. At the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, Palin essentially came in tied for second with Governor Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana, and Representative Ron Paul, of Texas, with 13 percent support in a straw poll of potential 2012 presidential candidates; former governor Mitt Romney, of Massachusetts, got 20 percent. A more recent survey has Palin in a three-way tie with Romney and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. She could do well in the Iowa caucuses or South Carolina primary, but it is much harder to imagine her making headway in New Hampshire, where independent voters were turned off by her last fall. It is also difficult to see just how she would expand her appeal beyond the base that already loves her.

In Alaska, almost everyone I met wondered who was advising her in Washington—and in Washington, everyone wonders the same thing. There are one or two clues. On the eve of the Alfalfa dinner, in January, Palin was a guest in the home of Fred Malek, a veteran Republican fund-raiser and government official dating back to the days of the Nixon administration. Malek raised money for McCain’s campaign last year, and also agreed to play host to a fund-raising dinner for Republican governors in early May. (Palin was to have been an honored guest, but canceled owing to spring flooding in Alaska.) As noted, Palin has established a political-action committee with the legal advice of John Coale, who met Palin when his wife, Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News host, went to interview her during the campaign. Coale, a former Hillary Clinton supporter, told me he felt Palin had gotten a bum rap from liberals and conservatives alike, and he advised her that a pac was a logical and legal way to pay for out-of-state political travel. “We raised a good bit of money without even asking,” Coale says. “Just set up a Web site and, I think in the first month, $400,000 came in.” Coale says he still exchanges e-mails with Palin from time to time, but doesn’t consider himself a political adviser; he also says that Van Susteren has “put up a Chinese wall about all of this,” and has obtained her interviews with the Palins independently. Since the campaign ended, Van Susteren has interviewed Palin twice more, but she says she has never had a conversation with Palin off-camera, except for when Palin called to rescind her acceptance of Van Susteren’s invitation to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in May, because of the Alaska flooding. Todd Palin came solo as Van Susteren’s guest, and when a reporter for Politico sought to interview him at a pre-dinner brunch attended by hundreds of journalists, Van Susteren interposed herself, as in the manner of a staffer, to say it was a social event. Van Susteren told me she was just trying to exercise good manners.

Palin’s closest adviser remains her husband—the “first gentleman” or “first dude,” as she calls him. Testimony in the Troopergate investigation suggested that Todd was physically in the governor’s office for about 50 percent of the time, often sitting in on meetings or phone calls in which he had no obvious official function. By the end of last fall’s campaign, McCain’s friends had picked up word that Todd was calling around to Republicans in South Carolina, urging them to keep his wife in mind for 2012—the implication being that the Palins believed McCain was about to lose. This spring, he stood in for Palin at an event in Manhattan—at Alaska House in SoHo, the cultural antipode of Wasilla—promoting the Alaska commercial-fishing industry’s contributions to world food aid. In a brief prepared speech, he extolled Alaska salmon as “some of the world’s healthiest protein, rich in vitamins and minerals, and a source of omega-3 fats.”

“She doesn’t at all have anyone who’s willing to give it to her straight,” one person who occasionally advises Palin told me. Todd may be the one exception. “I saw nobody else like that, nobody who would sit her down and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’” He added, of the poor communications operation run by Stapleton, “I don’t know what part Sarah Palin plays in the lack of communications, but I don’t think she’s aware of how big a problem it is.”

And her national ambitions? “What it looks like to me she’s trying to do is try the same formula that got her the governorship,” John Bitney says. “You sort of start off with a conservative base. The right-wing base is obviously out on the far end of the spectrum, but it’s a very motivated base. They show up, they’re committed. It gets you that political beachhead. She did not get started with the blessing of the Republican Party. She started with a dedicated corps of sort of right-wing true believers who killed themselves for her, and got her going. And then she began to build on that, and after she crossed the primary hurdle, she moderated her message on some points.”

When I ask Bitney what he makes of the whole Palin phenomenon, he sighs. “What do I take away from this?” he asks. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s just a lot of emotions and stuff. I find it’s frustrating dealing with Sarah, because it seems we’re always dealing with emotional crap and we never seem to be able to focus on the business at hand that needs to be done. I don’t know whether to blame her or pity her for all this emotional upheaval that we’re always going through with her. Now we all get to listen to Levi and Bristol. Check my feet for horseshoes if I have to sit there and listen to another talk show. I got involved in helping her become governor because we needed to change some policy directions. Teen abstinence is not why I waved signs for her.”

Palin herself often sounds tired and resentful these days, as if wondering whether she should have blinked and just said no to John McCain. In a rambling, 17-minute speech introducing Michael Reagan, the former president’s son and a conservative radio host at an event in Alaska in June—a speech that borrowed heavily, without clear attribution, from a four-year-old article by Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Craig Shirley—Palin seemed resigned to the fact that her reputation would never again be as fresh and glowing as it once was. She complained about “national figures and some in the press who, who want to put not just me, but anybody who dares speak up, it seems nowadays, right back down in their place.” She bemoaned her changing fortunes in Alaska. “I think things here that have so drastically changed these past months … Some want to forbid others from speaking up, and it’s been through lawsuits, been ethics-violation charges, media distortions And those are the folks who want to tell me, they want to tell you to sit down and shut up. We will not do so. I just can’t because I love my state, I love my country, and I need you, we need Michael Reagan to keep on fighting for our freedoms, for our country, and what we’re being fed today, it seems, is a steady diet of selected misrepresented news So I join you in speaking up and asking the questions and taking action, and here at home in my beloved Alaska, I just say, politically speaking, if I die, I die.”

Poll: Who is the most powerful woman in the G.O.P.?
Palin has disappointed many of those who once had the highest hopes for her. She has stumbled over innumerable details. But as she said to Andrew Halcro years ago, “Does any of this really matter?” Palin has shown herself to have remarkable gut instincts about raw politics, and she has seen openings where others did not. And she has the good fortune to have traction within a political party that is bereft of strong leadership, and whose rank and file often demands qualities other than knowledge, experience, and an understanding that facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things. It is, at the moment, a party in which the loudest and most singular voices, not burdened by responsibility, wield disproportionate power. She may decide that she does not need office in order to have great influence—any more than Rush Limbaugh does.

On a rare fine day in Juneau, not long ago, Palin was seen sitting in the sunshine in the broad plaza near the state capitol, alone with her thoughts and some reading material for more than an hour and a half. Down the hillside below her, the big cruise liners that ply Alaska’s Inside Passage in the summer months were beginning to call in the port. Only two years have elapsed since William Kristol and his colleagues disembarked from one of them and hearkened to her siren call. Sarah Palin might well have been wondering whether her own ship is going out, or just coming in.

Todd S. Purdum is Vanity Fair’s national editor.

[doug]

Alaskans: Palin had gone fishing on job
Observers cite ‘surprising amount of disinterest in state government’
The Associated Press
JUNEAU, Alaska - As surprised fans and critics of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin traded guesses behind her decision to resign more than a year before her term ends, the former vice presidential candidate offered few hints at her political future, except to say she'd gone fishing.

Palin has stayed out of the public eye since she made the announcement Friday, but said in a Twitter update Sunday she was looking forward to joining her family as they commercially fish in Bristol Bay. But to many Alaskans, Palin has been off the job for awhile already, acting as a disengaged presence around the state Capitol since she returned from the presidential campaign trail last year.

"She had a surprising amount of disinterest in state government after November," said state Rep. Les Gara, a Democrat from Anchorage. "This state has a lot of problems, and she showed a complete lack of interest in solving them."

Polarizing figure

In Alaska, Palin has become a polarizing figure and the focus of multiple ethics complaints filed against her with the state personnel board. She has taken a beating from Senate Democrats over many of her recent appointments, including an attorney general candidate who became the first Cabinet appointment ever rejected by the Alaska Legislature.

But with all the thorny issues enveloping her in Alaska, Palin's quitting may be more about something simpler: cutting her losses.

Things weren't likely to improve, if she stayed in office. She faces a potential veto override of nearly $29 million in federal stimulus funds for energy efficiency programs, money she had rejected in fear that it could bind the state to federal building mandates.

"The drumbeat of adverse news coverage from Alaska would likely have continued and intensified had she remained governor," said Juneau economist and longtime Alaska political watcher Gregg Erickson. "It would have become an increasing liability to her national campaign."

A day after abruptly announcing she would soon give up her job as governor, Palin indicated on a social networking site that she would take on a larger, national role, citing a "higher calling" to unite the country along conservative lines. In the last few months, Palin had laid the groundwork for a possible presidential run, establishing a political action committee.

Erickson said that while Palin has received an adulatory reception from social conservatives in the Lower 48 states, in Alaska she's become a lightning rod for criticism and controversy.

It's easier to govern in Alaska when oil prices are high, but they are down from last year's historic highs and the budget is much tighter. And this year, Palin's signature project, getting a natural gas pipeline, moves into a critical phase: whether North Slope leaseholders will commit to shipping gas in the pipeline, which is still at least a decade away.

Heart not in the job?

Palin has said stepping down as governor was about doing the right thing for Alaska — not wanting to be a lame duck governor if she knew she wasn't running for re-election in 2010. She also has hinted that her decision was a strategic move aimed at gearing up for a run for president.

But many political observers in Alaska say it was obvious her heart wasn't in the job.

Palin no longer delivered bagels to lawmakers. She limited her access to the media, and when she did hold news conferences, she relied on notes and her commissioners for backup. One legislator quipped after her state of the state address in January that the only eye contact she made in the legislative chamber was with the television camera.

State Sen. Gene Therriault, a Republican, says it's an unfair rap on Palin, one that was used by critics against her two predecessors.

"The detractors will always use that as a criticism because it's hard to evaluate. It's not surprising it's being used against the governor," he said. "It's an easy criticism to level, because you're never asked, 'Where's the proof?'"


Investigations, attacks from both sides

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, who will be sworn into office July 26, told Fox News Sunday that Palin had spoken to him about "the concern she had for the cost of all the ethics investigations and the like, the way that that weighed on her with respect to her inability to just move forward Alaska's agenda on behalf of Alaskans in the current context of the environment."

Erickson, the Juneau political watcher, said the governor's resignation makes sense.

"Politically, I see it as a smart move. With the complete breakdown of her alliance with Democrats that marked her first two years as governor, she has no ability to move her policies forward in legislation. Indeed, her Alaska agenda, the gas pipeline in particular, is likely to fare much better with her out of the picture," Erickson said.

Palin has also faced growing criticism within the Republican party.

Last week, Vanity Fair magazine published a highly critical piece on Palin, with unnamed John McCain campaign aides questioning if Palin was ever really prepared for the presidency.

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[doug]

Palin: The problem is Alaska’s ethics policy
Outgoing governor says complaints against her are ‘wake-up call’ to state

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says the numerous ethics complaints filed against her are a "wake-up call."
The Associated Press
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says she hopes the latest ethics complaint filed against her is a "wake-up call" that a new ethics policy is needed in the state.

"The only saving grace in this recent episode is that it proves beyond any doubt the significance of the problem Alaska faces in the 'new normal' of political discourse," Palin said in a release that was posted online through her Twitter account.

"I hope this will be a wake-up call — to legislators, to commentators and to citizens generally — that we need a much more civil and respectful dialogue that focuses on the best interests of the state, rather than the petty resentments of a few," Palin said.

The ethics complaint, filed Friday with the state personnel board, alleges that Palin has been paid for media interviews. Palin's chief of staff, Mike Nizich, called the allegation absurd.

"It is amazing to me that anyone could think that — let alone put their name behind it and once again seek to distract state officials and needlessly increase their work load," Nizich said in a statement late Friday. "The state is losing the value of some of its expenditures when public servants are pulled away from important assignments to deal with far-fetched and mean-spirited allegations."

Palin says her family has racked up more than $500,000 in legal fees and the state has poured about $2 million of taxpayer money into investigating the complaints. A spokeswoman later clarified that most of that expense was for staff time by state lawyers and others who have helped Palin defend herself.


Palin's lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, said the complaint was filed by an Anchorage resident, who faxed it to a local television station.

Van Flein said Palin has never been paid an appearance fee or received other compensation from any television or radio show or other media interview.

The complaint is the 17th filed against Palin and the second since she announced July 3 she is resigning. Most of them have been dismissed as baseless.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.