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

was growing according to plan: not the way urban aestheticians such as Jane Jacobs might have liked, but the old slogan “We Don’t Give a Damn How They Do It Outside” still resonated strongly in the Valley.
    Ignoring the bike paths, Sarah focused the secular aspect of her campaign on two issues: closing hours for local bars and liberalization of Alaska’s already lenient gun laws.
    In regard to the bars, the issue was whether to allow them to remain open until 5:00 AM or require them to close at 2:00, as did the bars in Anchorage. Both Stein and Wasilla’s first police chief, Irl Stambaugh, advocated the earlier closing.
    “What was happening,” Stambaugh told me during the summer of 2010, “was half the drunks in Anchorage would drive up here at two AM and get drunker for another three hours and then try to drive home. We were getting kind of tired of scraping them off the Parks Highway. I was also concerned with the number of women who were calling our domestic abuse hotline just after five o’clock in the morning saying, ‘Help, quick, my husband just came in and he’s trying to kill me!’ ”
    To Stein, a 2:00 AM closing “seemed like a no-brainer, what with the epidemic of drunk driving plaguing us, and especially in a city with such a strong Baptist and fundamentalist presence.”
    You’d think an evangelical Christian mother such as Sarah would have agreed. You’d be wrong. The bar owners argued that the hours between 2:00 and 5:00 AM were particularly lucrative and that city government didn’t have the right to interfere with free enterprise. Sarah wholeheartedly agreed. She saw the bill that would mandate a 2:00 AM closing as a classic example of government interference with personal freedom.
    The bar owners rivaled the right-wing Christian churches as the largest donors to Sarah’s campaign. Big jars into which Palin campaign donations could be placed appeared on all Wasilla bars andwere filled to the brim nightly. In the same saloons, pictures of incumbent mayor Stein were placed inside the urinals.
    The proposed changes to the state’s gun laws, which would allow the carrying of concealed weapons in bars and banks and on school grounds—they were already permitted everywhere else—seemed even less relevant. “It simply wasn’t a municipal issue,” Stein said. “The state legislature would decide that, and it didn’t matter how Irl Stambaugh or I felt about it.”
    But it mattered to Sarah and her supporters. She accused Stein, a longtime member of the National Rifle Association, and Vietnam vet Stambaugh of being “anti-gun.” In Alaska—especially in the Valley—this was a more serious charge than pederasty.
    Sarah’s campaign operated on two levels. On the surface—the Laura Chase level—she was the bubbly, energetic “hockey mom,” Chuck Heath’s daughter, a Wasilla High grad, and a member of the team that won the girls’ state basketball championship in 1982, which, even fourteen years later, was no small thing in Wasilla. She was a personification of the change long overdue at city hall.
    But there was also the secret underbelly: the doper/boozer–charismatic Christian coalition, which spread rumors that because John Stein’s wife still used her maiden name professionally the two of them weren’t actually married, and—far worse—that Stein was a Jew!
    “I’d been a Pennsylvania Dutch Lutheran all my life,” Stein told me when I talked to him during the summer of 2010. “I’d lived in Wasilla for twelve years and had been mayor for nine. Where was this suddenly coming from? I actually had to say in public, ‘I am not a Jew.’ As for not being married, my wife and I laughed. But the whispers grew louder, and pretty soon they weren’t whispers anymore. I actually had to produce a marriage license, and even then Stoll and Chryson said it was probably forged.”
    Sarah also introduced innuendo about sexual harassment into thecampaign. She encouraged gossip about