Going Rogue: An American Life (103 page)

Going Rogue

ing my family, my record, and me. As the number of lawsuits filed against us mounted, and depositions·, declarations, attorney time, staff time, and legal bills piled up, I asked Track again what he thought when he called home one day in the summer of 2009. The call came at noon my time, but it was the middle of the night in Baquba. For the fitst time in the nine months he’d been over there, my soldier sounded kind of beat.

Track was a man by then, twenty yeats old and serving a yearlong deployment as an infanttyman. Though he didn’t like the political spotlight, he had been supportive of my vice ptesidential bid. Now, rhough, he could see the our family

was taking ftom half a world away, and in that summer phone call, my oldest son would once again weigh in on my political future.

2

Naturally enough, I had assumed that after the election everything would go back the way it was before. John McCain would

go back

the Senate, and I would go back to the job I loved. But what a difference ten weeks can make. Before my plane even touched down in Anchorage, shocking character assassinations of those I love had begun. Anonymous McCain campaign staffers were feeding lies FOX News’ Carl Cameron, who reported them without heating our side of the story. I could roll with shoes against me, but the new blows against my family, my ad
ministration, and our state were over the top.
Other inaccurate stoties followed, including one in which it was reported rhat RNC lawyers were
lyingp>

Alaska

retrieve

clothes “stolen” ftom the campaign. Itonically, the campaign had
ordered
the B Team

pack the fancy RNC wardrobe into the

belly of our JetBlue plane and fly it back to Wasilla. There Jason,

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SARAH

PALIN

Jeanie, and Bexie joined us in immediately inventorying it all, right down to the $70 nylons. Then he and Todd FedExed some thirty boxes of clothes and fourteen empty suitcases to the RNC. The media’s constant pelting reminded me of the times we kids used to go out in the canoe with Dad near the Knik mudflats early mornings before school. Fall was duck-hunting season. There would be hunters all around us, and I would huddle up, trying to stay warm, as lead pellets rained down around us in the water. I’d peer through the dark early-morning fog and grumble, “Geez, Dad! There’s bullets flying around my head!” He’d say, “Nah, that’s just buckshot. Duck.” It was almost funny, certainly ridiculous, the political buckshot critics fired our way. Nationally, pundits and reporters would criticize me for focusing on Alaska and not attending the celebrity-packed events we were invited to Outside; locally, the opposition would criticize me for focusing on national issues-as if I suddenly needed to become parochial and think of Alaska’s issues as irrelevant to the nation. In Juneau, one Democrat lawmaker complained that I wasn’t as “sparky” as before and that Piper and I no longer brought around bagels like we used to. The few times I hustled out of the state to attend, for instance, a fund-raiser for kids with special needs, my Juneau critics cried that they were being abandoned.

Perhaps in another time and place it would have been endearing to know that lawmakers, mostly Democrats, wanted me nearby. (“There’s a pothole that needs repair on the Seward Highway! If she goes, who will fill it?”) But it was obviously disingenuous and absurd. Somehow my predecessors had been able to take extensive trips in the continental U.S. and abroad without anyone worrying that the state was at imminent risk of complere collapse the moment they left.

But since August 29 we were living in a “new normal.” •

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Going

Pundits seemed to assume that I was thinking only of my future on rhe national stage. And no matrer how many times and in how many

I repeated the plain fact thar Alaska came

first, the opposition interprered every position I took rhrough rhe prism of my supposed “national ambirions.” Even my previously posirive relationship wirh local media changed. For example, during a rourine interview for a srory abour a Thanksgiving turkey pardoning, our old friends at KTUU set up an odd camera angle to capture rurkeys being decapitated behind me as I stood there discussing Alaska’s relarively strong financial standing during the current recession. The phorographer couldn’t POSt it to the Web fasr enough. The video became an instant YouTube hit.

Now, r d be the first person to tell you where your Thanksgiving meal comes from, but this was a deliberate move to make some noise. My deputy press secretary, Sharon Leighow, was appalled afrer it aired and called rhe phorographer to ask him why he’d done that. We’d worked wirh this photog for years and had known him (and rhe starion) to have inregrity.

The KTUU news director told Kris and me later that he was profoundly sorry for the station’s lack of professionalism and rhar he had not known his employee to have

engaged in rhat kind

of taeric before. Kris told him he needed to catch up with the times: his photog and one of his reporters had approached her that day about

idea they had for a reality TV show starring

me. We declined.

“Oh;’ the news director said quietly. “No, I didn’t know my guys were doing that.”

That was an ultimately harmless incident (for everyone but the turkey), but there were others that left us truly appalled. In February, an Associated Press reporter asked Sharon if our commissioners could attend a press conference with me because