For the record, I don't know squat about AK politics and I don't think that this article is the singular, definitive authority (one source can never be). It's just a knowledgeable writer's viewpoint, but it presents an interesting story during this unique political period.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_gourevitch
It's amazing how Palin's brief political career has already been well exposed and analyzed in the mainstream press, so really this article doesn't offer much new, but instead does a good job thematically piecing together what we know about Palin. It describes an interesting schizophrenia and conflict-of-message surrounding the GOP presidential ticket and Ted Stevens-style traditional Alaskan politics. That's like most other states and communities too of course. According to this source, AK society is torn between a fiercely libertarian independent, live-off-the-land frontiersman mentality at odds with the meddling federal government, and a literal dependence on playing the political game to secure federal dollars for the state's very survival (since it is one of the harshest climates in America). The author coined this cultural phenomenon as "subsidized subsistence".
So on one hand, you have 40-years-in-the-Senate Ted Stevens, who was voted "Alaskan of the Century" and proclaimed "Senator for life" (metaphorically) by his constituency. He is a "Rockefeller Republican" believing in fiscal conservatism and minimal federal interference in state's affairs. Yet every 6 years he is re-elected on a platform of "AK first", meaning that he will do everything in his power to secure as much resources for the impoverished state as possible, and being a former President Pro-Tem and senior member of the Appropriations Committee helps a lot. And to get things, we all know you have to give things. An FBI corruption probe of AK politicians' dealings with oil companies has already ended several careers since 2006, and Stevens is heading to trial this month. Combative McCain doesn't have a ton of friends in the Senate (GOP or otherwise), and is at odds with Stevens and others whom he views as "pork-peddlers", which puts Palin in an awkward position. Even if Stevens is found not guilty and wins re-election in November, business as usual will have to change. Some Alaskans really fear the post-Stevens and post-earmark-reform days ahead, where they feel that AK will be set on a starvation course.
25% of Alaskans are registered with the GOP, vs. 15% with the Dems, and many others do not choose to affiliate with a party. While the state could be labeled as "conservative" (it went red the last few elections and most of its top leaders are Republican), it also happens to be one of the most socialistic in America, with each Alaskan enjoying thousands of dollars in state dividend payments from collectively-owned natural resources (in good years or lean), as well as many protectionist laws for state workers and minorities. So I guess they try to have it both ways, and maybe it has to be. Much of AK is barren or Third World, and the cost of living can be quite expensive due to the need to import even basic goods. Although over a million barrels of crude a day flow from AK's soil to the lower 48, soaring energy costs have really hurt Alaskans who may need to drive 100 miles or even boat/plane to the nearest town, and heavily heat their homes when it's -50 degrees outside.
So where does that leave Sarah Palin? She is AK's favorite daughter now, but she was born in Idaho and actually her politics are very different than the AK norm. She has touted her anti-corruption and reform credentials on McCain's "Country first" ticket, yet her record suggests she has operated within the "AK first" political mindset. Most Alaskan conservatives are secular, pragmatic Rockefeller Republicans like pro-choice Stevens, yet Palin's dogma and views appear more "Bush-like" Southern conservative. So if Obama wants to paint McCain as "more of the same", actually he should start with Palin. Former sports journalist Palin became mayor of Wasila (part of Alaska's small evangelical "Bible Belt" in the Mat-Su Valley) by first rubbing elbows with the State GOP and getting on the city council. Gradually she booted out the other councilmen that she once sucked up to, and as mayor dismissed them as "good ol' boys". As mayor, she raised taxes, networked with the well-connected to secure millions in public-works earmarks for her community, while also driving Wasila into legal trouble and debt over an ill-conceived sports complex.
As governor, she wanted creationism to be taught alongside evolution in schools, but did not call for any anti-abortion legislation. She is pro-capital punishment, but did not try to overturn the state's no-dealth-penalty tradition. She has doubts that humans contribute to global warming, but now must back McCain's environmental policy. Well, McCain was originally against ANWR drilling (Palin and Stevens have always supported it), but now that gas is $4 and the Dems showed political weakness on energy, he pounced. So Palin has strong Southern Republican-esque beliefs, but as AK's youngest and first female government, she knew not to rock to boat too much and enjoyed an 80% approval rating (the highest of any current governor). So is she a reformer who took personal risks to challenge entrenched interests and the status quo, or not? Actually she feels that the highlight of her tenure in Juneau is delivering on a long-stalled new natural gas pipeline project. She claims that she thumbed her nose at Big Oil when they wanted their palms greased, and instead gave the contract to a Canadian firm with no kickbacks. This is another Palin half-truth, because currently the project is still stalled over $500M that the legislature can't come up with (administrative costs that the state promised to the Canadian firm before they break ground). And actually the upstream gas producers haven't even agreed to ship product through the pipeline yet, so the project won't do anyone any good if the pipe is empty. She may have to suck up to Big Oil after all. All political mavericks learn that in order to survive, you have to get along and go along sometimes. Change usually comes from the inside, and you can't force change down people's throats, especially powerful people who you still need to get things done. This has and will apply to Obama as well.
I thought this article did a good job of presenting the current headlines on Stevens and Palin (Troopergate, Bridge to Nowhere, etc.) within the context of the unique AK political mindset. I find it interesting that if McCain and Palin get the chance to make good on their promise of "cleaning up Washington", they may actually have to start with AK appropriations, even if many Alaskans depend of subsidy for survival. Something's gotta give. It's hard to be a true fiscal, or even social, conservative if you come from AK. But maybe that shows how rugged, independent AK is more representative of America than we might think. Maybe us in the "lower 48" have become too engrossed in party ideology and accepted this artificial, simplistic, binary political identity for too long. There is no such thing as being totally liberal or conservative, and anyone who is really scares me. Each voter is unique and each issue means different things to different people, depending on the circumstances - which can change constantly. That's why I think the political flip-flop argument is really laughable in most cases. Obviously AK's circumstances are much different than Washington's, and therefore that state produces singular leaders like Stevens and Palin.
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Some highlights of the article:
Many Alaskans enjoy being disconnected from the Lower Forty-eight, which is sometimes referred to as if it were a foreign country. There is pride in this sense of apartness, and that pride has been stung repeatedly since 2006, when the F.B.I. began raiding state lawmakers' offices in an ever-expanding anti-corruption campaign. There have been indictments and guilty pleas. Oil-industry executives who were caught on videotape in the Baranof Hotel, in Juneau, the state capital, giving cash handouts to a state legislator have coöperated in pointing out other state legislators who liked to get paid before voting on oil-industry tax rates. Last year, the F.B.I. hit the home of Ted Stevens, Alaska's six-term senator, and he became a favorite figure of ridicule on "The Daily Show": an angry little man, with an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Magoo, who had once made himself seem even older than his eighty-plus years by describing the Internet as "a series of tubes"; Jon Stewart called him a "coot," and portrayed him as a bully and a crook. As I travelled around Alaska in mid-August, Alaskans wanted me to understand that, sadly, he might well be all of that—and a very good thing for the state, too.
So Ted Stevens may have saved my life—and that was something a great many Alaskans could say as they looked about at the roads and bridges, the hospitals and flood-control systems, the satellite weather and global-positioning relay stations, the sprawling Army and Air Force bases, the rural landing strips and postal air-cargo flights that sustain existence in Alaska as it enters its fiftieth year of statehood. Much of this infrastructure was the result of Stevens's work on the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees, and he made no apologies for his transactional approach to politics. On the contrary, as he brought Alaska the highest number of federal dollars per capita in the nation, he boasted that he was doing his job. Still, Stevens's decision to launch a reëlection campaign in the middle of a federal investigation required more than ordinary moxie.
...
Ralph Seekins, a former state senator who runs the Ford dealership in Fairbanks and serves on the Republican National Committee, told me, "There's a natural suspicion among most Alaskans of the federal government, and the leader of the resistance against that federal government is Ted Stevens." It was a curious description of a man who had done more than any other to wring from the federal budget the funds to make Alaska thrive and grow toward self-sufficiency. But it made sense. Confronted with the choice between subsistence and subsidy, the Alaska patriot has traditionally favored the pragmatic compromise: subsidized subsistence.
...
Back in Bethel, I met a dentist, a man who ran a janitorial-supplies service, and a man who ran a fuel service. I asked them how they thought Bethel and the villages it supported would fare without Ted Stevens in the Senate, in a time without earmarks. The dentist said, "We're fucked," and the janitorial-supplies man said, "There will be ghost towns." The fuel-oil man pointed to a hard black, jagged, wedge-shaped object on his desk, and asked if I knew what kind of tooth it was. "Mastodon," he said.
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"It's the most momentous political season I've lived through in Alaska," Pat Dougherty, the editor of the Anchorage Daily News, the state's largest newspaper, told me—and that was three weeks before the governor, Sarah Palin, became the human cannonball of the Presidential campaign and blasted into overlapping orbits of political and tabloid super-celebrity. Just about everyone in Alaska knew that Palin was on John McCain's list of potential running mates, but no one in the state's insular, Republican political world had seen any indication that the campaign was checking her background. That made sense to Dougherty. Palin was forty-four years old and had served only a year and a half as governor, and he said, "The idea of her as Vice-President is ridiculous. She'd be way in over her head."
Then again, two years ago Dougherty hadn't considered Palin ready to be governor, even after she prevailed in the Republican primary against the deeply unpopular incumbent, Frank Murkowski, who had previously spent twenty-two years as Alaska's junior senator. "We endorsed the Democrat in her race," he said. "We didn't think she had the experience." Looking back, Dougherty allowed that he had underestimated Palin. After twenty months in office, she enjoyed an eighty-per-cent approval rating—the highest in the nation—and although he said he wouldn't yet call himself an admirer, he described her performance as "great spectator sport." Dougherty was particularly impressed by her tough, you-deal-with-Alaska-on-Alaska's-terms attitude toward the big oil producers on whom the state's economy largely depends.
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Palin's record as the mayor of Wasilla, a town forty miles north of Anchorage, told a somewhat different story. According to "Sarah," a biography by Kaylene Johnson, Palin had got into politics after she befriended the man who was then mayor and his police chief at a step-aerobics class. She made them her allies and ran for City Council. Then she challenged them for control of City Hall, and drove them out. As she purged her former friends and patrons, she denounced them as "good ol' boys," although her takeover of Wasilla had been aided from the start by Alaska's Republican Party establishment.
Palin's style of governing was unorthodox and at times impulsive. Although she boasts of a record as a fiscal conservative, she raised the sales tax while she was in office. She left the town saddled with millions of dollars in debt from the building of a new sports complex, and with legal fees, because she had failed to secure title to the land on which the complex was built. Casting herself in the Ted Stevens mold, however, she had proved herself skilled at collecting federal earmarks for Wasilla, bringing in twenty-seven million dollars for her small town in three years.
Palin's biggest difference with Alaska's Republican establishment, then, was not so much fiscal as it was social. Ted Stevens is one of the last of the Rockefeller Republicans—the real thing, as he supported Nelson Rockefeller over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential race. He is essentially secular and skeptical of government, and favors abortion rights—a common profile in Alaska, a state that attracts a strong streak of libertarians and rugged individualists. By contrast, Palin belongs to the state's small evangelical community, which is centered in the Mat-Su Valley, around Wasilla. She thinks that creationism should be taught in the public schools alongside Darwinian evolution, she was called the town's "first Christian mayor" by a local TV station, and she asked the town librarian about banning books, but did not follow through.
As governor, Palin has done nothing to impose her religious or social views. Alaska has no death penalty, and during the campaign she said that she would support one, but never made an issue of it; she opposed abortion even for pregnancies caused by rape, but this was a personal opinion, not a legislative cause. In fact, she refused requests to put abortion bills on the agenda during a special legislative session this summer, preferring to discuss the natural-gas pipeline, which she pursued in such a bipartisan manner that she ultimately won more solid support for it from Democrats than from Republicans. While Republicans hold most of the state's top political posts, only twenty-five per cent of Alaskan voters are registered Republicans. Fifteen per cent are Democrats, and three per cent belong to the Alaska Independence Party—the extremist states' rights, quasi-secessionist faction to which Todd Palin once pledged his allegiance. A solid majority of Alaska's electorate claims no party affiliation. Alaskans kept telling me that Alaskans vote for the person, not the party.
So it was startling to see Palin emerge in the last days of August as an icon of the evangelical base of the Republican Party, and as a fierce—often vituperative—partisan scourge, mocking Barack Obama's character and positions. It was startling, too, to hear her, in her début speech to the Republican National Convention, reading a script that consistently distorted her own record. She said that she had put her predecessor's jet for sale on eBay, which was true, except that this is how government property was often disposed of in Alaska, and the plane didn't sell online; it had to be unloaded through a private deal, at a loss of half a million dollars.
Palin also said that she told Congress "thanks but no thanks" for the notorious Bridge to Nowhere—a Ted Stevens and Don Young earmark project that had long been a target of John McCain's ridicule. (The bridge, which would have cost nearly four hundred million dollars, was intended to provide access from one island to an airport on a smaller island, with a population of fifty people.) In reality, Palin had supported the bridge in her gubernatorial race, even after Congress revoked the earmark, but abandoned it following the election and directed the money Alaska had received to other projects.
And, of course, Palin touted her gas-pipeline project. "I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history," she said. "And, when that deal was struck, we began a nearly forty-billion-dollar natural-gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence." That was not entirely accurate. She was still waiting for the state legislature to release the five hundred million dollars she'd promised the pipeline company to help pay for administrative costs. But the crowd loved it. Many of the delegates wore lapel buttons that said, "Coldest State, Hottest Governor."
That same week, Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, announced, "This election is not about issues." What mattered, he said, was the "composite view" that voters would form of the candidates. On a talk show, the Washington bureau chief of Time told Nicole Wallace, a McCain spokesperson, that it was still unclear whether Palin was ready "to answer tough questions about domestic policy, foreign policy." Wallace laughed. "Like from who? From you?" And she asked, "Who cares if she can talk to Time magazine?"
Attacking the press is nothing new in the playbook of political defense, but it took a bold twist when the McCain campaign contrived to transform a family problem—the pregnancy of Palin's unmarried seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol—into a vindication of Palin's Christian family values. Surely, it had not been part of McCain's plan for his untested Vice-Presidential pick to start Day Four of her rollout by announcing Bristol's plans to marry the baby's father, Levi Johnston, who, as the Times reported, recently dropped out of high school. The campaign said that it was going public in order to quash offensive rumors that were circulating on the Internet: that Sarah Palin's five-month-old baby, Trig, who has Down syndrome, was not really hers but Bristol's, and that the Governor had faked her pregnancy in order to cover for her unwed daughter. This Faulknerian story had been making the rounds in Alaska for months—I heard versions of it in Anchorage and Juneau within twenty-four hours of arriving in each city—and it derived from the peculiar circumstances surrounding Trig's birth.
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Sarah Palin's makeover was just beginning, but the campaign had scored a critical victory: the press, in asking about the least-known potential President in recent memory, had been made to look contemptible. When, at last, Palin appeared at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, most of the forty million Americans who watched her on TV were seeing her for the first time.
The control of Palin by the McCain campaign was one of many ways in which it transformed her into someone largely unrecognizable to people who knew her in Alaska, where she hadn't shown a great interest in national economic issues other than energy policy, or in international affairs, and where she was viewed as more often seeking the attention of the press than avoiding it. For her first two weeks on the Presidential ticket, Palin was kept cocooned by handlers, except at rallies, where she read an adumbrated version of her Convention speech over and over, even as many of its claims were being debunked. When a Fox News anchor demanded to know when she could be interviewed, Rick Davis explained that he would allow access only to reporters who showed "deference."
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