Going rogue in lakeside Alaska
Frosty reception ... when Joe McGinniss moved next door, the Palins put up a high fence. Photo: AP
Neighbourly relations were tense when an author moved in beside Sarah Palin, writes David Marr.
Sarah Palin isn't the vice-president of the United States. You may have noticed. Nor is she a candidate this year for high office. But Mama Grizzly ain't done. She's on Fox News five nights a week campaigning as hard for herself as the Republicans.
She's in red. The hair is bigger than ever. Her thoughts still dangle from the sky. "A boiled egg is hard to beat," she said of the Republican candidates for the presidency the other night. "They have been through a lot of hot water."
That she hasn't been bubbling in the pot with Newt and Rick and Mitt has a good deal to do with the mirth and outrage provoked last year by the publication of The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, an account of the woman's life and shabby times by veteran reporter Joe McGinniss.
Sarah Palin and husband Todd. Photo: AFP
"It's one thing to run for vice-president," McGinniss tells the Herald. "People don't probe that hard. But if she were to be the Republican candidate in 2012 people would be all over this stuff about her past
"I think Rogue was a wake-up call that if she were to go forward this year she wasn't going to get the kind of fawning treatment she got from the press in 2008 just because she was a dazzling fresh face. America loves dazzling fresh faces."
McGinniss was such a face in 1968 when his expose of the Nixon campaign, The Selling of the President, sold by the hundreds of thousands and shifted the! boundar ies of political reporting. Since then he's written a lot of crime, had a famous brawl with the critic Janet Malcolm, dug deep for dirt on Teddy Kennedy and written for all the classy American magazines.
"Fantastic," is his rating of Palin's debut performance as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in September 2008. "It was one of the great political speeches of our time. She has never equalled that performance. That was very carefully scripted and she carried it off majestically.
"Even the things she said that were completely false like 'we're building a $US40 billion natural gas pipeline' didn't matter because she said them so convincingly. I thought, everything I've heard about Sarah Palin is that she is just a dimwit but this was the essence of charisma."
Conde Nast magazine Portfolio sent McGinniss to Alaska to research the pipeline he would end up ridiculing as "the great white whale of Alaskan resource development". He knew the state well after spending time there reporting the oil boom of the late 1970s. The magazine assignment had him on the ground when Palin returned a changed woman after her 2008 poll defeat.
"Alaska had seemed as big as life," he wrote. "But viewed from the Land of Oz, where she'd been for the past 10 weeks, it looked insignificant, marginal, downright puny. She'd been at the white-hot centre. How could she go back to the cold, dark edge?"
McGinniss turned his full attention to Palin, digging through the trash of the little town of Wasilla where she was mayor in the mid-1990s; interrogating witnesses of her climb to power as governor in 2006; and investigating her amazing selection as Republican candidate for the vice-presidency.
His research - or at least his accommodation in Alaska - made news around the world. "Joe McGinniss has rented the house next to the Palin family's lakeside home in Wasilla, Alaska, for five months while he completes his work," reported this paper's website in May 2010.
Palin posted on Faceboo! k: "Wond er what kind of material he'll gather while overlooking Piper's bedroom, my little garden, and the family's swimming hole?"
The Palins built a three-metre-high fence. He had death threats. The publicity boiled along all summer. The market was panting by the time The Rogue appeared in September last year.
"Palin did everything she could to stop it," says McGinniss. "She threatened. She had a lawyer announce she was considering a lawsuit." That didn't happen. But within weeks of publication, Palin announced she would not be running in 2012.
McGinniss is far from claiming sole responsibility. As he sees it, Palin faced two problems running for the Republican nomination this year: she didn't have a hope of winning and any attempt would expose her to the sort of scrutiny that would put at risk her lucrative new career as a political celebrity.
"These people worked out a way to game the system," McGinniss says of the Palin family. "I don't blame them. They are just grifters who suddenly saw a chance at the main chance and they were clever enough and canny enough to take it. The American media was so gullible and the right wing was so desperate for new heroic figures that they basically got a free ride. She knew she wouldn't get a free ride this year in 2012."
His attack on Palin is full throttle. "I think everything about her is false. I think her claims of super Christianity are as false as everything else. She discovered who she needed to be to play to a very small audience in her town of Wasilla and she has calculated her way every step of the way. There has been an opening for a woman of the extreme right. She saw that.
"Even in Alaska there were no openings for educated, intelligent women of the left because Alaska - part of the anomaly that is the state - had a number of those already. What they needed was a militant crusader for evangelical values. And she combined - and we can never underestimate this - raw sex appeal with Christian platitudes. The Ancho! rage Dai ly News called her 'The Joan of Arc of Alaska politics'. There was nothing subtle about it."
What followed in his eyes was a tale of cunning and vengeance; high ambition and lazy performance; bobsleds and cocaine; a toxic marriage that saw Todd sleeping on the couch most nights and the kids roaming the neighbourhood looking for a feed. Then young Track was shunted off to the military after the high-school bus fleet was mysteriously vandalised one winter.
"I laughed," says McGinniss. "The closer I got and the more people I talked to who knew her, the more I laughed. After a while laughter gave way to a numb stupefaction that this brainless, venal, definitely crafty, religious fanatic and self-aggrandising bimbo could have become a powerful factor in national politics."
McGinniss devotes hilarious and scurrilous pages to the mystery of little Trig, the Down syndrome baby born soon after Palin won John McCain's endorsement. "The story she tells of her pregnancy and the birth simply can't be true," says McGinniss who wonders if the "birth" was designed to make Palin the poster child of the Right to Life.
"It would be the most cynical ploy and the greatest hoax ever pulled off in American politics," he says. Pursuing the story with him are bloggers and the influential columnist Andrew Sullivan. But McGinniss despairs of the failure of the "establishment media" to take the story seriously. He doesn't believe the issue is yet settled either way: "I remain Trignostic," he says.
Rogue is as much about Alaska as Palin. "She could only have happened in Alaska," he says. "Alaska is our place of last resort. It's where people go when they can't make it anywhere else. The end of the trail. The frontier. It's the desperate people who move to Alaska to try to find a new start where their past can be wiped out. You have a lot of emotional instability."
But has the Republican Party learnt its lesson?
"It has. The primaries have weeded out the true extremists like Per! ry from Texas and Santorum and Gingrich Mitt Romney comes from Bain Capital, people who analyse cost benefits and risk-reward ratios. He is not going to go off the deep end and choose some unknown. I think for both major parties the lasting lesson of Palin - no lessons last for ever but at least for the next generation - is that you cannot take a risk."
Palin is now rich, free of the troublesome burdens of office, a big presence on Fox News and a determined woman with ambition large and small. "She has tried desperately to arrange photo ops with the dying Margaret Thatcher," says McGinniss.
"So far she has been unsuccessful." She has brushed aside the rebuffs of Mrs Thatcher's people. "She will stop at nothing. There are boundaries of taste that even the most extreme politician will bump up against.''
So what is McGinniss doing in the 2012 election? "Voting for Obama."
Joe McGinniss will be in conversation with Annabel Crabb at the Sydney Writers' Festival on May 19, and in other talks on May 17 and 18. David Marr is on the board of the festival.
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