Get used to Palin: The show's just starting
By Donald Craig Mitchell
In August when John McCain selected Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate, with the exception of Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes who still had pheromone up their nostrils from the lunch they had with Sarah in 2007 when the cruise ship on which they were riding stopped in at Juneau, no one else in the “lower 48" (as those of us in the subarctic call the US of A) had heard of the woman. Ninety days and counting later, Sarah Palin and her celebrity have become as ubiquitous a part of the popular culture as Paris Hilton and Madge Ciccone.
Sarah’s speed of light intrusion into the everyday texture of life in America rivals that of the Beatles. And three weeks after the election defeat that John and Cindy McCain climbed into their own car and drove themselves home from while Sarah and her entourage flew back to Anchorage on a private jet, it’s clear that, insofar as the cover of People magazine is concerned, Alaska’s governor-girl is on it to stay.
So for those Americans tired of listening to Sarah’s discordant Matanuska-Susitna Valley Girl syntax and her bubbly expressions of near total ignorance about almost every subject about which she’s asked, my advice is: get used to it. Because the show’s just starting.
The curtain went up the week after the election when Sarah ended the suspense by confirming that if in 2012 God arranged to open the door to the presidency for her “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.” Since then, at least two web sites -
www.2012draftsarahcommittee.com and
www.draftpalinforpresident.com - have begun shaking the tree to get God the money he’s going to need to make his candidate competitive in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Two weeks ago Sarah descended on the Republican Governors Association’s winter meeting in Miami like the rock star she’s become. The Linda Ronstadt in her prime of the Evangelical Hard Right. When she walked into the Intercontinental Hotel a phalanx of TV cameras lit up and more than 200 reporters were there to honor her celebrity, while Haley Barbour and Charlie Crist stood unnoticed at the back of the crowd. Next week she’s off to Georgia on the Republican National Committee’s nickel to barnstorm with Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss during the run-up to Georgia’s run-off election for the Senate seat that Chambliss is trying to defend. And from there it’s up to Philly to join other Governors for a meeting with Barack Obama.
My prediction is that for at least the next two years Sarah is going to keep her show on the road because that will be a lot more fun than being Governor of a backwater state that spends most of its time as far out of the limelight in which Sarah has been basking as North and South Dakota do. During the almost fifty years it has been a state Alaska has had nine governors. Other than Sarah Palin, how many people who do not live in Alaska can name one of them? And why should they be able to? Because who cares who the Governor of Alaska is?
That is the obscurity to which Sarah will return if she goes back to her day job. In addition to being no fun, for presidential candidate wannabe Palin, that also is the rub.
When he was asked at the Republican Governors Association meeting to handicap the likelihood that in 2012 God will open the door to the presidency that Sarah has promised to walk through if he does, Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, a chief executive respected for his gravitas, predicted that Sarah Palin’s political future “largely will be driven by the ideas that come out of her system of governance in Alaska,” rather than by her celebrity.
But during the two years that she’s been Alaska’s Governor, Sarah has had no “system of governance,” much less a system that, with her doing the thinking, has developed any new ideas about how to solve any of the major problems that beset the jurisdiction over which she was elected to preside. Instead, what she has had was Alaska oil selling for $120 to $140 a barrel. That allowed Sarah to govern, not by developing ideas, but by writing checks.
At all locations off the grid that distributes natural gas from the Cook Inlet gas field into homes in Anchorage and elsewhere in Southcentral Alaska, and particularly in the more than 200 small Eskimo, Indian, and Aleut villages that are scattered throughout rural Alaska, Alaska family incomes have been ravaged by the spike in the cost of energy, particularly the increase in the price of heating oil in the villages to, at some locations, $9 a gallon. But rather than developing a long term energy plan and then using Alaska’s petrodollars to finance its implementation, Sarah sent every man, woman, and child in Alaska a check for $1,200.
But that was a onetime deal since Alaska oil now is selling for less than $50 a barrel. So what are Alaska families who can’t afford to heat their homes to do next year? In recent months Sarah hasn’t been around long enough to say.
And then there’s the $30 billion pipeline to transport natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope to the Alberta Hub in Canada where from the Hub the gas can be distributed into homes from Illinois east across the Rust Belt and then north into New England. It’s been talked about in Alaska for twenty years. But the pipeline has not been built because building it makes no financial sense. Sarah’s solution to the problem that the cost of construction doesn’t pencil out was to leverage her popularity with their constituents to intimidate a majority of the members of the Alaska Legislature into voting to give TransCanada, a Canadian pipeline company that does not own any of the gas, $500 million of public money to help it pay for a private pipeline.
In 2010 the fact that, notwithstanding the $500 million, the cost of construction doesn’t pencil out will be reconfirmed when TransCanada holds an auction called an “open season” to see whether the three oil companies that do own most of the gas will agree to pay TransCanada the price to transport their gas to the Alberta Hub that TransCanada will have to be paid in order to be able to finance the construction of the pipeline.
When the “open season” is a bust because the oil companies will not agree to pay TransCanada what it needs to be paid, the State of Alaska will be out $500 million and the dream of a natural gas pipeline will be back to being just that, a dream. And the individual responsible for the fiasco will be Sarah Palin. Nevertheless, during the presidential campaign the aforementioned Haley Barbour touted John McCain’s running mate as “a bonafide energy expert.”
And it gets worse. When Sarah was asked on the campaign trail what, being an “energy expert,” she would do as Vice President to ensure that oil and coal produced in the United States is consumed in the United States, rather than transported overseas, here was her answer:
Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't
flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and
where it's not. But in the sense of the Congress
today, they know that there are very, very hungry
domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I
believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is
not to allow the export bans to such a degree that
it's Americans who get stuck holding the bag without
the energy source that is produced here, pumped here.
It's got to flow into our domestic markets first.
Huh? And with an absolutely straight face, John McCain vouched to the nation that Sarah Palin “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.”
Simply put, when the baloney is cut through, Sarah and her patron’s assertion during the presidential campaign that her two-year tenure as Governor of Alaska transformed a University of Idaho journalism major and former local television sports reporter into one of the nation’s most knowledgeable “energy experts” is a canard so risible that privately even Sarah and John McCain must know that the very idea of it is a joke.
The real deal is that the phenomenal 90 percent approval rating among Alaska voters that Sarah recorded last spring (and which hardcore Palinistas continue to tout as evidence that Sarah Palin is “the most popular governor in America”) was based on $120 to $140 a barrel oil. And to a lesser extent it was based on Sarah not being Frank Murkowski, her predecessor and the most reviled Governor in Alaska history. That approval rating was not based on leadership. And it was not based on Sarah’s development of the new “ideas” that Jon Huntsman has predicted will be the benchmark against which their owner’s suitability in 2012 for high national office will be judged.
Even more ominously for Sarah’s presidential prospects, while she’s still having the time of her young middle-aged life rousing the crowds she continues to attract out on the road that she’s been reluctant to come off of, back home the glow appears to be fading at a pace commensurate with the rate at which the price of Alaska oil has declined. Sarah’s 90 percent approval rating with Alaska voters is now down to 61 percent.
Interestingly, the residents of Juneau were the first Alaskans to pretty much give up on Sarah. Juneau, a small gold rush-era town in Southeast Alaska that today consists of two cruise ship docks, a row of T-shirt shops, and the State Capitol up Franklin Street from the wharf, clings to its status as the state capitol with pathological tenacity. It does so because constant vigilance is the only way that Juneau has been able to fend off the efforts that have been made every ten or twenty years since statehood to relocate the state capitol north to Southcentral Alaska where the majority of Alaska’s population lives.
As part of their defense against efforts to move the capitol, since statehood the city fathers and mothers of Juneau have expected the Governor of Alaska and his family to live full time in the Governor’s Mansion up the street from the State Capitol Building. And they used to expect the Governor to require the members of his cabinet to live full time in Juneau.
More than twenty years ago members of the Governor’s cabinet who lived in Anchorage began weaseling out of relocating by renting apartments in Juneau while they spent more and more time working out of their offices in Anchorage where they continued to live at home with their spouses and children. In 1989 that fact came to public attention when Alaska Governor Steve Cowper had to fire Tony Smith, his Commissioner of Commerce, when the Anchorage Daily News reported that Tony had been collecting per diem for living with his wife in their home in Anchorage when he’d never actually moved to Juneau.
Today even Juneau no longer expects the members of the Governor’s cabinet to move there. But all Governors have complied with Juneau’s rule about living in the Governor’s Mansion. Until Sarah.
During the two years she has been Governor, Sarah bunked in the Governor’s Mansion more often than not between January and May when the Legislature was in session. But as soon as the Legislature left town she flew home to Wasilla to live with her husband, Todd Palin, and her children who still live at home in the house that Todd built for her several years ago on the shore of a lake there. And when she’s been in Wasilla she’s had the politically tone deaf chutzpah to collect the same per diem that got Tony Smith fired. During her first nineteen months in office, out of 570 days Sarah spent more than 300 of them living at home in Wasilla and she collected $43,490 in per diem.
It’s now been three weeks since the election. And Sarah has yet to set foot in Juneau. Next week she’s off to Georgia. And from there up to Philly. By the time she gets back to Alaska the Holiday Season will be full upon her. So it’s unlikely that Sarah will spend another night in the Governor’s Mansion until the Legislature returns to Juneau in January.
When John McCain made Sarah famous and Charles Gibson came to Alaska to interview her where did Charlie (as Sarah, with faux familiarity, called him) go? To Wasilla. And two weeks ago when Greta Van Susteren came to Alaska to interview Sarah where did Greta go? Again to Wasilla. During the interview Fox news broadcast on November 10 Greta asked Sarah whether, given the controversy that doing so has provoked, she planned to continue collecting per diem for living at home in Wasilla. Sarah answered:
The choice there in many months of the Juneau mansion
being re-plumbed and all the improvements being made
in the infrastructure of the Juneau house, where we
weren’t going to be there anyway. Knowing that in the
end it would have cost the state more money to do what
other governors had done and this is either charge the
state for hotel rooms or the state rents you an
apartment like they did for Governor Murkowski. We
said no, we just won’t sell our house, knowing that
we’re going to spend quite a bit of time here,
especially those months where the remodels were taking
place in the governor’s mansion.
“Months where the remodels were taking place in the governor’s mansion?” And the Governor’s Mansion has been uninhabitable while the remodeling has been going on? If that’s true, Greta Van Susteren's interview was the first time that news had been publicly reported in Alaska. By chance, when Sarah was telling Greta that whopper I was in Juneau on a business trip during which I twice drove by the Governor’s Mansion. And the mansion didn’t look uninhabitable to me. It just looked uninhabited.
Sarah Palin’s insult to Juneau has been brazen and unapologetic. But rather than being angry, Juneau seems happy to be rid of her. To the best of my knowledge, over the past two years Bruce Botelho, Juneau’s roly-poly mayor who in 2005 spent $400,000 of the city’s money to sponsor a national competition for the design of a new capitol building as a ruse to keep the state capitol in Juneau, has said nothing publicly about Sarah sticking her thumb in Juneau’s eye by staying home in Wasilla and moving the seat of her government to the state office building in Anchorage to which she commutes when she’s in Alaska and feels like coming into work.
On November 4 McCain-Palin won 59.5 percent of the statewide vote in Alaska. And McCain-Palin won 80 percent of the vote in Wasilla. But McCain-Palin lost Juneau to Obama-Biden by more than 15 percentage points. So what goes around comes around.
But insofar as her presidential prospects are concerned, Sarah’s relationship with the Alaska Legislature when the new one convenes in Juneau in January will be much more important than her nonrelationship with the residents of the city in which the Governor of Alaska is supposed to be living. And between the $50 a barrel and falling price of oil and the resentment that many members of the Legislature feel toward Sarah after she trashed them personally and publicly during the presidential campaign in order to deflect attention from the Legislature’s Troopergate investigation, that relationship could be toxic. And if the Legislature takes Troopergate to the conclusion that the outcome of its investigation requires, that relationship could be worse than toxic.
Troopergate is the local Alaska name for the investigation that the Republican and Democratic members of the Legislative Council, which runs the Alaska Legislature during its off-season, voted unanimously to hire a former prosecutor named Steve Branchflower to conduct. The Legislative Council directed Branchflower to investigate whether Sarah had fired Walt Monegan, her popular Commissioner of Public Safety, because, despite having been leaned on hard and repeatedly by both Sarah and Todd, Walt had refused to violate the State Personnel Act by firing Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, from his job as an Alaska State Trooper.
Sarah first agreed to cooperate with the Troopergate investigation. Then when John McCain selected her as his running mate, she began stone-walling in order to try to run out the clock until after the election. As part of the stone-wall Sarah filed an ethics complaint against herself with the State Personnel Board and then announced that she would only cooperate with the Personnel Board’s Troopergate investigation.
So there were two Troopergate investigations. One that Steve Branchflower conducted for the Legislative Council. And one that the State Personnel Board hired another former prosecutor, an Anchorage attorney named Tim Petumenos, to conduct.
After conducting his investigation, Steve Branchflower concluded that “Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating . . . the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, and that she did so because the evidence before him “demonstrate[d] that Governor Palin and Todd Palin and her family have, over an extended period of time, endeavored to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired from his job as an Alaska State Trooper.” After conducting his investigation, Tim Petumenos concluded that there was “no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act . . . in connection with the employment of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten.”
There, at present, Troopergate sits. Check. But not checkmate. Because depending on the seriousness with which the members of the Alaska Senate (half of whom are Democrats) take the discharge of their constitutional responsibility, for Sarah there’s real potential trouble ahead.
Article II, Section 20, of the Alaska Constitution provides that “all civil officers of the State are subject to impeachment by the legislature” and that “impeachment shall originate in the Senate.” While the Legislature has not established the legal standard for the impeachment of the Governor, it has established the legal standard for the impeachment of judges, which is “malfeasance or misfeasance in the performance of official duties.”
In the report on his Troopergate investigation, Steve Branchflower advised the Legislative Council that Governor Palin committed “malfeasance in the performance of official duties,” i.e., he advised that she misused her authority as Governor to try to benefit her “personal interest” by settling a private score with her ex-brother-in-law. If that is what happened, Sarah Palin should be impeached.
In the report on his Troopergate investigation, Tim Petumenos advised the State Personnel Board that Governor Palin did nothing of the kind. But in his explanation of how he reasoned to that result, Tim Petumenos informed the Personnel Board that:
[Former] Commissioner [of Public Safety Walt] Monegan
has testified that the Governor called him to inquire
as to why nothing had been done to discipline Trooper
Wooten and to complain that he had received a slap on
the wrist. Commissioner Monegan asserts that he
informed the Governor that there had been a process,
that it was completed and that nothing more could be
done. He stated that he did not tell her the result of
the proceeding because he did not believe he was
authorized to tell her (sic) outcome of the
proceeding. The testimony about this phone call cannot
be used as evidence of a violation of the Ethics Act
against the Governor for the following reasons: 1. The
Governor denies that the conversation took place.
Governor Palin asserts that this is more than a
failure of recollection on her part. She believes that
(sic) she would have remembered that such a
conversation, given its content, had it taken place.
Independent Counsel has found no evidence to
corroborate or refute the contentions of either
Commissioner Monegan or Governor Palin. There is no
note or record of this conversation. (my emphasis
added).
And Tim Petumenos further informed the Personnel Board that:
Commissioner Monegan alleges that he had another
conversation directly with Governor Palin on February
13, 2007 in a face to face meeting in Juneau.
Commissioner Monegan states that he and the Governor
were walking down some stairs. Mr. Monegan has the
Governor raising the topic of Trooper Wooten.
According to Mr. Monegan, Governor Palin began by
stating she wanted to talk about Trooper Wooten and he
interrupted her before she could say more. Mr. Monegan
testified that the Governor did not get out more than
a single sentence before he interrupted her.
Commissioner Monegan testified that he assertively
informed the Governor that he had to keep her “at arms
length” about this matter because of her position as
Governor, and because of her personal interest in the
matter due to her family connection to Trooper Wooten.
Commissioner Monegan asserts that he told the Governor
that she should instead direct that her husband Todd
Palin be the one to further communicate with him about
Trooper Wooten, since he was a private citizen.
Commissioner Monegan asserts that the Governor then
stated, “That’s a good idea.” Commissioner Monegan
indicated that she never spoke to Commissioner Monegan
about the matter again. This conversation cannot be
used as evidence of a violation of the Ethics Act for
the following reasons: 1. Governor Palin denies that
this conversation took place. Though she remembers
seeing Commissioner Monegan on that day, she does not
believe they were ever alone and insists she would not
raise a subject such as this in the presence of
others. Governor Palin has also testified under oath
that this is not a failure of recollection on her part
since the nature of the conversation as described is
such that she would remember having had it. There is
not evidence to corroborate or refute whether this
conversation took place or not. No notes or other
record of the conversation have been produced. (my
emphasis added).
Sarah Palin and Walt Monegan both testified under oath. So either Sarah committed perjury or Walt did. If Sarah was the person who did so, then, in addition to being prosecuted criminally, she should be impeached.
It is not possible to know simply by reading the Petumenos report where the truth lies. But the Legislature has a constitutional responsibility to make its own judgment regarding the matter. And the procedural means that the Alaska Constitution proscribes for doing so is for the Alaska Senate to initiate an impeachment proceeding against Governor Palin.
In 1985 the Alaska Senate initiated an impeachment proceeding against then Alaska Governor Bill Sheffield. After listening to the testimony of witnesses, the Alaska Senate concluded that Governor Sheffield had not committed an impeachable offense. That may be what the Alaska Senate concludes after it listens to Governor Palin and former Commissioner of Public Safety Monegan testify. Or it may not be.
Either way, Sarah Palin’s celebrity and the nation’s view of her moral fitness for high office may take a hit, and maybe a hard one, if in January the members of the Alaska Senate are prepared to discharge their constitutional responsibility. If they are, given the manner in which during the presidential campaign Sarah trashed the members of the Legislative Council who authorized Steve Branchflower to conduct his Troopergate investigation, it is reasonable to assume that, since those tactics worked pretty well for her once, Sarah will conclude that they can work pretty well again.
For those of us now thoroughly addicted to Sarah-watching, if the Alaska Senate has the political courage to initiate an impeachment proceeding, however it turns out, the rough-and-tumble will be fabulously entertaining. Particularly because Alaska’s governor-girl was 10-years-old years old when Richard Nixon lifted off from the White House lawn in his helicopter to fly into ignominious disgrace at San Clemente. So she’s not old enough to have learned firsthand the lesson of Watergate; which is that the cover-up always is worse than admitting to the crime.
.... and decided to place here on her personal thread.... 
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