Subject: [big campaign] Palin from a local perspective
From: "David S. Bennahum" <[email-masked]>
To: Big Campaign <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 14:21:13 -0400
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

http://www.minnesotaindependent.com/6891/the-thrilla-from-wasilla-an-alaskan-recounts-the-reign-of-gov-sarah-palin
"The Thrilla from Wasilla: An Alaskan recounts the reign of Gov. Sarah  
Palin"
By David Noon 9/2/08 12:23 PM

The nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate is perhaps  
the most bizarre thing I’ve witnessed since moving to Alaska six years  
ago, arguably surpassing the time a bald eagle dropped a flounder into  
my hot tub. Judging by the e-mails I received on Friday — half of  
which were some variation of “Who the fuck is Sarah Palin?” — almost  
no one outside this state knows who the fuck Sarah Palin is. Here’s a  
quick primer.

Her political career began ran in tiny Wasilla, where she defeated a  
three-term incumbent in a tough mayoral race that attracted hundreds  
of voters. According to legend, Palin campaigned aggressively and  
enthusiastically, knocking on every door in the city and writing  
personal letters to locals who’d actually bothered to show up at the  
polls in the previous four years. In office, Palin quickly began  
distributing a stable of severed equine heads to rivals and suspected  
foes. She slashed the city’s budget and fired a host of subordinates —  
the head librarian and the chief of police, most notoriously — while  
asking for the resignations of her entire court of managers to test  
their “loyalty” to a 32-year-old mayor. Arguing that the city’s $4  
million surplus revenue would be best spent on roads and sewers, Palin  
hacked the appropriation for the Wasilla city museum, driving three  
septuagenarian curators into disgruntled retirement. When Palin  
proposed halving the city’s property tax assessment, one city council  
member — in a parody of the mayor’s small-government evangelism —  
proposed simply getting rid of it altogether.

So went her first ten months in office. Though Palin’s abrasive  
decisions sparked widespread grumbling, a move to recall her was  
bridled and a lawsuit by the fired police chief went nowhere. Palin  
survived a rocky initiation, and in 1999 more than 800 appreciative  
citizens bore her triumphantly aloft to a second term. From there, she  
moved on to a state resource commission and into the perennial rumor  
mill of potential gubernatorial and senatorial runs. When the flagrant  
ass-peddling that’s long defined Alaska’s Republican party finally  
backfired in 2006, Palin vaulted to the governor’s mansion, promising  
to reduce corruption and draw more hydrocarbons from the soil.

In most ways, Palin has been a vast improvement over her predecessor,  
Frank Murkowski, a world-renowned dope who managed to aggravate every  
possible constituency while presiding over a vast ocean of corruption  
during his single term in office. She approved a bill that squeezed  
oil producers for more revenue, and she called out fellow Republicans,  
including the party’s own state chairman, for their pliable ethics.  
Along these lines, Palin’s work has been commendable, though it bears  
noting that after corruption indictments had been laid against nearly  
a dozen public officials, lobbyists and corporate executives,  
legislative inertia was not difficult to overcome. “Troopergate” —  
which I suspect is going to turn out very badly for Palin — takes the  
shine off Palin’s image as a reformer. As with her approach to the  
mayor’s office a decade earlier, Palin has established a pattern of  
using public office to settle private scores and to retaliate against  
subordinates who have been deemed insufficiently helpful.

More substantively, Palin’s vaunted record as a budget-trimming  
“maverick” and a principled opponent of federal pork is also  
overstated. She has never opposed federal earmarks on principle, even  
for the patently absurd Gravina Island bridge (“to nowhere”). And  
while she hacked $270 million from this year’s budget, the  
“principles” she deployed were inconsistent and provincial. She left  
most projects in her home region of the Matanuska-Susitna Valley  
untouched (though she dismantled a funding proposal for a recycling  
center). And she allowed the state to fund an “academic based”  
conference to highlight the state’s unique argument that shrinking  
polar ice doesn’t threaten polar bear habitats. It’s true that she  
eliminated funding for a zamboni blade-sharpener — a budget item that  
was to state political snark what the “Bridge to Nowhere” was for the  
rest of the country — but to describe Palin as “anti-pork” requires  
that we overlook the basic point that for most people, “pork” is  
merely synonymous with “projects I don’t like.”

Since her nomination last week, other aspects of Palin’s conservative  
ideology received lots of exposure. She is fanatically anti-choice, a  
stance that the birth of her fifth child — and her own teenage  
daughter’s pregnancy — will only underscore as McCain rallies social  
conservatives to the tent. Her religious mentors in Alaska are genuine  
End-of-Days lunatics, and Palin has offered modest endorsement for the  
view that creationist superstition should be granted equal time in  
high school science classes. In keeping with her administration’s  
cautious approach to governing, though, Palin has not forwarded any  
legislation on these or any other issues. And while she personally  
opposes domestic partner benefits for same-sex couples, Palin vetoed a  
plainly unconstitutional bill that would have denied those benefits to  
state workers. These traits could be as effective a combination for  
McCain’s candidacy as they’ve been for Palin in Alaska. Social  
conservatives will recognize her as one of their own, while moderates  
may not be inclined to view her as a dangerous ideologue.

As a vice presidential candidate, though, Palin could be disastrous.  
She’s not a policy wonk, and she’s incapable of holding a press  
conference without a coral reef of staffers to feed her answers.  
Though amiable and charming in debates, she is staggeringly uninformed  
on most issues of national significance, and voters would do well to  
wonder how the erstwhile Mayor of Wasilla would manage the American  
imperium when President McCain strokes out over a third-tier  
international crisis.

More ominously for Palin, she’s made a tremendous number of enemies  
during her rise to power, folks who have remained more or less quiet  
about the less savory aspects of Palin’s professional and personal  
life. Given the McCain campaign’s apparent failure to thoroughly  
research Palin’s past, I would not be surprised to see some highly  
public score-settling over the next few weeks.

***David Noon is a professor of history at the University of Alaska in  
Juneau, the author of the great, sort-of-on-hiatus Axis of Evel  
Knievel blog, and a contributor to Lawyers, Guns and Money.
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