Free The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin by Joe McGinniss

more established political organization. The powerful right-wing Republican state senator from Wasilla, Lyda Green (a native of Texas), provided it.
    Green offered Sarah the services not only of her son-in-law, Tuckerman Babcock, a Republican political strategist, but also of her staff member Laura Chase, whom she recommended as campaign manager.
    A graduate of the University of Idaho, like Sarah, Chase had gained experience in public relations while working for Alyeska, the oil company consortium that built and operated the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. She’d also worked for the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce.
    Chase liked and respected John Stein. Senator Green, however, urged her to work for Sarah instead. “She’ll bring fresh energy,” Green said. “She’s innovative. After nearly a decade of Stein, it’s time for a change.” Green also stressed that the job would be “great experience” for Chase.
    At their first meeting, according to Chase, Sarah said her main goal was to build more bike paths in the city. That was it. No greater vision, and certainly no covert Christian extremist agenda. “Bike trails are my baby,” Sarah said.
    She invited Chase to a meeting at her home. “Tuckerman Babcock was there,” Chase recalls, “with a big city map and a laminated Republican playbook. They knew I wasn’t comfortable, because John Stein and Nick Carney were my friends.”
    Sarah eventually persuaded Chase to take the job by offering a personal inducement. “I can visualize you being deputy administrator,” she said. “You and I will run the city together. We can make it the kind of place we’ve always wanted it to be.”
    Chase recalls no mention of any affiliation with the evangelical right. “She was very careful not to let me see that,” Chase says, “because if I’d gotten the slightest whiff of it, I’d never have gotten involved. For one thing, I’m very openly and actively pro-choice.”
    Having assembled her campaign staff, Sarah announced her pro–bike path candidacy, making no mention of her real platform, an amalgam of Assembly of God and Alaska Independence Party ideals.
    John Stein was in his office when a friend from the chamber of commerce told him that Sarah planned to run against him. “I was stunned,” he recalls. “I was astounded. Not just because I’d been her mentor, but because in her four years on city council she’d never said a word. She had not put forward a single idea.”
    Stein now admits to having been naïve. “Municipal races in Wasilla had always been about sewers and roads,” he says. “The Mat-Su Borough, not the city, controls the fire department and the school system. The city is strictly nuts and bolts. It never occurred to me that a city race could be the vehicle for advancing extremist ideology.”
    Until the 1996 race, not even party affiliation had been an issue. Stein was a Republican, but nobody had noticed or cared. What mattered, as a former city official recalls, was that “John Stein commanded loyalty, allegiance, and respect because he would carefully listen to people and actually consider what they had to say. You never came away from a meeting with John feeling you’d had anything less than a fair hearing.”
    Nonetheless, after nine years in office, Stein was vulnerable to charges of cronyism. “Once I confirmed that Sarah was serious, I did some soul-searching,” he says. “I think most politicians succumb to arrogance eventually, and I certainly don’t exempt myself. I’d get together with my staff and socialize after council meetings, and that led to the charge that we were conducting business on the sly. I didn’t pay enough attention to appearances.
    “In addition, there was a hard-core residue of anger about the police department and the sales tax. These extremists like Stoll and Chryson were looking for an excuse to detonate. And Chuck Heath was hooked up with them from the start.”
    Even so, Stein wasn’t overly worried. Wasilla