The small Alaskan town of Wasilla sits on the merging deltas of the Matanuska
and Susitna rivers in an area known as the Valley, an hour’s drive from
Anchorage. It is a casual, mostly rural place where dog mushers, farmers,
homesteaders and other independent sorts mind their own business – and
expect others to do the same – and who don’t worry much about government
encumbrances such as zoning laws.
While gaining popularity as wholesome, peaceful and kid-friendly, the Valley
has also developed a reputation for junk-strewn gardens and cranky
landowners who don’t mind using the serious end of a shotgun to run off
trespassers.
Four years ago, one of Alaska’s most prominent Republican politicians called
the local people “Valley trash”. In response, many wore “Valley trash”
T-shirts with pride. They didn’t much care what big-city folks thought. This
is where Sarah Palin grew up and where she started her political career,
becoming mayor of Wasilla at the age of 32. No matter what people said about
the Valley, she maintained a fierce pride in her community. She liked
small-town living.
Two years after the “Valley trash” jibe, Palin put at risk her promising
political career by exposing the ethical lapses of the state chairman of her
own Republican party. With a legislative corruption scandal also shaking
public confidence, Alaskans were ready for a change.
Palin seized the Republican party’s nomination for governor and then won the
gubernatorial election in a remarkable display of people power. At 42 she
was the youngest governor in Alaskan history and soon had the highest
approval rating of any governor in America.
Last week more than 37m Americans turned on their televisions to watch
Governor Palin’s speech accepting the Republican nomination as
vice-president – a speech that has transformed the dynamics of the election
campaign.
Friends and enemies in the Alaskan delegation to the convention had heard her
most memorable line before. Describing herself as a “hockey mom” – icebound
Alaska’s version of the American “soccer mom” – she asked: “You know what
they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick.”
So who is this pitbull in lipstick – or, as she has also been dubbed, “Dick
Cheney in lipstick”? Palin’s childhood home faces Alaska’s Talkeetna
mountains. In the spring, purple violets, Indian paintbrush and wild
geraniums carpet the alpine tundra. In winter, the snow-covered mountains
take on a rose blush. They were a place of sustenance and renewal for her
boisterous and busy family.
The third of four children born to Chuck and Sally Heath, she was brought to
Alaska from Idaho in 1964 when she was two months old. The family lived
frugally. To help make ends meet, Chuck Heath was a school teacher by day
and moonlighted as a hunting and fishing guide and as a bartender, and even
worked on the Alaska railroad for a time. Sally was a school secretary and
ran their busy household.
In summer and winter, most of the family’s activities took place outdoors. “We
could literally go hunting out our back door,” Chuck Jr, Palin’s brother,
said. She shot her first rabbit at age 10 not far from the back porch. In
her teens she hunted caribou with her father. The family’s freezer was
always full of fish and game.
Chuck Sr was the high school cross-country and athletics coach. She ran on his
teams and earned the nickname “Sarah Barracuda” for her fiercely competitive
nature on the basketball court. On one memorable occasion she came on with a
fractured ankle to score the winning shot for the Wasilla Warriors in the
state championship.
“Headstrong” is how her coach, Don Teeguarden, described her: “She knew her
own mind and was generally willing to express her opinion. She didn’t agree
just for the sake of agreement. At the time I thought those were positive
attributes and I still do.”
She had an unapologetic streak of stubbornness from early childhood. Sarah’s
siblings were astonished by her resolve in the face of a father whose
decisions were the final word in their household. “She never lost an
argument and would never, no matter what, back down when she knew she was
right,” Chuck Jr remembers. “Not just with me or other kids, but with Mom
and Dad too.”
“The rest of the kids, I could force them to do something,” Chuck Sr said.
“But with Sarah there was no way. From a young age she had a mind of her
own. Once she made up her mind she didn’t change it.”
Later on he would enlist the help of people she respected – especially coaches
and teachers – to persuade her to see things his way. Yet he concedes Sarah
was persuasive in her arguments and often correct. Later, when his daughter
became governor, Chuck found it immensely amusing that acquaintances asked
him to sway her on particular issues. He says he lost that leverage before
she was two.
Not that she is the only one arguing. A relative remarked that the closeness
of the Heath family resembles a scene from the film My Big Fat Greek
Wedding. When they get together these days, everyone is loud, opinionated
and gets into everyone else’s business.
Like her siblings, Sarah was baptised in the Catholic church. When her mother
discovered what she saw as a more meaningful path to faith, her family
followed her to a different church – the Wasilla Assembly of God. Sally
Heath bundled up the kids and took them to church every Sunday morning and
evening and most Wednesdays, too. As a little girl, Sarah sat through
services fidgeting. When she was 12, however, she asked to be baptised. She
wanted to make a public statement of faith.
With Alaska’s perpetual summer sunshine glittering off the chilly waters of
Beaver Lake, Pastor Paul Riley immersed her. Her siblings and her mother
were also baptised that day as friends and family watched from the shore.
Sarah took the commitment she made to God seriously, becoming the leader of
the high school’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
She had a boyfriend, Todd Palin, who had come to Wasilla from Dillingham, a
remote community in western Alaska where his Yup’ik Eskimo grandmother,
Helena “Lena” Andree, was an important influence, teaching him the value of
hard work and traditional native ways. He had fished with his grandparents
from a young age, eventually taking over their commercial fishing operation.
“He had a car and a truck and a job. He was a lot more grown-up than most of
my friends,” said Sarah. She and Todd lived five miles apart. In the
evenings they sat on their porches talking on two-way radios that Todd used
on his fishing boat.
After high school, much to her brother’s amusement, Sarah entered the Miss
Wasilla pageant and won. When he asked her why she would do such a thing:
“She told me matter-of-factly, ‘It’s going to help pay my way through
college’.”
In Sarah’s home there was an expectation that if you wanted something, you
earned it. “We always worked,” Heather, her elder sister, said. “We never
had anything handed to us. We knew on a teacher’s salary that we would all
have to pay our own way through college. We knew we’d have to be
independent.”
At college in Idaho she studied journalism. Newspapers had been a passion
since early childhood. During the summers she helped Todd to fish
commercially in Bristol bay. They fished from a 26ft skiff with no cabin, a
boat that could carry 10,000lb of salmon in eight holding bins below deck.
It was the most physically demanding and dangerous work she had ever
undertaken.
“Sarah has toughed out many a cold night,” Todd said. “Even with 100mph winds,
you don’t want to be the one that turns back just to find out later how good
the fishing was.”
“Todd is a brutal boss,” Sarah said. “He shows no mercy to anyone.”
Sarah and her father sometimes fished without Todd while he worked at his
oilfield job on Alaska’s North Slope. Chuck Sr remembers Sarah driving the
boat onto the trailer in dangerous surf when no one else was willing to
attempt it.
When she and Todd married and started a family, they named their first child
Track, after the track and field season in which he was born. Sarah’s father
jokingly asked what they would have named their son if he had been born
during the basketball season. Without hesitation Sarah answered: “Hoop.”
Their first daughter, born in 1990, was named Bristol after the ocean bay
where they fished. Willow was born in 1994, named after willow ptarmigan,
Alaska’s state bird. Their youngest daughter, Piper Indy, came in 2001. She
was named after the Piper Cub that Todd flies and the Polaris Indy
snowmobile he drove in the first of his four victories in the Iron Dog
snowmobile race, a gruelling 2,000-mile run from Wasilla to Fairbanks.
Between babies, Sarah worked short stints at television stations and at a
utility company – and began to take an interest in local politics. The
Wasilla of her childhood had grown from about 400 residents to more than
4,000 in 20 years. Many new businesses had appeared in sprawling strip malls
along the city’s main thoroughfare. At the same time Wasilla was becoming a
bedroom community for commuters who worked in Anchorage. A member of Wasilla
city council, Nick Carney – the father of one her high school friends –
invited her to run for a council seat.
Campaigning as a “new face, new voice”, 28-year-old Sarah won easily. But
after taking office she was dumbfounded by the inner workings of the city
government. Coming from a small community, she knew everyone: the mayor,
John Stein, had been in her aerobics class.
“Right away I saw that it was a good old boys’ network,” she said. “Mayor
Stein and Nick Carney told me, ‘You’ll learn quick, just listen to us’.
Well, they didn’t know how I was wired.”
She voted against a pay raise for the mayor. Then she crossed Carney. He owned
the only garbage removal service in town and had proposed an ordinance
requiring all Wasilla residents to pay for garbage to be picked up from
their homes. “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.”
She grew increasingly impatient with politics as usual. No matter what the
issue, the entanglements of political cronyism were a frustration. Too much
of government was being run for the benefit of those in office.
“By my second term on the council, it was apparent that things weren’t going
to change unless there was a change in leadership,” she said.
Promising fresh ideas, she challenged the mayor in a contentious and heated
campaign. Stein felt the sharp edge of Sarah’s competitive drive. Wasilla
voters sided with her. On October 1, 1996, she defeated him, 651-440.
Seizing her mandate for change, Sarah stormed city hall, not realising how
hard it would be to make changes, especially in an administration that had
become entrenched. “Nick Carney told Sarah to her face that he’d do anything
he could to make things difficult,” said Judy Patrick, a friend who had been
elected to the Wasilla council. “There were some very cantankerous people on
that council.”
Stein’s loss was a bitter one. Many of his supporters viewed the new young
mayor as a kid playing a grown-up game. Police Chief Irl Stambaugh – another
of her former aerobics classmates – was fired. Department heads were told to
reapply for their positions. Jobs were cut.
Carney, Stambaugh and Stein formed a citizens’ group called Concerned Citizens
for Wasilla to discuss ousting the new mayor. The former police chief filed
a lawsuit for contract violation, wrongful termination and gender
discrimination. He lost the case two years later.
Watching all this in the wings was Donald Moore, the regional “borough
manager” (roughly equivalent to the chief executive of a British county
council). Now retired, he observed that there is an “inverse relationship
between the size of the community and the ease of management”. In other
words, a small town can be hell to govern. Everyone knows everyone and lots
of people have axes to grind.
“Sarah is a very gracious woman,” Moore said. “But she does not suffer fools.”
This was something that others would learn during her rapid rise in state
politics – and which America’s most powerful politicians are now discovering
as they feel the unstoppable force of Hurricane Palin.
She has a gift for connecting with people, but she also possesses a steely
resolve and competes with fierce tenacity. The biggest mistake her
adversaries make is underestimating her.
© 2008 Kaylene Johnson
Extracted from Sarah, published by Epicenter
