Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury
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Every year on July 4, a parade marches through downtown Wasilla, ending at a city park, where the mayor throws a picnic. When I saw Chuck and Sally Heath marching in the parade, behind the campaign float for the current governor, Sean Parnell, I jumped from the curb to say hello. Chuck wouldn’t—couldn’t—talk about his daughter; the strict rule in the family now is no interviews, ever, without Sarah’s permission. After we had been walking for a while, he looked around and asked where Sally had gone. “Sally’s upset,” said the woman marching next to him, glaring at me, “because you are not following orders.”
In whatever remains of Palin’s inner circle, however, most people are following orders. Some details of the Palins’ private life, however, suggest a reality at odds with Sarah’s image. In speeches, Palin pays tribute to the man she still calls “the First Dude.” One of the strangest passages in Going Rogue concerns post-election rumors that the couple was considering a divorce. “That day in sunny Texas when the divorce rumors were rampant in the tabloids, I watched Todd, tanned and shirtless, take the baby from my arms and walk him back to the ranch house,” she writes, like a frontier Barbara Cartland. “Dang, I thought. Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd?” Locally, much speculation surrounds the marriage. Some say Todd is henpecked, and others see him as the heavy. One person who has been a frequent houseguest of the Palins’ says that the couple began many mornings with screaming fights, a fusillade of curses: “ ‘Fuck you,’ ‘Fuck this,’ ‘You lazy piece of shit.’ ‘You’re fuckin’ lucky to have me,’ Sarah would always say.” (This person never saw Todd and Sarah sleep in the same bed, and recalls that Todd would often joke, “I don’t know how she ever gets pregnant.”) Whatever the nature of the relationship, Todd is now as much a part of Sarah as Hillary Clinton is of Bill. Whether they like it or not, the Palins, like the Clintons, are probably stuck with each other.
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http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/10/sarah-palin-201010?currentPage=7