The Outsider: Where Is Sarah Palin Going Next?

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Hell, Yeah, We're Out of Here
According to Palin, as she announced her decision, her family was uniformly delighted by her move. "It was four yeses and one 'Hell, yeah!' " she said. Others, however, had tried and failed to persuade Palin to rise above silly-season attacks. John Coale, for one. A prominent Washington attorney and fundraiser (and husband of Fox News' Greta Van Susteren), Coale helped Palin set up a PAC and a legal-defense fund. "She was very worried about money," he says, because the cost of defending herself against the various complaints ran some $500,000 in legal bills. Perhaps inevitably, the legal fund produced yet another ethics complaint.

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Coale was surprised when Palin told him she made a habit of listening to her critics on talk radio. "You can't do that," he told her.

"Yeah," she conceded — then reconsidered. "But I've got to see what they're saying."

"No, you don't," he answered.

"She made the mistake that every time someone attacked her, she'd fight back," Coale says. And that instinct was especially strong when the attack involved family. In recent months she has been in an unseemly tussle with Levi Johnston, the hockey-playing former fiancé of her daughter Bristol. After a joke aimed at 18-year-old Bristol hit 14-year-old Willow instead, Palin demanded multiple apologies from comedian David Letterman. Even after Palin announced her resignation, she remained on high alert. Shannyn Moore, an Alaska blogger, questioned whether Palin quit because of rumors she was facing a scandal. Palin's lawyer threatened to sue. Net result: more publicity and an FBI denial of any investigation. (See pictures of Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston.)

"There's been a lot of adverse publicity and the drumbeat of allegations," says Gregg Erickson, who watches Juneau politics as editor-at-large of the Alaska Budget Report. "She rises to the bait every time."

For Palin, however, these aren't isolated incidents. She believes they grow from the same root, which is too big and too formidable to ignore. "A lot of this comes from Washington, D.C. The trail is pretty direct and pretty obvious to us," says Meg Stapleton, a close Palin adviser in Alaska. Awaiting a flight back to Anchorage from distant Dillingham, Stapleton adds that the anti-Palin offensive seems lifted straight from The Thumpin', which describes the political strategies of Rahm Emanuel, who is now the White House chief of staff. "It's the Sarah Palin playbook. It's how they operate," Stapleton says.

Palin and her Alaska circle find evidence for their suspicions about the White House in the person of Pete Rouse, who lived in Juneau for a time before he became chief of staff to a young U.S. Senator named Barack Obama. Rouse, they note, is a friend of former Alaska state senator Kim Elton, who pushed the first ethics investigation of Palin, examining her controversial firing of the state's public-safety commissioner. Both Rouse and Elton have joined the Obama Administration. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs scoffed at the theory. "The charge is ridiculous," he said. "Obviously there is no effort ... From my vantage point, a lot of the criticism she is getting from others seems to be generated from self-inflicted wounds." (Read "Where Palin Made Her Name.")

Something else might have been eating at Palin too. Call it boredom or impatience: Juneau must seem awfully small compared with the national stage. A state representative from Anchorage, Democrat Mike Doogan, recalls the traditional opening of the legislature on a January day — the same day Obama was sworn in as President. Doogan was chosen to pay a ceremonial visit to the governor to announce that the session had begun. Dressed in his best suit, with a plastic iris in his lapel, he waited in Palin's office as she finished a meeting. "She wasn't particularly happy to see us or interested in anything other than getting the ceremony over as quickly as possible," he says. "And this from a woman who had served cupcakes for my birthday at the mansion just six months earlier." That was the last he saw of the governor in Juneau.

Born to Run
Her departure was a distillate of all things Palin. It packed the same gob-smacking wallop as her arrival on the GOP ticket. Sunlit against an Alaskan waterfront, it was as telegenic as her boffo acceptance speech. Rambling along in Palinesque fashion, she didn't quite tell us where she's headed, but she left no doubt that she remains in a hurry to get there.

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