Klein did not last long enough to get his retribution. In September 2010, he was fired.
For Sarah Palin, the months since Election Day had been a letdown even bigger than the loss to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Being governor, she found, was drudgery compared to her media stardom. “Her life was terrible,” one adviser said. “She was never home, her [Juneau] office was four hours from her house. You gotta drive an hour from Wasilla to Anchorage. And she was going broke.” Her sky-high approval ratings in Alaska—which had topped 80 percent before McCain picked her—had withered to the low 50s. She faced a hostile legislature, a barrage of ethics complaints, and frothing local bloggers who reveled in her misfortune. All this for a salary of only $125,000? The worst was that she had racked up $500,000 in legal bills to fend off allegations that she had dismissed Alaska’s public safety commissioner because he refused to fire a state trooper who was her ex-brother-in-law. She needed money and worried about it constantly.
Partly because of her embarrassing campaign interview with Katie Couric, and partly because of her outlandish family life and moose-shooting habits, Palin was a massive American celebrity. In November 2008, John Coale tagged along with his wife, Greta Van Susteren, on a trip to Alaska to tape an interview with Palin for Fox News. Later, the Fox camera crew, Van Susteren, and Coale gathered around the Palins’ kitchen table for some moose chili. After dinner, Coale and Palin retreated to the pantry and sat on stacks of boxes and talked for the next hour about her Troopergate dilemma. Palin confessed she didn’t know what to do about her legal bills. Coale assured Palin he would figure something out.
Whatever one thought of her intelligence, she was more than shrewd enough to see that there was money to be made on her newfound national profile, and she hadn’t been the one making it. Planning quickly got under way for a book. Conservative pundit Mary Matalin introduced Palin to Washington superlawyer Robert Barnett, who helped Palin land a reported $7 million book contract with HarperCollins. Two former Palin campaign aides were hired to plan a book tour with all the trappings of a national political campaign. But there was a hitch: with Alaska’s strict ethics rules, Palin worried that her day job would get in the way. In March, she petitioned the Alaska attorney general’s office, which responded with a lengthy list of conditions. “There was no way she could go on a book tour while being governor” is how one member of her Alaska staff put it.
On the morning of July 3, 2009, in front of a throng of national reporters, Palin announced that she was stepping down as governor. To many, it seemed a mysterious move, defying the logic of a potential presidential candidate, and possibly reflecting some hidden scandal—but in fact the choice may have been as easy as balancing a checkbook.
Once she resigned from the governorship in July, the race was on to sign her up on television. Producers had already put out feelers. Weeks after the 2008 election, reality show producer Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor, called Palin and pitched her on starring in her own show. Then, in September 2009, Ailes arranged for Palin to fly on a private jet when she needed to travel from San Diego to New York to meet with her editors at HarperCollins. During the visit, Murdoch met Palin at a charity dinner hosted by his wife, Wendi, at Cipriani 42nd Street, and that only increased the network’s appetite. Ailes deputized Bill Shine to land her.
Negotiations dragged out over the next six months. Palin made it clear to Fox that she wouldn’t be willing to move to New York or Washington. Fox offered to build a remote camera hookup in her Wasilla home. Palin also told Fox that she didn’t want producers hounding her for interviews. She wanted all her appearances to have to go through Shine personally. In January 2010, Palin finally had her $1 million–a–year deal. Shine was responsible for making sure the various Fox personalities got equal booking time, to maximize her ratings appeal across the network. “Obviously, there needs to be a sense of fairness,” Shine explained.
Hiring Palin brought the number of prospective presidential candidates on Ailes’s payroll to five: Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and John Bolton. Presidential politics were what brought in viewers, and in the Obama age, Ailes was dominating both politics and business. Fox was on track to generate nearly a billion-dollar profit. A Wall Street analyst valued the network at more than $12.4 billion. In 2009, Ailes earned $23 million. The Obama era turnaround plan was firing on all cylinders. Ailes “predicted that the Democrats would lose the House,” one senior producer said. Ailes was right. In the midterms, Republicans would retake the House in the biggest electoral gain since 1948.
But Ailes’s biggest stars—Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin—were burning hot—too hot—which posed new problems. Beck’s numbers were moving toward three million a day, a stunning achievement. “I’ve never seen anyone build an audience this fast,” Ailes told executives. The concern was that Beck was almost engulfing Fox itself. He did not follow Ailes’s directives, and some of Fox’s other big names seemed diminished by comparison—and were speaking up about it. Sean Hannity complained to Bill Shine about Beck. And it didn’t help matters that O’Reilly, who had become friends with Beck, scheduled him as a regular guest, a move that only annoyed Hannity further. In March, The Washington Post ran an article that reported on grievances Fox employees had about Beck’s inflammatory rhetoric and his self-promotion.
Palin also ruffled Fox executives’ feathers. In the winter of 2010, tensions between Palin’s camp and Fox arose over a prime-time special that the network wanted her to star in. Nancy Duffy, a senior Fox producer, wanted Palin to host the show in front of a live studio audience. Duffy hoped to call the program Sarah Palin’s Real American Stories. Palin hated the idea. She complained to her advisers that she didn’t want to be a talk show host. She wanted to just do voice-overs. More important, she didn’t want Fox to promote her name in the title of the program. Not that it mattered: Palin’s ratings were starting to disappoint Ailes anyway. Fox did not schedule any additional specials.
In the control room, the Palins entertained producers with their private reality show. Fox staffers chuckled watching Sarah and husband Todd on the video link Fox had installed in her Wasilla office. “On the internal feed you see everything. Someone should tell her that. Todd does the camerawork. She barks at him big time, ‘Todd, what are you doing!’ It’s embarrassing,” one person explained. Fox producers came up with names for their characters: “The Bitch” and “The Eskimo.”