Palin’s cold shoulder

WASILLA, Alaska — While Sarah Palin’s supporters tout her personal warmth and openness, the newly minted Republican vice presidential nominee can be brusque to allies, advisers and employees who fall from her favor.

Palin has unceremoniously ended relationships with an aide who was dating a family friend’s soon-to-be ex-wife, a campaign adviser whose mother-in-law fought Palin’s legislative agenda, a local political mentor who she felt represented the “old boys' network,” a police chief who she said tried to intimidate her with “stern look[s]” and a state commissioner who refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband.


“When she decides you’re done, you’re done,” said John Bitney, who was a top aide to Palin’s gubernatorial campaign and administration.

Bitney, a longtime state Capitol hand who grew up in this small town with Palin and her husband, Todd, said he was asked to leave his job as legislative director in the governor’s office last year after the Palins found out that he was dating the soon-to-be-ex-wife of one of Todd’s good friends.

While Palin’s office framed the departure as an “amicable” mutual decision, Bitney told Politico that Sarah and Todd Palin “were upset with me about my divorce and who I was dating, and they didn’t want that in the governor’s office. I wanted to stay with the governor and support the governor — we’re talking about someone who’s been a friend for 30 years — but I understood it, and I have no ax to grind over the whole thing.”

Still, Bitney took a line from the "Seinfeld" character Elaine, deeming Palin “a bad breaker-upper.”

Palin’s abrupt and often unexplained — or not fully explained — dismissals, though, leave former colleagues and political observers speculating about the “real reasons,” Bitney said, adding that Palin's style “is more dramatic than the way most executives do it. They bring you in, tell you they’re going to go in another direction and get everyone in the office to sign a card and cut a cake. But that’s just not her style.”

The McCain-Palin campaign declined to answer questions about Palin’s personnel moves or personal rifts. Her supporters in Wasilla — a group that seems to include an overwhelming majority of the city’s 7,000 or so residents — say she is guided by the taxpayers’ interests and a strong moral compass.

“In general, she is an extremely kindhearted person,” said Judy Patrick, a close ally who served on the city council when Palin was mayor. “It’s just difficult when you’re a leader. She had to make tough decisions on how she planned to accomplish what she planned to accomplish and who was going to be on the team to do that.”

Palin’s willingness to end allegiances with those who offend her may have helped propel her rise in 2004, when she exposed corrupt dealings by a Republican bigwig on the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, burnishing her reformer credentials and setting the stage for her 2006 gubernatorial campaign.

But on other occasions, her trigger finger has gotten her into trouble.

An ongoing investigation by the state Legislature — expected to be released before the presidential election — into Palin’s firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan in January threatens to damage her reputation as a reformer.

At first, Palin offered only a vague, platitudinal explanation for Monegan’s dismissal. But after Monegan asserted he was pressured by both Sarah and Todd Palin, the governor accused Monegan of not being a team player, and of failing to hire sufficient numbers of troopers or doing enough to reduce rural alcohol abuse.

Earlier this month, he said that "pressure could have been perceived to exist” from her office to have the trooper fired, “although I have only now become aware of it."

Some who worked with Palin during the beginning of her political career here say her hair trigger revealed itself as soon as she became mayor of her hometown in 1996 and, at least initially, hurt her ability to get the job done.

After upsetting the three-term incumbent Wasilla mayor in 1996, Palin quickly eliminated the position of one city department director and asked five others for a letter of resignation, a résumé and a letter explaining why they should be retained.

Though five of the six department heads had supported her opponent, John Stein, Palin insisted the housecleaning was not politically motivated. Only two directors kept their jobs and one of them — city planner Duane Dvorak — left on his own eight months later.

“After all the excitement, I kind of felt like the ax could fall any time and just never felt like the situation warmed up,” said Dvorak, who had worked for Stein for more than two years and is now a planner for the far away Kodiak Island Borough.

Dvorak, who did not back either Stein or Palin, recounted being asked to brief the new mayor and her top aide on a wide variety of topics related to the city and state codes “that really didn’t have a whole lot to do with planning. But because they let everyone else go, they didn’t have anyone else to call on,” he said. “It’s one thing to take the city in a different direction and try to work with the staff that you have and maybe make a few key changes over time, but to just precipitously let people go and then restaff — it didn’t go over well.”

According to once-confidential records, Palin suggested that one of Stein’s top backers, then-Police Chief Irl Stambaugh, had purposefully made her miss a city proceeding — which she called “a very embarrassing situation for me” — by not informing her of it and asserted Stambaugh did not participate enough in staff meetings.

“And when you did speak, you often did so in a disrespectful or condescending tone,” she wrote in a termination letter to Stambaugh, in which she asserted she had tried for three months to win his support. “You never gave me that,” she wrote Stambaugh, who had been chief since the town created its own police department four years earlier.

“When I met with you in private,” she continued, “instead of engaging in interactive conversation with me, you gave me short, uncommunicative answers, and then you would sit there and stare at me in silence with a very stern look, like you were trying to intimidate me.”

The letter was released as part of Stambaugh’s wrongful termination and discrimination lawsuit against the city, in which his lawyer wrote Stambaugh, who stood over 6 feet tall and weighed more than 200 pounds, “had been informed that Mayor Palin felt intimidated because of his size. The mayor never discussed this perceived problem with Stambaugh. However, Stambaugh, being sensitive to the mayor’s concern regarding his sex, size and height, made particular efforts to sit in a chair whenever discussing matters with Mayor Palin and talk in a quiet, soothing voice to the mayor.”

The suit alleges Palin ousted Stambaugh at the behest of the National Rifle Association, which supported a state concealed weapons bill that Stambaugh opposed, and of local bar owners, who — along with Palin — opposed Stambaugh’s push to shorten bar hours. Both NRA members and bar owners made campaign contributions to Palin.

Stambaugh’s suit was dismissed.

One day after Palin delivered an “intent to terminate employment” letter to Wasilla's veteran library director, Mary Ellen Emmons, Palin relented, telling the Anchorage Daily News that Emmons promised to support the new mayor.

"You know in your heart when someone is supportive of you,” she told the paper after talking with Emmons, who quit before the end of Palin’s first term.

Stein, who Palin easily bested in a 1999 rematch, told Politico that Palin ended up doing a fine job in her two terms as mayor. But the 1996 falling of the “Palin ax” — as the local Frontiersman newspaper dubbed it — was unprecedented and whipped up a fierce controversy in the town, including a threatened recall petition from a group headed by Stein and then-Councilman Nick Carney.

Carney, whose daughter had played high school basketball with Palin, in 1992 recruited the then-28-year-old Palin to run for city council. She easily won the race but quickly broke from Carney.

“Right away, I saw that it was a good old boys' network,” Palin is quoted as saying in a favorable biography of her published in April. “Mayor Stein and Nick Carney told me, ‘You’ll learn quick, just listen to us.’ Well, they didn’t know how I was wired." It contends that soon after Palin took office, she “made a political enemy of Carney,” who owned a garbage removal company, by voting against an ordinance he proposed that would have required city residents pay for curbside pickup.

And this year, Palin largely shut out Tuckerman Babcock, an influential local Republican strategist who has advised her in each campaign since 1996, and who the Frontiersman said was up for — but never received — a top city job when Palin became mayor.

Babock’s mother-in-law is state Senate president and fellow Wasilla Republican Lyda Green, who fought many of Gov. Palin’s legislative initiatives and recently told the Daily News that Palin is "not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?"

Babcock would not speculate as to why Palin stopped seeking his counsel but told Politico, “She’s doing fine without me, so it’s not a big deal.”