Sarah Palin at her home in Wasilla, Alaska.
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"It comes at such great cost," she tells TIME. "The distraction. The waste of time and money, public's time and money." She decided that "it's insane to continue down this road. And Alaskans who have paid attention to what's going on, they understand that." But what she sees as distractions, many voters see as the gauntlet of public life; that if you can't take the heat, don't go into the public sauna. She asserts that if people were shocked by her decision, it was because the media haven't covered the real story. "We have sat down with reporters, showed them proof of the frivolity, the wastefulness, you know, millions of dollars this is costing our state to fight frivolous charges. And countless, countless hours from my staff, our Department of Law, from me, every single day, just trying to set the record straight--and it doesn't cost the adversaries a dime."
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.
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.
"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.