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Last Updated: Oct 9, 2008 - 10:41:19 AM |
It's unlikely the name Sarah Palin would mean much to anyone if not for
a man named Nick Carney. Long before she stood up to Republican cronies
and "the good old boys" of Alaska, Palin stood up to Carney, a
colleague on Wasilla's city council. As Kaylene Johnson explains in her
sympathetic biography, Sarah, Carney had the gall to propose an
ordinance giving his own company the city contract for garbage removal.
In Johnson's telling, it was the first time Palin bravely spoke truth
to power: "'I said no and I voted no,' Sarah said. 'People should have
the choice about whether or not to haul their garbage to the dump.'"
Johnson writes that Palin's vote made Carney into a "political
enemy"--the first of many, it turns out.
The episode might serve as a compelling, if small-bore, example of
Palin's reformer instincts. Except that, according to those who were
present, Carney wasn't quite the crooked trash magnate Palin makes him
out to be. For one thing, Carney couldn't have proposed the ordinance
because he'd recused himself from the matter. The council, in fact, had
asked him to appear as a kind of expert witness on the relevant rules
and regulations. "I looked at it as we actually had an expert on the
council sharing the information," recalls Laura Chase, a fellow
councilwoman. "Not ... conspiring over a contract. There was no way
that was happening."
So if it wasn't a sinister garbage conspiracy that put Carney in
Palin's crosshairs, what was it? At first glance, the two would have
appeared to be allies--both had spent most of their lives in Wasilla
and had attended the same high school. But, beyond that, they were
sociological opposites in almost every respect. Whereas Palin had
bounced around several no-name colleges before graduating from the
University of Idaho, Carney held a degree from Dartmouth. Palin seemed
preoccupied with her family and church when she entered politics.
Carney was preoccupied with histories of the Civil War and World War II
(he later contributed a self-published book to the genre) and savored
the New York Times crossword puzzle. By the time he joined the city
council, Carney had traveled to Asia, Australia, and Central America.
He'd run the Anchorage office of Alaska's economic development agency
and had served as the state's agriculture director. "I'd dealt with
larger budgets by far than the city of Wasilla," he recently told me.
Carney had a wry sense of humor. He was fond of joking that he'd
graduated from Wasilla High School in the "top 20 percent"--by which he
meant he was valedictorian of his five-person class. Sometimes Palin
was the only colleague who didn't get his jokes. "I don't think he had
too much patience for her lack of understanding," says John Stein, then
the town's mayor. In internal discussions, Carney would be relentlessly
logical while Palin was vague and intuitive. "Nick had a way of being
direct and to the point, something that Sarah was uncomfortable with,"
recalls Chase. Which is to say, when it came to garbage removal, what
Palin seemed to have chafed against was less the substance of Carney's
position than what she felt was his elitist, Ivy League bearing. And,
over the next few years, she found ways to get him back.
These days, Palin is engaged in this same fight against elites, though
on a considerably larger stage. "I'm not one of those who maybe came
from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and
their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go
off and travel the world," she recently told Katie Couric. "No, I've
worked all my life." That hardly makes her the first politician to run
on class resentments--nearly every conservative from George W. Bush to
Mitt Romney has sought a bond with voters by attacking the
over-educated and entitled. But more often than not these conservatives
are elites themselves; hence the spectacle of Yale legacies and Harvard
millionaires (and most of the Fox News executive suite) railing against
wine-swilling sophisticates.
Palin, by contrast, may be the first conservative politician since
Nixon to experience resentment so authentically. For her, it's not so
much a political tool as a motivating principle. A trip through Palin's
past reveals that almost every step of her career can be understood as
a reaction to elitist condescension--much of it in her own mind.
Before he became her enemy, Nick Carney was actually Palin's
mentor--though, like John McCain, his reasons for championing her had
much to do with his own political agenda. In the early '90s, Carney and
a group of local business leaders decided the city needed a sales tax
to fund public services--such as a police force--it could no longer
live without. To advance this position in an area not exactly teeming
with Great Society liberals, they'd formed a group called "Watch on
Wasilla" and persuaded John Stein, then the mayor, to embrace their
cause. Carney won his seat on the city council in 1992 on the back of
these efforts.
Heading into that election, Carney and Stein realized their program
would go nowhere if they couldn't connect with what you might call
Wal-Mart moms--that great mass of voters too busy earning a living and
raising their families to follow local politics. "We were lacking lines
of communication between the council as it existed and the younger bloc
of voters in town," recalls Carney. "We didn't have anyone on there who
worked [as a laborer] for a living or who was a housewife."
Carney's daughter had gone to high school with Palin; Stein and his
wife knew her from an aerobics class they attended. She seemed bright
and energetic and had a winning way about her--the same qualities
McCain would notice 15 years later. They invited her to attend a "Watch
on Wasilla" meeting and, after a brief interview, asked her to run on
their moderate plank. Carney introduced her to local business leaders
and campaigned alongside her. "I took her around . .. and said, 'This
is a person who supports our points of view. She'll do what she can to
make the police force run.' And she did it." It was a bit like Palin's
convention rollout in miniature, and the initial effect was similar.
Palin breezed into office with Carney that October.
Palin's first year or two on the council went smoothly by all accounts.
"I was relatively pleased at the fact that she did communicate back and
forth to that group," Carney says. "She would make good decisions."
But, in retrospect, there were signs of tension. Though council members
routinely bickered with one another, Palin became defensive when she
was on the receiving end. "Sarah is intimidated, in my personal
opinion, by people who are intelligent," Laura Chase says.
The city had traditionally put up part of the purse for the Iron Dog
competition--the grueling, 2,000-mile snow machine race that usually
starts in Wasilla--and one year the council considered upping its ante.
(First prize could be tens of thousands of dollars.) When a colleague
pointed out that Palin should recuse herself because her husband was a
perennial Iron Dog contender, she protested, "I don't think I have a
conflict of interest here because Todd won it last year. There's no
guarantee that he's going to win it this year." As others chimed in to
explain the problem, Palin dug in her heels. "Well, it could be
perceived that way, but it isn't," she harrumphed.
As a rule, the city's department heads attended every city council
meeting. One evening, as the session wound down, Palin mentioned to
Mary Ellen Emmons, the library director, that something had been
bothering her--a book she thought was overly indulgent of
homosexuality. "She said there was no room in our library for that kind
of stuff," recalls Chase. Emmons curtly disagreed, but Palin was
adamant. She suggested the librarian could at least keep such books in
the reference section, where visitors would have to request them. "We
don't believe in censoring books," Emmons finally told her, at which
point Palin trailed off muttering.
Palin also butted heads at times with Dick Deuser, the city attorney.
Deuser was not your average small-town lawyer. He'd attended law school
at the University of Minnesota and had worked for a prominent Anchorage
firm. At one point, the council asked him about the legality of banning
group homes--such as shelters for runaways--a position Palin
championed. Deuser had an academic manner and was fond of citing
Supreme Court precedent. When he explained that a ban would be
unconstitutional, Palin appeared impatient with such legal niceties. "I
would describe it this way: Sarah was not an in-depth person. Never
has, never will be," Deuser says. "Her instincts are political as
opposed to evaluative."
That Palin would feel threatened by the more urbane members of the
community is no surprise given her upbringing. Late one September
morning in Wasilla, I met a high school classmate of Palin's named
Perry Cowles, a warm, scruffy- looking man with a soul patch and
hipster glasses. Cowles overhauls hot rods for a living, and his shop
sits at the front of a three-acre lot. A few hundred yards back is his
residence, which he described to me as "a typical Alaska house: seven
hundred feet of living space; five thousand feet of garage space."
For lunch, Cowles took me to a restaurant near the top of Hatcher Pass,
a fearsome peak from which, on a clear day, you can see the Knik River
off in the distance. He flipped through his high school yearbook while
we ate. Almost every page reminded him of another classmate who'd
passed away--one who died when his prop-jet crashed, another who
drowned in a lake. I got the sense life in small-town Alaska was
somehow more precarious than in the lower 48.
Or, for that matter, in Anchorage. Though it's only 45 miles away,
Anchorage can feel like an alternate universe--a far more affluent and
cosmopolitan one at that. In Wasilla, the resentment has sometimes been
intense. Cowles had been a hockey player in high school. In those days,
the town had a single outdoor rink, which he and his teammates would
mop after games and practices. He jokingly recalled how the Anchorage
teams would show up in their parents' new cars wearing $200 skates
"while we had tennis shoes with butter knives." "I'll never forget--we
had a game with a team we were outmatched against," Cowles told me.
"Our coach said, 'We can't win. But you go out there and I want blood.
I want you to teach these rich kids a lesson.' And we did."
Palin nursed a milder form of this grievance as a high school
basketball player. When Palin's coach, Don Teeguarden, arrived at the
school in 1976, there were only 300 students and the team was abysmal.
To improve, Teeguarden scheduled the powerful Anchorage teams, which,
he told me, "was a pretty easy sell" for a no-name like Wasilla. By the
time Palin was playing for him a few years later, the Wasilla girls had
improved significantly--becoming a state power in their own right--but
they still sometimes struggled to be taken seriously. "It was easy to
put that small school chip on our shoulder," says Teeguarden. "If an
Anchorage school came to Wasilla and we won, it was like it didn't
count because they had to travel forty miles. To really get much
respect from the Anchorage press, we had to go into town and win."
Palin's church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, also marked her as an
outsider. The modern Pentecostal tradition traces its roots to a
grassroots religious fervor at the start of the twentieth century. In
the ensuing decades, followers tended to be less educated and affluent
than their Protestant brethren. The tradition is also more democratic,
in that it emphasizes a direct connection with Christ through the Holy
Spirit. Hence the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues (in which
congregants are moved by the Holy Spirit to speak in unfamiliar
languages) and the laying on of hands (in which congregants invoke the
Holy Spirit and heal one another with their touch).
Paul Riley, the church's founding pastor, personally epitomized the
overlay of religion and class in Wasilla. Since Riley's work as a
minister wasn't lucrative enough to support his family, he spent years
moonlighting as a school bus driver while his wife worked in the post
office. He sometimes endured the sneering of local elites. In 1980, he
decided to construct a building large enough to house a 1,000-member
church--a far bigger flock than he had at the time. It was a massive
undertaking that took four years to complete and required $1 million in
capital, even with the help of dozens of volunteers from around the
country. "I had one banker that was concerned about me," Riley told me.
"He said, 'What'll happen if you can't pay back the loan?' I said,
'We'll be here when you're gone.' The honest truth: He was gone before
the church was finished. The bank went belly-up. ... I just felt in my
own heart that God was giving us direction."
Against this backdrop, Palin suffered her own petty slights and
indignities. Growing up, she'd been pushed to great lengths by her
hard-charging father, Chuck Heath. Heath had competed in the Boston
Marathon and would lead his brood on grueling runs through the Mat-Su
Valley. He had exacting standards for his children, sometimes higher
than his daughter could deliver on. Palin was, according to classmates,
an above-average basketball player, but hardly a star. Even as a
junior, she found herself languishing on the JV team.
But Palin compensated for what she lacked in talent (and height) with a
freakish intensity. When I asked Elwyn Fischer, another classmate, how
Palin got the nickname "barracuda," he thought it had to do with "that
little grin thing she does." "She sets her teeth, it looks like she's
eating jerky," Fischer said. "Flashing some fang, you know." Teeguarden
allowed that "as a young player--freshman, sophomore--she was a bit
foul-prone. ... She wasn't about to back down. I'm guessing it was
connected to those kinds of things."
Palin is often described in profiles as an academic standout. But, as
on the basketball court, she was good but not great. Like most high
schools, Wasilla had several distinct subcultures--among them, a
religious/jock clique, of which Palin was a part, and a group of more
bookish kids that took AP classes and studied theater. "We were
considered the geekier, nerdy kids. We were smarter," recalls Elle Ede,
another classmate. And yet Palin didn't lack for academic ambition.
Rodger Foreman, one of her English teachers, would allow students to
appeal their exam grades if they felt they'd been scored harshly.
Foreman recalls that Palin regularly availed herself of the appeals
process. "She was kind of like that. She thought she was right."
By 1996, a cultural shift in Alaska had emboldened Palin to take on
Carney and Stein and enforce her own sense of right. Since it came
online in the 1970s, Alaska's oil pipeline had attracted legions of
Sunbelters--oil men from Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. They were
largely right-wing evangelicals who preferred Wasilla--where land was
cheap, zoning was minimal, and taxes were low--to the more uppity
environs of Anchorage. Their presence led to a proliferation of
conservative churches and anti-government attitudes. By 1994, the same
Republican tide that swept the Democrats from Congress had reached the
Mat-Su Valley as the conservative hordes came of age.
In 1996, Palin was also asserting herself more and more. For example,
she'd demand to know why Stein, the mayor, had "raised the budget."
Stein and Carney tried to explain that he'd done nothing of the
kind--that, when a city grows, businesses collect more in tax revenue,
but that new residents also increase demand for public services. Palin
wasn't appeased. She'd say things like, "'Oh, okay. Well, that's the
way you think about it,'" Stein recalls. "I was thinking--these are
things she should know better. Why is she asking me these stupid
questions?"
Carney saw ulterior motives. During a break one evening, he stopped
Palin as she was heading to the restroom. "Sarah, it sounds like you're
running for mayor," he said, half-joking. Palin turned red and became
visibly upset. "What makes you say that? I never said I was running for
mayor." "You never denied it, " Carney responded. Palin just repeated
herself and stomped off.
Within a few months, Palin was officially challenging Stein and
exploiting the cultural shift masterfully. She welcomed a national
anti-abortion group in to carpet bomb Wasilla with pink postcards
affirming her pro-life bona fides. She orchestrated an NRA endorsement
and a mailing from the group falsely proclaiming Stein, a lifelong
hunter, "anti-gun." (Stein complained to the local newspaper that Palin
was telling voters he wanted to "melt down" all the firearms in the
state.) And, in a move practically out of Karl Rove's playbook, she
dwelled on how Stein's wife used her maiden name, going so far as to
demand a marriage certificate as proof of their nuptials. Palin's
campaign literature proclaimed her "deeply devoted to conservative
family values"--all in the context of an ostensibly nonpartisan
election. (Stein himself was a moderate Republican.)
Upon winning, Palin moved quickly to punish her snooty tormentors. Days
after she was elected, the city council became deadlocked over how to
fill two seats--Palin's and another that had opened up when its
occupant won higher office. Palin insisted on making her own
appointments, a move of dubious legality sure to irritate Carney. When
he objected, she simply cut off discussion. She later accused him of
sabotaging her proposed candidates. As she explained to the Mat-Su
Valley Frontiersman, the local paper: "'It was brilliant maneuvering I
had to do to deal with the impasse.'" "And," the same article
continued, "the look on Carney's face when she appointed Steve Stoll
and Dianne Keller told her the strategy worked, she said."
Within a year, Palin had blown through her personal enemies list. She
had demanded the resignation of Emmons, the librarian opposed to
censorship (who successfully fought for her job), and Irl Stambaugh,
the city's police chief. Among Stambaugh's crimes? Insufficient
enthusiasm when Palin asked him to file a weekly report listing "at
least two positive examples of work that was started, how we helped the
public, how we saved the City money, how we helped the state, how we
helped Uncle Sam," according to The Seattle Times.
Palin also persuaded allies on the city council to can Dick Deuser, the
city attorney. "She wanted yes-or-no answers ... and he would give her
more sophisticated answers," recalls Anne Kilkenny, the local gadfly
and author of an anti-Palin e-mail that became nearly ubiquitous after
Palin joined the GOP ticket. "She hated it. ... She'd get very
irritated, really irritated."
And Palin took every opportunity to humiliate her former mentor. "She
had people coming in, castigating me," Carney recalls. "Anything I
proposed, even innocuous resolutions, went down to defeat." At city
council meetings, Palin would sit and chitchat with allies at great
length while Carney held his hand waiting to speak. Finally, toward the
end of the meeting, Palin would turn and ask, "Oh, Nick, did you have
something to say? Well, keep it brief."
To this day, Palin's most impressive achievement--the one that vaulted
her to the governorship and made her a candidate for vice
president--was partly an outgrowth of these same resentments. In 2003,
thenGovernor Frank Murkowski appointed Palin to be the "public member"
on the three-person Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC).
She resigned from the position eleven months later and, not long after,
helped bring to light the ethical problems of a fellow commissioner
named Randy Ruedrich.
Ruedrich shared some of Nick Carney's qualities. He was well-educated
(he'd come to the commission with a Ph.D. in engineering) and impatient
with his intellectual inferiors. (As Palin crammed to get up to speed
on energy issues, consuming several books recommended by her staff,
Ruedrich seemed to scoff at her credentials.) But, unlike Carney,
Ruedrich also violated ethics rules. After several months, it became
obvious that Ruedrich was interacting privately with companies the
aogcc regulated. Some of them, such as BP, owed him deferred
compensation from earlier employment.
Ruedrich's hauteur created tension with Palin from the get-go. "I got
the impression he was surprised he wasn't made chairman instead of
her," says Linda Berg, then an AOGCC administrative staffer. (A
Ruedrich spokesman denies this.) "He was just arrogant. That's the
biggest thing I remember." This appears to have exacerbated some of
Palin's own insecurities. "She would say she wasn't qualified for the
job," her fellow commissioner, Dan Seamount, told me. "I differed with
her. She brought a lot."
In addition to serving on the commission, Ruedrich headed the state
Republican Party, and he would spend hours each day fielding calls on
his cell phone. He also had a habit of bypassing Palin and speaking
directly with contacts in Murkowski's orbit. Before long, Palin told
Seamount that Ruedrich's private meetings really bothered her and
reported them to her supervisors. Though Ruedrich eventually resigned,
Palin worried about a possible cover-up. She quit the commission after
urging the administration to come clean.
It was a classic even-paranoids-have-enemies case. "[Ruedrich] didn't
think she was much of a threat, nothing to be dealt with," says
Seamount. Had Palin been a more mellow and forgiving soul, Ruedrich
might have been right. But he badly miscalculated.
Although Palin did Alaskans a service by blowing the whistle on
Ruedrich, it's not exactly reassuring that a potential vice president
is prone to vendettas that will on occasion be justified. One evening,
I paid a visit to Anne Kilkenny, who had by this point ascended to
local icon status. Kilkenny is a stout woman with a pretty face and a
flair for the dramatic. Midway through our conversation, she turned to
me and lowered her voice: "What happens to me if Sarah Palin wins?"
Kilkenny believes she's on Palin's enemies list, though she concedes
she doesn't know for sure what Palin thinks of her.
It's easy to see Kilkenny as Palin's culture-war antithesis. She grew
up in San Francisco and holds a degree from Berkeley. She proudly calls
herself a social liberal. But Kilkenny isn't so easy to stereotype. Her
husband, Pat Johnson, hails from a conservative Wasilla family that's
been close to Palin's for decades. Pat's mom Eileen once belonged to a
Christian women's group that included Palin's mother--"I used to walk
with a limp, but my leg grew two inches after the ladies laid their
hands on me," Eileen told me.
Kilkenny initially supported Palin. But, once the mayor bludgeoned the
town librarian about book-banning, Kilkenny and a group of concerned
residents held a meeting to mull a possible recall. After much debate,
they decided to help Palin become a better mayor instead.
The group's efforts reflected a kind of establishment delusion--the
hope that if you just surround the rough-hewn outsider with the right
advisers and submerge her in the proper environment, she'll eventually
assimilate. It's a delusion that's playing out all over again on the
McCain campaign, amid all the briefings with the likes of Henry
Kissinger and Joe Lieberman. Give Palin a few months in the Old
Executive Office Building, the thinking goes, and she'll become Adlai
Stevenson. But it never quite works out that way. As Nixon
demonstrated, the forces of class resentment can be allconsuming and
elemental.
"I remember after the recall meeting how I was going to help her,"
Kilkenny told me. Palin had a habit of smacking gum during city council
meetings. Kilkenny thought more people would take her seriously if she
knocked it off. "So at the next council meeting, I sat next to her mom.
I said, 'Tell Sarah to ditch the gum.'" And the response? "She didn't
take it too well."
Could Sarah Palin despise Anne Kilkenny because Kilkenny once suggested
she refrain from chewing gum? I'd like to believe it's not true. But
I'm honestly not so sure.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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