www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8c130fe3-adab-4cb3-8443-c363f085cf13
It's unlikely the name Sarah Palin would mean much to anyone if not for a man named Nick Carney. Long before she stood up to Republican cronies and "the good old boys" of Alaska, Palin stood up to Carney, a colleague on Wasilla's city council. As Kaylene Johnson explains in her sympathetic biography, Sarah, Carney had the gall to propose an ordinance giving his own company the city contract for garbage removal. In Johnson's telling, it was the first time Palin bravely spoke truth to power: "'I said no and I voted no,' Sarah said.
The episode might serve as a compelling, if small-bore, example of Palin's reformer instincts. Except that, according to those who were present, Carney wasn't quite the crooked trash magnate Palin makes him out to be. For one thing, Carney couldn't have proposed the ordinance because he'd recused himself from the matter. The council, in fact, had asked him to appear as a kind of expert witness on the relevant rules and regulations. "I looked at it as we actually had an expert on the council sharing the information," recalls Laura Chase, a fellow councilwoman. So if it wasn't a sinister garbage conspiracy that put Carney in Palin's crosshairs, what was it? At first glance, the two would have appeared to be allies--both had spent most of their lives in Wasilla and had attended the same high school. But, beyond that, they were sociological opposites in almost every respect. Whereas Palin had bounced around several no-name colleges before graduating from the University of Idaho, Carney held a degree from Dartmouth. Palin seemed preoccupied with her family and church when she entered politics. Carney was preoccupied with histories of the Civil War and World War II (he later contributed a self-published book to the genre) and savored the New York Times crossword puzzle. By the time he joined the city council, Carney had traveled to Asia, Australia, and Central America. He'd run the Anchorage office of Alaska's economic development agency and had served as the state's agriculture director. "I'd dealt with larger budgets by far than the city of Wasilla," he recently told me. He was fond of joking that he'd graduated from Wasilla High School in the "top 20 percent"--by which he meant he was valedictorian of his five-person class. Sometimes Palin was the only colleague who didn't get his jokes. "I don't think he had too much patience for her lack of understanding," says John Stein, then the town's mayor. In internal discussions, Carney would be relentlessly logical while Palin was vague and intuitive. "Nick had a way of being direct and to the point, something that Sarah was uncomfortable with," recalls Chase. Which is to say, when it came to garbage removal, what Palin seemed to have chafed against was less the substance of Carney's position than what she felt was his elitist, Ivy League bearing. And, over the next few years, she found ways to get him back. These days, Palin is engaged in this same fight against elites, though on a considerably larger stage. "I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world," she recently told Katie Couric. That hardly makes her the first politician to run on class resentments--nearly every conservative from George W Bush to Mitt Romney has sought a bond with voters by attacking the over-educated and entitled. But more often than not these conservatives are elites themselves; hence the spectacle of Yale legacies and Harvard millionaires (and most of the Fox News executive suite) railing against wine-swilling sophisticates. Palin, by contrast, may be the first conservative politician since Nixon to experience resentment so authentically. For her, it's not so much a political tool as a motivating principle. A trip through Palin's past reveals that almost every step of her career can be understood as a reaction to elitist condescension--much of it in her own mind.
Before he became her enemy, Nick Carney was actually Palin's mentor--though, like John McCain, his reasons for championing her had much to do with his own political agenda. In the early '90s, Carney and a group of local business leaders decided the city needed a sales tax to fund public services--such as a police force--it could no longer live without. To advance this position in an area not exactly teeming with Great Society liberals, they'd formed a group called "Watch on Wasilla" and persuaded John Stein, then the mayor, to embrace their cause. Carney won his seat on the city council in 1992 on the back of these efforts. Heading into that election, Carney and Stein realized their program would go nowhere if they couldn't connect with what you might call Wal-Mart moms--that great mass of voters too busy earning a living and raising their families to follow local politics. "We were lacking lines of communication between the council as it existed and the younger bloc of voters in town," recalls Carney.
Stein and his wife knew her from an aerobics class they attended. She seemed bright and energetic and had a winning way about her--the same qualities McCain would notice 15 years later. They invited her to attend a "Watch on Wasilla" meeting and, after a brief interview, asked her to run on their moderate plank. Carney introduced her to local business leaders and campaigned alongside her. and said, 'This is a person who supports our points of view. It was a bit like Palin's convention rollout in miniature, and the initial effect was similar. Palin's first year or two on the council went smoothly by all accounts. "I was relatively pleased at the fact that she did communicate back and forth to that group," Carney says. Though council members routinely bickered with one another, Palin became defensive when she was on the receiving end. "Sarah is intimidated, in my personal opinion, by people who are intelligent," Laura Chase says. The city had traditionally put up part of the purse for the Iron Dog competition--the grueling, 2,000-mile snow machine race that usually starts in Wasilla--and one year the council considered upping its ante. There's no guarantee that he's going to win it this year." As others chimed in to explain the problem, Palin dug in her heels. "Well, it could be perceived that way, but it isn't," she harrumphed. As a rule, the city's department heads attended every city council meeting. One evening, as the session wound down, Palin mentioned to Mary Ellen Emmons, the library director, that something had been bothering her--a book she thought was overly indulgent of homosexuality. "She said there was no room in our library for that kind of stuff," recalls Chase. She suggested the librarian could at least keep such books in the reference section, where visitors would have to request them. "We don't believe in censoring books," Emmons finally told her, at which point Palin trailed off muttering. Palin also butted heads at times with Dick Deuser, the city attorney. He'd attended law school at the University of Minnesota and had worked for a prominent Anchorage firm. At one point, the council asked him about the legality of banning group homes--such as shelters for runaways--a position Palin championed. Deuser had an academic manner and was fond of citing Supreme Court precedent. When he explained that a ban would be unconstitutional, Palin appeared impatient with such legal niceties. "I would describe it this way: Sarah was not an in-depth person. That Palin would feel threatened by the more urbane members of the community is no surprise given her upbringing. Late one September morning in Wasilla, I met a high school classmate of Palin's named Perry Cowles, a warm, scruffy- looking man with a soul patch and hipster glasses. Cowles overhauls hot rods for a living, and his shop sits at the front of a three-acre lot. A few hundred yards back is his residence, which he described to me as "a typical Alaska house: seven hundred feet of living space; For lunch, Cowles took me to a restaurant near the top of Hatcher Pass, a fearsome peak from which, on a clear day, you can se...
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