MYSTERY, ALASKA
The National
October 03. 2008 12:09AM
United Arab Emirates
"Palin has a way of transcending the obstacles that come her way,
gently bypassing possible scandals with apparent ease and little
damage to her sky-high approval ratings in Alaska." Stephen Collins
for The National David Gargill travels to Anchorage to examine the
roots of Sarah Palin’s spectacular and sudden ascent from the depths
of obscurity to the heat of the national spotlight.
By mid-September the freakishly robust growing season in the
Matanuska-Sustina Valley was winding down. Home to some of the
world’s deepest topsoil, and blessed with 20 hours of sunshine on
long summer days, the Valley is renowned for the oddities of scale
that sprout from its earth. 90-pound cabbages are commonplace at the
State Fair in Palmer, a sleepy agrarian hamlet at the foot of Pioneer
Peak. During America’s Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
uprooted struggling Midwestern farmers and transplanted them atop
the rich soil of the valley, hoping to engender civilisation in a
landscape both lush and forbidding.
These days the Mat-Su is also fertile terrain for the cultivation
of myths, and ever since John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his
running mate on August 29th, a great many concerning the Wasilla
native have blossomed here. Palin stormed onto the national scene like
few American politicians before her, a self-professed "hockey mom"
who single-handedly saved the Republican convention amid torrents of
press attention and a swooning embrace from movement conservatives. Her
debut took the nation’s eye off the storms battering its Gulf Coast,
reenergised a Republican base leery of the Senate’s Maverick,
and catapulted the obscure former mayor and city councilwoman to
international rock-star status as fast as bloggers could post.
But ignorance is bliss, and as this unknown was cast in greater relief
by each datelined detail, the bloom wore off the rose – if only by
a few points – and suddenly, Palin’s place on the ticket posed more
questions for the McCain camp than it answered. The national and
international media departed en masse for points north to vet the
Vice Presidential candidate, perhaps for the first time. Her broad,
smiling face and signature upsweep graced every glossy in the country
while her record in Alaska was ruthlessly dissected in the broadsheets.
Palin merchandise – and reindeer dogs – priced to move at the Day
Break Espresso Stand in Wasilla. Rob Stapleton for The National
The slow drip of unflattering news from the north and a handful of
disastrous media appearances sent Palin’s poll numbers tumbling,
but she continued to attract record crowds of fervent admirers to the
previously somnambulant McCain roadshow. But for a candidate thrust
into stardom fuelled by her folksy authenticity, the real Sarah Palin
remained an enigma, cloaked in the protective embrace of a campaign
determined to shield her from scrutiny.
Was she a moral paragon ready to "clean up Washington" – or an abuser
of power who conducted state business on private e-mail accounts
to avoid oversight and used her office to settle family vendettas,
dismissing Alaska’s respected Public Safety Commissioner because he
refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband?
Was she a woman of faith and family to whom the majority of Americans
could relate – or an End Times-awaiting creationist book-banner? The
archetype of Alaska’s fabled frontier spirit – or a pork-barrel
grifter in the mould of Alaska pols like Congressman Don Young and
Senator Ted Stevens, both under investigation for corruption?
The truth was protean and elusive, lost somewhere in the great divide
that separates Alaska from what its residents still call "outside"
– the rest of the United States.
When I set out for the Valley a few weeks ago, Palin had just stumbled
through an interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson – but her drawing
power endured, as 10 million people tuned in. The big papers unloaded
their lengthy reports from Wasilla and Anchorage ("Once Elected,
Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes" was The New York Times headline)
but the base remained besotted.
In the last week, however, a stream of high-profile conservative
apostates have soured on Palin, the last straw apparently a
disastrous interview with Katie Couric that stretched over three
nights of national news like a slow-motion car crash. To David Frum,
the former Bush speechwriter who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil",
Palin had "proven pretty thoroughly… that she is not up to the job",
while another prominent right-wing columnist suggested Palin withdraw
herself now to save McCain’s chances.
It was a startlingly fast journey from saviour to scourge – with
the final chapter still unwritten: will Palin’s inexperience sandbag
McCain? Or will her ineffable appeal to hard-working "regular folks"
save the day?
In Alaska, people are uneasy about their state’s new status as a hub
of partisan chicanery and intrigue, and ambivalent at best about all
this attention from the lower 48. They now have a horse in this race
and mere loyalty would usually lead most folks to stand and cheer,
or simply clam up and ride the bandwagon home for The Big Win. But in
what they like to call "the world’s biggest small town", anyone who
wants to know the dirt on Sarah Palin can find it. Kinship has its
limits, and for Palin, who has thrown more than her share of sharp
elbows in state politics, negative stories heading downstream – from
sources in both political parties – now threatened the seaworthiness
of McCain’s vessel. The only question remaining was whether the flow
could be staunched before the old Navy man at the helm was forced to
toss her into the drink.
******************
"But what’s Wasilla? It’s a series of pretty good sized national
stores. Wal-Mart, Target, so on, then there’s housing around the
edges, helter-skelter. It’s an oddity." Rob Stapleton for The National
When I arrived the Governor was the literal talk of every town, and
every TV set – muted in a briny smoke-filled bar, or presiding over a
disappointing hotel continental breakfast – was tuned to some conduit
offering news of her exploits. She was the subject or subtext of every
conversation, and since the majority of Alaskans knew her personally –
or felt they did (a testimony to her considerable political skills)
– facts and opinions regarding her past were being everywhere
disseminated, rarely without some hack reporter within earshot to
absorb them.
These notebook-wielding Huns had so tenderised the populace that all
but the most hostile natives by now proved pliant and yielding, and so
I sought out a few people who witnessed Palin’s rise first hand and a
few who admired it from afar in an attempt to understand her unlikely
ascent to power, her troubles in office, and the irresistible sway
she still seemed to have, a magnetic hold on voters that even some
of her estranged allies could neither shake nor fathom.
I couldn’t see out the window of the aeroplane that brought me into
Anchorage, and so it was in the queue for a rental car that I got
my first impression. The panorama looked like a blast site, as if
the range of jagged brown seismic cones had not been hewn by the
implacable advance of glaciers or tectonic pressure, but by a sudden
violence far beyond the human scale.
On the majestic drive north from Anchorage to the Mat-Su, the frontage
roads fall away with the brief wooded and wood-sided suburbias of
Eagle River and Chugiak, and soon the vast tidal plane of the Knik Arm
presents itself, peeling off into the western distance. The lowlands
have gone maize and duelling shades of green in an early autumn
flourish. Past the Knik, termination dust – the lovely Alaskan term
for the first light touches of snow that "terminate" the summer –
painted the massifs to an even level across the eastern side of
the Valley. The sight of things so huge soaring so high filled
me with a sense of impending, of peril and awe. Their astounding
permanence, the impossible finality and atemporal aspect of them
struck a near-spiritual chord. Eternity felt undeniable in a place
like this. And Jalmer Kerttula had been active in Valley politics for
about that long, witness to a (relatively) brief but eventful epoch.
He arrived in 1935, 14 years before statehood, and served as a
legislator for over thirty years, presiding over the house and
the senate – a living reminder of the hardscrabble men and women
whose tenacity (with a generous assist from Washington’s largesse)
made Alaska.
"My father had been here before," Kerttula told me as we sat in
his living room, "he was first mate on a ship that got iced in
out of Point Clarence in 1921." Kerttula, known to all as Jay,
left the legislature in 1994, after being ousted by Lyda Green,
the current senate president. He’s dressed in old grey flannels,
a striped button-down shirt and broad suspenders, his jawline lost
behind a full-on beard in the style of Reagan’s surgeon general,
C Everett Koop. Jay, the first Jalmer I’ve ever met, seems to have
less nostalgia for the years he spent in power than for the rough
place where he came of age.
"The federal government purchased all the homesteads in the area and
then sold them at thirty years and three per cent," he tells me,
"deep soil but windy." I crack a smile because I’m reminded of a
piece of local wit I’ve picked up, "Wasilla sucks but Palmer blows,"
but it’s not the moment for me to share it.
"Wasilla was the inheritor of a tiny community at Knik. That was where
Joe Palmer brought his three mast schooner in, and he had a drugstore,
a hotel and several things. Slowly the railway came in on the way to
the mines and Wasilla essentially had an old sales & service store,
Hearning’s, a grocery, a hardware store and a hotel. Down by the
lake you had some other properties, some whorehouses and stuff,
but you don’t mention that. Years later, a post office."
"But what’s Wasilla?" Kerttula asked rhetorically, tracing what
registers as the arc of the Valley’s squandered promise, "It’s a
series of pretty good sized national stores, Wal-Mart, Target, so
on, then there’s housing around the edges, helter-skelter. It’s an
oddity. It’s not like a normal city with one street after another,
but you’ve been there, so you know what it is. I don’t see it as a
good training ground for anybody."
I had been to Wasilla. It didn’t come highly recommended, and for
the most part the town failed to exceed expectation. The New York
Times columnist Maureen Dowd dubbed the town "a soulless strip mall,"
but that seemed a facile dismissal of this grim warren of sanitised
neon storefronts glinting in the utter dark, nondescript clutches of
buildings as disposable as the items dispensed through their doors
and drive-through windows, dwarfed by the snow-crowned mountain peaks
that disapprovingly framed the distance. The trivial held in the palm
of the profound.
Inside the local Taco Bell, I slunk back to my seat with my trove of
novelty food and sat by the window. Mall-dwelling teenagers laughed,
shouted and generally had a tough time sitting still, while joylessly
attired farmers ate in silence, soundlessly grinding their fair share
of boiled ground beef and milled corn with their jawbone beards. (This
C Everett Koop look was apparently hanging on strong with the Valley’s
gentlemen farmers). Perhaps kids got married a little earlier up here;
maybe gun ownership was less dangerous than going without; but those
differences aside, the view was indistinguishable from that of any
Taco Bell in Ohio or Pennsylvania.
At times Alaska seems almost Soviet – sloughing off rugged
individualism for annual dividend checks from the permanent fund –
but it is indelibly American, and the McCain camp is counting on the
fact that Palin could mount a strong showing in towns like Wasilla
in the lower 48. From where I sat, they were legion.
****************** When I walked into Lisa Catlett’s house, out near
mile marker seven on the Wasilla Fishhook Road, she’d seemed busier
than I’d ever been in my ever-loving life. Her four children swarmed
around her and the house, three boys and a girl ranging in age from
eight to two. She was dealing with the thirty-odd salmon fillets she’d
just brought in from the smokehouse for canning and vacuum sealing. On
top of that there was the unwanted journalist who’d insinuated himself
into spending the afternoon with her and her family to see how real
Valley people got on.
At first I walked up to the wrong door, past several four-wheel drive
vehicles and drooling hounds. After introducing myself to the man of
the house, I asked if he was Rob. He said no. I asked for Lisa. He
asked who I was, warily: "You trying to collect a debt?" We sorted
it out but the message was clear: people look out for their own here.
The Catlett clan had a serious spread. A creek ran from the road up the
left edge of the property, past a trampoline, back into the forest. The
lane led toward a large clearing hewn out of the cottonwood, birch,
aspen, brambles and underbrush, where there stood a matching house and
guesthouse, with dark wood siding and green roofs. The smokehouse,
with huge metal doors borrowed from a meat locker, stood between
them. Outbuildings were in abundance: tree houses, a skate shack,
chicken coops.
Lisa spent the summer between high school and college here, "just to
get an Alaska experience," and after meeting and marrying her husband
Rob, an electrician, in the lower 48, returned to Alaska to raise a
family. The children are all home schooled. "I went to a great books
college," Lisa says, as her kids port ducks around the property,
arguing about their names, "and that really changed my perspective
on what I wanted my kids to learn. I want them to read all the great
books and speak a couple of languages, and I thought they probably
wouldn’t get that in the public schools."
Rob woke her at 6am on August 29th to tell her the news about Sarah
Palin. "I was like, no way! That’s so awesome!"
Lisa, neither partisan nor intensely engaged with politics, had
no doubts about the scope of Palin’s personal appeal. She had once
voted for the famously unpopular former governor, Frank Murkowski –
who Palin later unseated – and almost instantly regretted it. "I’m
tired of the good old boys – they’re so removed from us. And that’s
what I think Sarah’s appeal is, she’s like us. She does get her own
caribou, make moose burger, that kind of stuff, that seems Alaskan. I
don’t need somebody to cook for me. I have to haul my own wood inside
when it’s cold."
"When Obama came out I made it a point to watch him," she
continued. "He was on some talk show telling some story about how
he didn’t like Grey Poupon, he liked mustard, and the whole thing
seemed like a charade, you know? I thought even this attempt to be an
everyman was fake, you’re a fake in a different way but you’re still
a fake and I don’t buy it and I love Sarah Palin! I just think she’ll
tell it like it is and doesn’t care if it upsets people."
I ask Lisa what she makes of the stories detailing Palin’s spotted
record as a reformer in Alaska, but she’s undeterred. "I don’t
know," she says, "that may be true. Maybe I’m jaded but I think all
politicians are politicians, I just think it’s different degrees. I
still like Sarah, I think maybe she’s the least tainted that I’ve
ever seen."
****************** Andrée McLeod is shouting into the phone from a
desk set up in her bedroom as I wait for her at a kitchen table annexed
by stacks of paper. "She’s only powerful if you think she is! This
right here, if it turns out to be true, is a bunch of bull****!"
It is because of McLeod, a lovably obstreperous woman of Armenian
descent somewhere in her fifties, that the world knows of Governor
Palin’s preference for Yahoo over .gov – one of the little details
from Alaska that suggest uncomfortable parallels between the modus
operandi of the Palin State House and the Bush White House, which
also liked to transact government business on private e-mail accounts.
The stacks covering the table are the fruits of McLeod’s request
for e-mails and phone calls between Palin and two aides, whom McLeod
suspected of working in concert to oust the Alaska Republican Party
chair, Randy Ruedrich – a violation of the state executive ethics
code, which forbids conducting party business on state time. It might
seem a venial sin – but it was also precisely the accusation Palin
had earlier wielded to eject Ruedrich from the Alaska Oil and Gas
Conservation Commission- with the help of Andree McLeod herself.
McLeod emigrated from Beirut with her family in 1963, and moved to
Alaska from Long Island thirty years ago. She was apolitical until
1995, when she spied an opportunity to earn money for grad school by
operating a falafel cart in Anchorage. The town fathers squashed her
plans, declaring fried chickpeas "potentially hazardous." She took
the fight to city hall, wound up running for mayor, and her local
state house seat twice, losing the last time in a tight race that
required a recount.
McLeod told me that she’d met Palin shortly after her own failed
state house bid in 2002. They’d stuck up an unlikely friendship, the
home-grown beauty queen and the cerebral but scrappy and energetic
import. Palin complained to McLeod about Ruedrich’s penchant for doing
party work from his office at the AOGCC, where Palin also served –
appointed by Murkowski after her losing bid for Lt. Governor marked
her as a "comer" in the state party. McLeod got tired of Sarah’s
ceaseless complaints and told her to do something about it already.
"She didn’t know how to go about it," McLeod says. "I would guide. So
that reporters would ask her, but there was a role I played in the
background, making sure all the information was correct. But she did
the exact same thing she accused Randy of doing. Had I known that I
wouldn’t have given her the time of day."
The takedown of Randy Ruedrich was Palin’s first public scalping
(of a fellow Republican, no less) and it helped cast her as a dogged
reformer.
"It’s true, Andrée’s almost responsible for creating Sarah Palin,"
Rick Rydell, an Anchorage talk radio host and 2004 Alaska Republican
Man of the Year, tells me over sushi a few days later. Rydell has
just finished his show, which airs weekdays from six to nine in the
morning. His Harley is parked out front and we’re sampling some
hijiki and gyoza, talking about the Palinistas – his disparaging
moniker for those still "drinking the kool-aid."
He’s been in the business twenty-seven years, first in Juneau,
then Portland, getting as far east as Cleveland before returning to
Alaska eighteen years ago. "Being here the day Sarah was announced
as McCain’s VP pick," he recalled as he tossed slabs of raw fish
under his thick handlebar moustache, "was like being at the centre
of a nuclear explosion, just like all eyes were turning and looking
right where you’re sitting." But McCain’s pick didn’t impress him. "I
said this on the air the first day: this looks like a Hail Mary pass
downfield into heavy coverage. And I still think it holds pretty true."
Rydell had been a friend and confidant of Palin’s over the years;
she and her husband Todd – the self-styled "First Dude" – had even
attended his wedding. Yet Rydell was not the only prominent Alaska
Republican to break with the Governor. She still has a glut of fans
and political allies in the state, but does appear to have alienated
an alarming number of those who have been allowed behind the curtain
– among whom it is said that even in Palin’s crusades for ethics,
ambition has often trumped principle.
****************** Laura Chase has a message for the world: "There
isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish I hadn’t done my job
so damned effectively." The job in question was managing Palin’s
successful campaign for mayor of Wasilla in 1996. Palin ousted
three-term incumbent John Stein in a rough campaign; she secured the
endorsement of the National Rifle Association and injected hot-button
"wedge" issues like abortion into the race for what had previously been
a non-partisan office, affixing to Stein the label Palin would later
use so effectively statewide to bring down entrenched Republican pols –
"Good Old Boy".
Chase was born in Palo Alto and moved to Alaska before statehood. She,
like Palin, holds a degree in communications from the University
of Idaho. "She was viewed very positively," Chase said, recalling
Palin’s arrival on the Wasilla City Council. "First of all, she’s
a really attractive young lady, and to get involved on the council,
which was full of a bunch of old folks, was a real shake up."
Palin later asked Chase to run her campaign for mayor, and after
overcoming reservations about unseating "a good man" like Stein,
she accepted. "She said that if she won she would hire me as the city
administrator," confides Chase, still incredulous, "and that the two of
us would provide leadership for Wasilla. The second she won, she didn’t
even remember who I was." The fact that she remains crushed is clear.
"I’m still proud of Sarah," Chase confessed to The New York Times, "but
she scares the bejeebers out of me." When I asked her to elaborate, she
mentioned Palin’s effort to remove books from the public library, which
Chase claims she witnessed first hand. "There’s no place in the world,"
Chase says today, "for people who don’t believe what she believes."
There was a knock at the door – and a reporter from American Media –
publishers of quality supermarket checkout titles like Star and the
National Enquirer – came in to take Chase’s picture. The reporter
asked Chase if "she still had the letter," but Chase told him it had
been shredded. He quickly took his leave, and it was just us and the
awkward silence.
After a few moments I asked about the mysterious letter. "Oh," Chase
sighed, "a week after she won the mayor’s job she dropped by my house
and handed me a check for $1,000" – intended to compensate for the
job that had failed to materialise. "I tore it up, handed it back,
and told her she was lucky that Todd put up with her. A few days
later I received a three-page hand written letter saying, ‘How dare
you? You don’t know anything about mine and Todd’s relationship."
Chase tells me she shredded the letter because "If I kept it I’d never
be able to let it go. It’s kind of a love-hate thing, you know?" And
I did know, because over the course of the hour I’d spent there,
I was shown at least two hulking Palin scrapbooks that were still
very much intact. If anything, I suspected, the letter was purged
because it severed once and for all her connection to the warm fuzzy
she clearly derived from the news clippings and other Palin campaign
kitsch she so obviously prized. We found ourselves in silence again.
"I just wish I didn’t feel this way," she told me, her oval face more
dour now, "because I am so proud of her."
I asked her about this pride – since she had evidently soured on Palin
– and suggested it might relate to the wave of "local girl done good"
and "she’s one of us" feelings washing over Alaska.
"She’s nothing like us!" she stammered, "she doesn’t know what it’s
like to not be able to pay the bills, to not be able to get credit
cards or health insurance for the kids. Not everyone has what they
have; that image is a lie. And it’s not that she’s like us. We’d like
to believe that. People are living vicariously through her. They feel
they’re missing something in life. But she has that way where she
can impact someone in that manner; its like you feel you’re living
that life, and that’s why she can say ‘Oh, I’m just one of them,’
because we’re desperately trying to live vicariously through her
energetic and determined lifestyle. Maybe that’s why I’m so damned
proud of her – I’m doing it too."
As Palin prepared to meet Joe Biden in this week’s vice presidential
debate – and Republican cadres worried publicly about a repeat of
Palin’s recent public missteps – I wondered if Palin’s ineffable
appeal insulated her against even the worst performance she could
deliver. Consider that Laura Chase and Andrée McLeod, former intimates
of Palin turned vocal critics, both offered their services to the
Governor after their disenchantment with her. It seemed as though
she had kindled a faith – perhaps borne of idealism – that exceeded
anything they had known before or since, and a certain nostalgia
for that earlier moment posed a constant temptation to return to the
Palin camp.
Palin has a way of transcending the obstacles that come her way,
gently bypassing possible scandals with apparent ease and little
damage to her sky-high approval ratings in Alaska. "Troopergate" –
with its allegations that Palin fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt
Monegan when he failed to dismiss the Governor’s ex-brother-in-law,
a state trooper – would likely have felled a lesser personality,
but Palin seems to have evaded censure, particularly now that the
McCain campaign has devoted its substantial resources to quashing
the investigation.
State Senate President Lyda Green told me she knows full well the
"Troopergate" allegations were substantial, because she knew the
trooper in question, Mike Wooten. When he told her details from
his confidential personnel file were being used against him by the
lawyer for his ex-wife, Palin’s sister, Green says she contacted a
friend at the appropriate state agency. "I made inquiries," she said,
"and the guy who I talked to happens to be a friend, and he said,
yeah, we’re having a little problem with that.’"
But that inquiry has been stalled by a Republican lawsuit and Palin has
begun to take on a Teflon sheen to which nothing can stick. Before I
left Alaska, I learnt that the local papers had indeed reported on the
substance of McLeod’s allegations against Palin – that she committed
the same offences for which she persecuted Randy Ruedrich – but Palin
waved them away with a brief response: "For any mistakes like that,
that were made, I apologise."
None of this stopped Palin from coasting into the Governor’s mansion,
and her approval rating – even with the additional pressure of national
scrutiny – is still near a robust 70 per cent.
"It’s almost to the point now where people don’t care about her
politics," Democratic State Sen. Bill Wielechowski admitted, "this
is such a small state that it’s like a family, and you want to see
family members succeed. People are just so proud of her and maybe
she had to throw a few people under the bus, but she’s still ours
and she’s making us proud."
David Gargill’s work has appeared in Harper’s, GQ, and several other
publications. He last wrote for The Review on the artist Wafaa Bilal.
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