At the age of 10, Sarah Palin got her very own bunny rabbit. Which means to
say that she crouched down in the grass outside her family home, aimed her
shotgun and blew its furry little head off. That's how things work in
Alaska. You kill stuff. You freeze it. You turn it into stew. Even as a
pre-pubescent, the future Governor of Alaska - and now, perhaps, the future
Vice-President of the United States - was able to fully exercise her
Second-Amendment right to keep and bear arms. There's no doubt about it:
even by the standards of the Deep South or the Wild West, America's 49th
state is an intense place. It's absurdly big, for a start. Bigger than
Britain, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark combined. Yet it has the
population of Bristol. The capital, Juneau, isn't even accessible by land -
which tells you everything you need to know about how much Alaskans enjoy
other people's company. They'd rather be alone in the mountains, fully
armed.
Strictly speaking, Palin isn't a native Alaskan, but she might as well be. She
moved there from Idaho as an infant when her father, Chuck Heath, took a
teaching job in Skagway, near the border with British Columbia. The family
moved later to Wasilla, a town of 400 people, about an hour to the northeast
of the state's biggest city, Anchorage. Until two years ago Palin was Mayor
of Wasilla, which is why no one in their right mind expected John McCain to
appoint her as his vice-presidential candidate - a job that potentially puts
her second-in-line to the most powerful job on Planet Earth. To be fair, of
course, Wasilla is bigger than it used to be. According to most estimates,
all of 7,000 people call it home today.
In an effort to find out what inspired McCain's decision, I took a six-hour
flight from Los Angeles to Anchorage, rented a suitably robust 4x4 and
headed north into the wilderness where Palin was brought up. Could all the
astonishing details I had read about this 44-year-old woman's life possibly
be true? Basketball prodigy. Wife of a half-Inuit named Todd who races
snowmobiles and calls himself the First Dude. Part-time commercial
fisherwoman. Talented moose-killer. Beautiful - former runner-up Miss
Alaska. Mother of five (one of whom is named Piper Indy, after the Polaris
Indy snowmobile). And, of course, governor - with an Eliot Ness agenda that
has seen her take on the members of her own Republican Party, calling out
corruption and wasteful government spending, going as far as to auction her
predecessor's private jet on eBay.
And let's not forget the evangelical Christianity, the creationism, and the
steadfast belief in the sanctity of life that meant she didn't think twice
about keeping her youngest son after it was confirmed during pregnancy that
the boy would struggle with Down's syndrome. Aside from her lack of
experience (although after the battles she's waged it's not unreasonable to
suggest that she's just as qualified as Barack Obama, if not slightly more
so), the Google-search on her life seemed just, well...too good to be true:
for red-state Republicans, at least.
Even from the air, Alaska is an intimidating place: the plane comes down low
over jagged peaks, circles over a godforsaken island, then finally puts down
its wheels over the muddy waves of the Cook Inlet, strewn with splintered
logs and fishing vessels. Anchorage itself is more of a frontier town than I
had imagined: strip-malls, bars, a handful of oil company skyscrapers. I
keep expecting to see a bear in the street: two joggers have been mauled in
recent months. There are so few people that I briefly wonder if a neutron
bomb landed before my flight. A sign advertises gun loans. I buy a cup of
coffee from an Inuit, and it tastes exactly how you would imagine a cup of
coffee made by an Inuit would taste. In the car park of my hotel, someone
has written “Way to Go, Sarah!!!” in red, white and blue lettering on the
back of their Ford Explorer SUV.
I pick up a copy of the Anchorage Daily News and see that Palin's improbable
career is already being given the CSI treatment: it turns out that her
crusading opposition to the so-called Bridge To Nowhere - which would have
linked an island with a population of 50 to the Alaskan mainland at the cost
of a third of a billion dollars - was nothing of the sort. As John Kerry
might put it, she was for the bridge before she was against it. “I think
we're going to make a good team as we progress that bridge project,” the
paper quoted her as saying in 2006, while campaigning for governor. Standing
by McCain's side last week, she declared: “I told Congress, thanks but no
thanks on that bridge.”
With the details of that story ringing in my head - along with other
allegations that McCain's new vice-presidential candidate forced a public
safety commissioner to resign after he refused to fire a police officer
involved in a messy divorce with Palin's sister - I drive to Wasilla. It's a
small, unkempt-looking place, defined by a series of out-of-town stores, a
huge lumber yard, a ramshackle bar named the Mug-Shot Saloon with Harley
Davidsons parked outside, and a lake, by the side of which is Palin's house.
In the distance, under grey skies, snow-drizzled mountains loom. This part
of Alaska is called the Mat-Su Valley - it's between the Matanuska and
Susitna rivers - and the residents, including Palin, proudly call themselves
Valley Trash. Since Friday, the place has been mobbed with secret-service
agents and visitors such as myself.
Palin's primary boast about her two terms as Wasilla's mayor is that she
helped it to become the fastest-growing town in Alaska, encouraging the
construction of all those out-of-town stores by the highway. At the same
time, she served on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, where
she took it upon herself to single-handedly dismantle the “good ol' boy
network”, resulting in one of her fellow commissioners and Alaska's former
attorneygeneral both paying record fines for ethics violations. The
Republicans of Alaska must have wondered what on earth hit them (before
Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla, she coached the incumbent in an aerobics
class). McCain is now keen to point out that Obama - who tends to toe the
Democratic line - has never shown any willingness to make such uncomfortable
decisions on his own turf.
He has a point.
Unable to find any locals to interview, I decide to stand in front of Wal-Mart
and ambush people as they leave. But first I must buy pens. At the till I
find myself behind a teenager purchasing a rainjacket disguised to look like
a hedge. “Hunting trip?” asks the middle-aged female cashier. “Moose,” he
replies. “I got myself a big one the other day,” says the cashier. “Sweet,”
replies the teenager.
Outside the store I collar Bobby and Mary Deason, both in their sixties. Bobby
is retired, Mary works for the school district. It turns out their children
went to school with Palin, and know her well. “I think she's great,” says
Bobby, who adds that his relatives in Alabama woke him up with the news of
her appointment. “I always knew she'd be picked if she was considered,” he
says. “She's the best-lookin' governor in the country, heh-heh!” Like Palin,
Bobby is a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and I
can't help but warm to him. “Last week, I shot a nice brown bear,” he tells
me, grinning. “And I got myself a nice bull caribou, too.”
Others are similarly enthusiastic. Melinda Crockett, 35, tells me that
McCain's choice of Palin convinced her to vote Republican. “I think that
mothers can do great things,” she says, as her two daughters pull on her
sleeves. “She's a great choice. She adds youth and freshness.” All of this
is to be expected, of course. If you believe the polls, Palin has an
approval rating somewhere north of 80 per cent - truly astonishing for any
politician. Perhaps it's because in a state where men often travel to the
end of the Earth to fish or work on the oil rigs - as Todd Palin does -
women who also go to work instead of simply cashing their husbands' pay
cheques earn a special kind of respect. I read more about this in Palin's
biography, Sarah, which is piled high near the checkout of a local book shop
(a few days ago the book's tiny publisher, Epicenter Press, could barely
give the thing away. Now it's been inundated with orders for 45,000 copies,
with presumably more pending). Sarah describes going salmon fishing with
Todd on a 26ft boat without a cabin, in hammering rain and ferocious winds.
One time, she broke her hand, went ashore to get a bandage, then went back
out to sea for the final catch. “Todd is a brutal boss,” she writes. “He
shows no mercy to anyone.” I wonder if I would ask my own wife to do the
same thing. Probably not.
But that's the way things are in Alaska: tough. Palin is as much of a provider
as any man. Yet how she manages to care for five children at the same time
is anyone's guess: we can only assume that she relies on a large family (her
parents, Chuck and Sally, still live in Wasilla, and it's said that her
husband does his bit too). In the liberal blogosphere, meanwhile, there is
no admiration for Palin's “supermom” abilities, only suspicion that it must
all be some kind of fraud, compounded by hostility over her decision to have
a Down's syndrome baby then immediately go back to work (while looking
great). The latest rumours - unsupported by any kind of evidence - suggest
that her Down's syndrome baby in fact belongs to her 17-year-old daughter
Bristol. Such a cover-up seems highly improbable, especially given Palin's
announcement yesterday that Bristol is five months pregnant: it seems likely
only to damage the Democrats by making them look extraordinarily mean
spirited.
In Alaska, meanwhile, Palin's popularity continues to grow. Today is the
beginning of a petrol-tax holiday for Alaskans, on top of which they'll be
receiving a $1,200 “relief” cheque in the post. Alaska has so much oil of
its own that it can afford it: thanks to rising prices, the state has a GDP
of more than $41 billion, which must tempt Vladimir Putin to punch a hole in
the wall of his dacha: the Russians sold the place to the US in 1867 for
$7.2 million, which works out at a 2 cents an acre. Alaskans share in this
wealth every year with a dividend from the vast liquid wealth that gushes
constantly through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.
On the way back to Anchorage, I flip on the radio. A woman is complaining
about the way Barack Obama kissed Joe Biden's wife during the Democratic
convention. “Is it because he's black, d'you think?” asks the host. Another
caller says that Palin has more foreign policy experience than Obama because
Alaska and Russia are a mere three miles apart at their closest point in the
Bering Strait (they're separated by Russia's Big Diomede Island and Alaska's
Little Diomede Island, but you can walk across the ice in winter). The
caller adds that Palin also has a long history of dealing with Canadians.
Later, another listener says he's worried about the investigation of Palin
for allegedly trying to get her former brother-in-law fired. The host calls
him a despicable human being and throws him off the air. It's what you'd
expect of a right-wing radio host, but there's also something protective
about the way he does it. For a moment I wonder if John McCain might be a
genius.
