The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin by Joe McGinniss Page A

I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it’s cracked up a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don’t let me miss an open door. And if there is an open door in ’12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plow through that door.”
    Henning later filed a second complaint, charging that Sarah had improperly billed the state per diem costs for days when she worked out of her Wasilla home.
    A stocky man who’s obviously spent a lot of time outdoors, Henning meets me at Vagabond Blues, the downtown coffee and sandwich shop where just about everybody meets everybody in Palmer. He’s known Sarah since childhood. Chuck Heath was his sixth-grade teacher. He remembers Chuck coming in the first day and telling the students to forget the curriculum for the year: they weren’t going to waste time on stuff like English and history and math. They were going to study the only subject that really mattered—the great Alaskan outdoors.
    “If you were an outdoorsy kid, he was the greatest teacher you could have,” Henning says. “But if you were any kind of bookworm, it must have been a very long year. He didn’t hesitate to make fun of boys he didn’t think were manly enough, and the only girls he paid attention to were the pretty ones.”
    Henning was friends with Sarah’s younger sister, Molly, but as for Sarah herself, he says, “She gave me the willies from the get-go. She was always standoffish, and if she didn’t get her way she was a bully.”
    Moving back to Wasilla in 1989, after several years in southwestern Alaska, Henning found the adult Sarah not much different from the child. “Todd and I hit it off okay—we were both fishermen and we could talk about snow machines—but Sarah still had this clique-y high-schoolish thing going, and my wife didn’t like her, so we never really socialized.”
    Even so, Henning voted for her for mayor. “I had joined the Last Frontier Foundation, which was all about more conservative, smaller government, and I was a Christian and I knew she was, too, so it was a pretty easy choice.”
    It was also one he soon regretted. “She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know the first thing. She had to hire a business manager to run the city because she didn’t know how. And then she spent fifty thousand dollars remodeling her office without getting city council approval.”
    Henning approached her one night at a social gathering. “It was at Harry and Whitney’s house—they live in Utah now—and I asked her about the remodeling. She said how dare I ever question her! Just like that. Boom. From that point forward the door was closed for conversation.”
    With increasing dismay, Henning watched Sarah spend $15 million to build a new sports center on land the city didn’t own. “She wanted to prove she was a hockey mom, but to me that wasn’t being conservative.”
    Once she became governor, Henning turned into an outright gadfly, requesting copies of state e-mails that, he said, showed Sarah was doing state business on private accounts to avoid public scrutiny.
    “She’d promised open and transparent, but that was just another of her lies. And Todd was copied on everything. He was supposed tobe working for BP, a company with which the state is doing business. But she’s copying him on confidential documents regarding oil and gas. How can you say that’s ethical?
    “Listen, I used to see Todd up on the slope. Even after I filed my ethics complaints, he never pointed a finger at me. He’s a wimp. He makes me sick. People say he’s a man’s man? I’d love to grab him by the neck and beat the shit out of him.”
    “That doesn’t sound very Christian,” I say.
    Henning laughs. “I know. Todd and Sarah bring out the worst in me. I’ve got to be careful