Read Online The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin by Joe McGinniss - Free Book Online

foremost among them the Assembly of God.
    No one recruited more enthusiastically than Sarah. The two thousand new voters were given a slate of five antiabortion candidates to support. All five won, receiving more than twice as many votes as the leading pro-choice incumbent, Sarah’s stepmother-in-law Faye Palin. The five new members gave the antiabortionists a majority on the governing board, which quickly translated into a majority on the operating board, which quickly translated into a vote to prohibit all abortions at the hospital.
    Her contribution to the winning side whetted Sarah’s appetite for politics. “If it wasn’t for the abortion fight, she would never have run for any kind of office,” says Reverend Howard Bess, the only one of more than forty Valley ministers to oppose the antiabortionists.
    At the same time, Mayor Stein had come to believe that Wasilla could no longer rely on state troopers for law enforcement, but needed its own police department. Merchants were reporting appalling rates of theft and robbery, and residents of the city’s new senior housing project were under constant threat of break-in by youths, who stole painkillers and other prescription drugs.
    A police department, however, could be funded only by new taxes, and, as Stein recalls, Wasilla was populated largely by “libertarians who hate two things: cops and taxes.” Nonetheless, with the help of a city councilman named Nick Carney, a member of one of Wasilla’s oldest and largest families, Stein formed Watch on Wasilla, a group whose purposes were to educate the public about the need for a police department and to find a means to pay for it. Jim and Faye Palin joined, and Faye, having recently lost her seat on the hospital board, was named president.
    The city’s businesses were all for the creation of a police department, but Watch on Wasilla felt it also needed an advocate more attuned to the city’s growing number of young families—someone with the time and energy to run for and win a city council seat. They interviewed a number of potential candidates, including a young Wasilla Lake housewife named Sarah Palin.
    After their first choice said she wasn’t interested, Carney and Stein took a second look at Sarah. “She wasn’t the brightest star on the horizon by any means, but at least I’d known her all her life,” Carney says. “She’d even gone to school with my daughter.”
    Four years earlier, at the age of twenty-four, Sarah had joined a Wasilla prayer group led by a woman from Ketchikan named Mary Glazier. “God began to speak to her about entering politics,” Glazier told attendees at a religious conference in Everett, Washington, in June 2008. “We began to pray for Sarah. We felt she was the one God had selected.” Sarah viewed the invitation to run for city council as God’s answer to Mary Glazier’s prayers.
    At twenty-eight, Sarah had three children, she belonged to the Iditarod Elementary School PTA, she’d played basketball at Wasilla High, and she was Chuck Heath’s daughter. “She also told us she was a born-again Christian, a lifetime member of the NRA, and a ‘hockey mom,’ which was not a phrase I’d ever heard before,” Stein says.
    “The evangelicals had been storming into Wasilla—we evenrented the city council chamber to one of those groups for Sunday services—so I figured she’d have a strong base of support,” Stein says. “I didn’t care about her religion or her views on guns or abortion. All that mattered to me was that she’d vote for the police department and the sales tax. After all, what did you really have to know to serve on city council? You need gravel for roads, and sewage runs downhill—that’s about it.”
    Stein mentored Sarah, and Nick Carney took her campaigning door to door. In October 1992, as the sales tax initiative passed, she easily won election to the council. Thus did John Stein open the gates of the city to the mother of all Trojan