Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: A Memoir of Our Tumultuous
Years
By Frank Bailey
Howard Books, 2011, 383 pages, $26.
Winston Churchill once observed, “In war, you can only be killed
once, but in politics, many times.” By that reckoning,
Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin is a bloodbath.
A self-described “Fox News conservative” and evangelical
Christian, author Frank Bailey was a staffer for Sarah Palin during
her bid for the Alaska governorship in 2006. Later, he worked in
her administration. By his telling, Bailey quickly became
disillusioned with the Republican rock star’s conduct but stuck by
her side until 2009.
Pulling from a hefty store chest of email correspondence, Bailey
paints a morally harrowing picture of the chief Mama Grizzly’s
stint in Alaskan politics: poll fixing, “planting” letters to the
editor, and paying newspapers to publish editorials; illegally
coordinating with the Republican Governors Association on a
campaign ad; pulling strings to get her ex-brother-in-law, state
trooper Mike Wooten, fired; and resigning as Alaska’s governor
because she “hated the damn job.”
The overall picture: a paranoid, emotionally volatile psycho
chick obsessed with money. “Punishing enemies and wealth
accumulation became a full-time job,” Bailey writes. “Jabez,” a
biblical character blessed by God with riches, became a frequent
password Palin used for her electronic accounts.
Bailey also contends that “Sarahcuda” cared little for her
family. “I recall one day when Bristol [Palin] phoned from school
crying while Sara sat in my office,” Bailey writes. “Sarah rolled
her eyes and held the phone out, as if to say, ‘You wanna listen to
this?’”
Turning to the 2008 presidential election and Palin’s stint as
John McCain’s running mate, Bailey portrays a disjointed process.
He says that McCain staffers didn’t vet Sarah until days after she
was selected as the vice presidential candidate. “In simple terms,
the woman who nearly became the second-most-powerful person in our
country was chosen on a whim,” he writes.
The lion’s share of the book focuses on the much-discussed
Troopergate scandal, in which the Palins allegedly targeted Wooten
for termination following threats against their family. When public
safety commissioner Walt Monegan did not bow to her wishes, Palin
fired him. Such were the charges from political opponents, at
least.
“First Dude” Todd Palin was more preoccupied (“obsessed,” Bailey
says) with Wooten than anyone else near the governor. “His hope
became that if we hurled enough accusation spaghetti against the
wall, no matter how frivolous, something might stick,” Bailey
writes.
Bailey was the lynchpin on Team Palin. He took scorching heat
during the investigation after a taped phone conversation became
public in which he asked a public safety department staffer why
Wooten was still on the government payroll. Contrary to the
official report, Bailey writes in his memoir that Todd and Sarah
were intimately involved in applying pressure to oust Wooten.
A special investigation in October 2008 found that Palin had
abused her power, but it did not recommend a criminal investigation
or sanctions. Later findings from the State Personnel Board cleared
her of ethical wrongdoing.
If for no other reason, Blind Allegiance is a
worthwhile read for its first-hand account of the scandal. Whether
the re-telling is accurate is another question.
Consider the source. Bailey devotes page after page to
sanctimoniously smearing Palin’s reputation, yet he claims the book
is a way to confess his own sins and clear his own conscience. That
declaration would be more veritable were he not cashing in by
trashing his former boss. Bailey has an ax to grind, and he grinds
it with glee.
Adding to the doubt, Bailey’s co-authors — Ken Morris and
Jeanne Devon — are anything but paragons of journalistic virtue.
Devon, a regular blogger on the left-wing Huffington Post,
has carved her niche as a professional Palin hater. Lefty economist
Morris, meanwhile, publicly offered $100,000 to Palin’s favorite
charity if she agreed to have dinner with him and four other
“progressives” and allow them to ask any question they wished.
Worse, Bailey’s tell-all might be illegal. The Alaska attorney
general’s office has opened an investigation into whether the
former Palin staffer illegally used government emails that hadn’t
yet been disseminated to the public for personal monetary gain — a
violation of state law.
Although much of the email correspondence quoted by Bailey is
embarrassing, Palin’s reputation on that front was bolstered by the
release in June of 24,000 pages of emails from her administration.
The document dump, in response to public records requests filed in
2008, provided no smoking gun for salivating journalists expecting
to find a hotbed of scandal and political corruption.
Given those caveats, some of the evidence presented in Blind
Allegiance is compelling, and conservatives ignore it at their
own peril. It casts further doubt on whether Palin has the poise
and personality to be a prime-time presidential candidate. Her near
obsession with answering critics, clearly documented by Bailey
throughout the book, is one example. Protecting a political
reputation is good; reckless preoccupation with every negative word
penned by a pundit is not.
Devoted Palin fans will no doubt find Blind Allegiance
yet another entry in the growing genre of Palin-phobia. But it’s
far more than that. It’s another piece of baggage that Palin must
carry with her. Whether deserved or not, her image outside a loyal
cohort of conservatives is tarnished.
