Santa Cruz documentary filmmaker, journalist and former Huffington Post blogger Geoffrey Dunn’s new book, “The Lies of Sarah Palin,” is one of several Palin-focused tomes hitting bookstores now.
The 400-plus page polemic burrows into Palin’s Alaska roots, rides shotgun during Palin’s cyclone of a vice-presidential bid and thrums happily on her enduring place on the American political scene. Fair? Depends on your perspective. Balanced? Deliberately not.
With upcoming local readings and the book hovering near the top of Amazon.com top-seller lists and being mocked by conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, the Santa Cruz Sentinel sat down with Dunn for a quick question-and-answer session.
Q. Let’s start with the title, “The Lies of Sarah Palin.” Very straightforward.
A. Very straightforward, and not the original title. The original title I proposed was “Northern Exposure.” ` Quite frankly, the publisher came up with the title, “The Lies of Sarah Palin.” That was their decision. And what they wanted to do was market it, and they are marketing it, as clearly an anti-Palin book. They felt that my book needed to be more of a polemic than an exploration. I want to say, I felt comfortable with that because the more I learned about Palin, the more opposed to her having any role in American politics I became.
Q. When did you first hear about Sarah Palin?
A. I first heard of Palin right after I was in Alaska after 2005. Right when she announced her candidacy for governor. And so I knew people that knew her. Alaska’s a small place. Biggest state in the union and the smallest town. It’s just a small town, and so I knew a lot of people that knew her. And no one liked her who I spoke with. And actually when it was announced that she was John McCain’s vice-presidential candidate, I had a friend tell me that I should call up Irl Stambaugh, who was the Wasilla police chief that she fired. So I called Irl, his name was in the phone book, and he gave me a great 45-minute interview. And that’s really when I got on the Palin beat for the Huffington Post. I had all these inside informants in Alaska talking to me about her.
Q. Alaska comes across as a character in this book. Is the connection just the recovery time from cancer treatment that you spent up there?
A. I first went up there in ’74. Let’s just say that I went up there with my father in a transitional point in our lives. He had left my family a few years earlier. And so in some ways Alaska is a way of encountering my father again, and coming back to terms with him. He was this rough-and-tumble cowboy, hunter, fisherman. And we fished our way across Alaska. That was a great experience for me and as it turned out the last trip I ever took with my dad. I many ways, this was a way of finding my dad again. My dad was a very conservative Goldwater Republican. I knew he wouldn’t have tolerated Sarah Palin for an instant. He would have seen right through her. I could almost hear him telling me what a phony she was.
Q. Palin is a pretty well-covered subject, and I think it’s difficult to make a case that she’s been treated with kid gloves by the mainstream media. Her popularity persists regardless. What does this book add to the conversation?
A. Not kid gloves, but maybe 16-ounce gloves. Part of the problem with mainstream journalism is their 24-hour news cycles and lack of in-depth reporting. The major example is TrooperGate. I turned up several emails and records that never have seen public light. And I’ve turned up dozens, if not hundreds of documents, that no one had ever seen before. Now, was it because I was a great investigative journalist? Not really. It was because I was persistent, and developed sources.
Q. Could you talk about some of the sources you were able to develop? How did you get that kind of access? Did writing for the Huffington Post help?
A. The fact that I knew Alaska, that I had a history in the state really helped me. I knew my way around the state, and I knew my way around the culture, helped me. The fact that I came from a fishing family here in Santa Cruz helped me. That I had family members that had been going up there to fish for years. But I didn’t just do this as a fly-by-night reporter. I developed friendships; people had a confidence in me. In addition to that, the fact that I was breaking stories for the Huffington Post, gave people confidence that I could, one, respect confidentiality, and two, do a good job with it. They worked hand in hand. I thought I was going to have to tell the story of the election through the eyes of Democrats, that the only people that were ever going to talk to me were Democratic operatives who were following Palin around, so that’s how I was going to tell the story. In fact, the Republicans leaked me everything. There are documents and emails in the book from Republican operatives during the McCain campaign, and no one’s ever seen those. And they really tell the story on the ground of what it was like to work for Sarah Palin.
What’s fascinating to me is the reaction of two people to her selection as vice-presidential candidate: George Bush and Barack Obama. Both said she’ll never get up to speed. There’s no way she can ever get up to speed. This is unfair to her and unfair to her family.
Two national figures who know how hard that road is, knew she wasn’t ready for it.
Q. It may have been unfair to her, but in retrospect it was the best thing that ever happened to her. She won for losing.
A. Absolutely. It’s probably the thing that troubles me most about American politics. Again, this has nothing to do with her, in some ways it’s equally true about Obama. She went from absolute obscurity to instant international celebrity in a period of 24 hours. In the first two weeks after her nomination, she went from being unknown outside of her state to being the most recognized figure in the world. And in terms of recognition, her numbers are astonishing, there’s no one who doesn’t know who Sarah Palin is. What happens now in American politics is you can take that type of political celebrity, and turn it into political cache. We saw that in California with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and to a certain extent that’s what happened with Obama. The McCain campaign ran that celebrity ad against Obama in August of 2008, and there was truth to it. He became a celebrity, and that celebrity contributed to his political viability. So now what you have with Palin is this international celebrity that she cashes in on in two ways: one through the media, her own books, her TV show, her Fox News appearances. She’s gone from having a middle class lifestyle to having a very upper class lifestyle in a short term. Nouveau riche. And she’s got celebrity. That celebrity is all she has as a political cache. She doesn’t have any real policies. She doesn’t have any real substance. It’s all about form and glitter.
Q. Do you think there’s anything evolutionary or new about this sort of mythology or back story that she’s built up around herself that sets her apart from candidates in the past? You could almost see a book from 1960 called “The Lies of John F. Kennedy.”
A. You could, and certainly there are myths about all candidates.
The fact of the matter is we’ve always had these myths about national candidates. You don’t become a national candidate without a narrative, without some sort of myth. But even in the case of Kennedy, he serves in Congress, serves in the Senate, emerges organically as a national figure, and of course his father’s money plays a key role in that and he hires writers. He has someone write his Pulitzer Prize-winning book in 1956, and so there are parallels there. The one difference is when Kennedy becomes president, he’d really been on the national scene for a decade. Sarah Palin had one moment on the national scene. Richard Nixon had been vice president for eight years, had run for president and then run for governor of California. The American people essentially knew who he was.
Q. Why does Sarah Palin continue to resonate with her base, whether it purely style, or substance. What is it about her that people seem to attach to, and does social media play a role in that too?
A. Social media is perfect for her. Twitter is the absolute ideal for her, no substance. It’s just all one quick line. No linkage. It’s worked out brilliantly for her and she plays it very well. Sarah Palin gets her power. She knows who she’s playing to. There was a book that came out a few years ago that talked about how American politics had become a lot like the World Wrestling Federation. And I though when I first read it, Ah, this is bullshit, this isn’t real. We now pick our political candidates like we do our favorite wrestlers, and it’s got nothing to do with what they say. It’s got everything to do with this visceral response that we have to them. She represents people values legitimately, I want to say this. There is a great critique to be made about the nature of government in the 21st century and what it’s doing to this country, and the expansion of government in the last 50 years, into every aspect of our lives, at every level. And I mean locally, regionally, statewide, nationally. There’s a real critique there. There’s tremendous waste and the national debt should bring fear into everyone. She’s tapped into that.
The second thing she’s tapped into is she personifies the anti-abortion, pro-life position. No one has that kind of cred. So that’s another important thing she does. Another thing she does, first major woman figure in the Republican party of her generation. But the other huge thing she taps into, and it sprang from the opening speech at the convention, she is the anti-Obama. She is his equal in terms of charisma and she has defined herself politically as the anti-Obama. And she has just maintained a drumbeat of criticism around him that taps into the anti-Obama forces in this country. The one thing I want to say about that is, there are plenty of reasons to be critical of Obama, and he’s certainly not above criticism. But what she did on the campaign trail when she quote-unquote goes rogue, the first thing she does is bring up Rev. Wright, which McCain forbade her to do and that’s where she went rogue. And she accuses Obama on the campaign trail of palling around with terrorists, and then adds the caveat: “He’s different than you and I.” And how is he different? He’s different in terms of race, he’s different in terms of his name, so that this is way of racially coding and religiously coding these differences. And crowds go nuts. She draws 60,000 people in Florida. Sixty-thousand people.
Q. Did you ever make inroads in trying to interview her?
A. Oh, they hated me from the get-go. They went after me after I wrote one of my pieces for the Huffington Post. Her attorney wrote a nasty letter. I got as close as I could. I talked to her campaign manager, several of her campaign managers, none of them liked her. Talked to very close family friends and friends of hers who grew up with her, some on the record, some off. Any attempt to contact her, I sent out emails and didn’t get any response.
Q. The Republican field for president has clarified within the last couple weeks. You’ve got some major names saying that they’re not running. Do you think Palin is still considering it?
A. Oh absolutely. I don’t know if people are aware, she just sent out a letter in South Carolina to 400,000 Republican dancing around the issue. Here’s how I see it, the Republican race: with Mike Huckabee dropping out, with Donald Trump being forced out, with Newt Gingrich self-immolating, there’s now a huge hole again for that Republican base. I don’t think Michele Bachmann can fill it. I don’t think she has the national juice to claim that space. There’s only one figure in the Republican Party who generates the type of charisma, energy, money, attention that matches Obama, and that’s Palin. And I think –” this is my prediction –” she’s got one guy working for her in Iowa.
If you read the chapter in my book that deals with the 2008 campaign, you’ll see why she’s not spending time in New Hampshire. She really alienated everyone up there in the Granite State. She’s got what I call the South Carolina option open to her. And that is to come in the race after Iowa and New Hampshire, presuming no one’s going to be running away with it there. Stealth candidacy there. You’ve got to remember she’s very close to the new governor, Nikki Haley, who’s a protegee of hers, and who Palin helped to get elected. She has Haley’s organization to tap into, and so what I see as a potential scenario now is for Palin to enter the race in South Carolina, and I think she’ll have a very strong showing there. Particularly with Huckabee, Trump and maybe Gingrich floundering by then. And she could use that momentum generated there to thrust her into the national spotlight again.
Q. You don’t think the furor over the Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting, the gun sites on the website prior to the shooting, Palin used a website to “target” Giffords’ Tucson district by using a gun sight, that didn’t end her career?
A. It transformed her career. I think it’s possible for her to win the GOP nomination. I don’t think it’s ever possible for her to be president. She sealed that deal after Tucson.
The Republican elite, the establishment know she can never win. They don’t want her as their candidate.
Q. That also makes her Obama’s favorite Republican, right?
A. One of em. I think Trump probably would have been a good one. And maybe Bachmann.
Q. What happens if she wins?
A. I’ve picked out spots in Vancouver Island and Costa Rica. And I will owe people a lot of money if she wins. I will be broke and homeless. But my book will sell.
Dunn reading/signing: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 25, at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz. Free, open to the public; two seating/signing vouchers will be given with a purchase of each book.
