U.S. election 2008: an attempt to lay out (selected) facts. Part 2: Sarah Palin
Oct 21 '08 (Updated Nov 09 '08)
The Bottom Line In which our author tries to find an actual person among all the Sarah Palin myths. Will he succeed? Will he find a charming baby iguana instead? Stay tuned!
When I promised, in my McCain essay, to write a follow-up about Sarah Palin if my second child didn't emerge from his mother's womb into a waiting, trembling world, I was expecting not to be called on it. But four days later, child #2 is still squirming around with fetal gusto, causing my wife Cindy severe abdominal pain. Apparently, then, I am meant by higher powers to write about Governor Palin. I prefer not to pick fights with higher powers.
Palin's an important topic, I'll give you that. Her ticket may well win: the polls are close, and remember that the exit polls of actual voters in 2004 showed Kerry beating Bush by three points. The chances of an American of McCain's age dying in the next four years, given no other medical info, are 23%, without even counting the risk of crippling disability. Then consider that McCain is a cancer survivor who is refusing to release his medical records despite months of clamor from the press; I suspect his survival odds are worse. Sarah Palin could be our president soon. A big deal.
Still, gotta say: if I was writing about marvelous children's books right now (Mark Alan Stamaty's Who Needs Donuts?, Steven Kellogg's the Mysterious Tadpole, Gary Larson's There's a Hair in My Dirt!) or my favorite albums of 2008 (Cloud Cult's Feel Good Ghosts, Veda Hille's This Riot Life, Joe Jackson's Rain), you could buy them. If I write even the most careful, factual, fair-minded and informative essay possible about Sarah Palin, you probably can't buy her ... and you definitely can't take her back for a refund. I write this because destiny calls, and because my wife is one uncomfy woman.
To repeat the opening riff about my biases:
1) I am a political junkie who majored in economics in a right-wing (Republican/Libertarian) program, and minored in psychology and anthropology from professors who I think were mostly liberal Democrats.
2) I'm a liberal, and several of the sites I read are liberal, but
2A) I read sites like Obsidian Wings and Reality-Based Community and the Daily Howler -- liberal sites that nonetheless shoot down liberal-biased news stories if they don't fit reality, even if I'd liked those stories -- while
2B) I ignore partisan cheerleaders like the Daily Kos or the Huffington Post and
2C) I regularly read the American Conservative magazine, the right-wing websites of Daniel Larison and Ross Douthat, and the libertarian sites Marginal Revolution and Unqualified Offerings. In other words, I have no interest in just being told "You're right again, Brian!" over and over (although it's fun sometimes, so please feel free). I like learning things, and I prefer that some of them be inconvenient.
Structural note: I'll start with personal material, then go to her career, job by job. As before, Epinions won't let me hyperlink to non-Epinions URLs, so I'll list my sources as the first Comment. When I am giving my own opinion, as opposed to a verified fact, I will clearly label it as such.
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Family Life
Sarah Palin is still married to, and seems to still love, her first husband, with whom she's been raising five children. By all accounts she has neither abused them, nor sold them into slavery, nor turned them into Olympic gymnasts. She was active in the PTA when her first child was in elementary school, although not since. She thinks abortion should be illegal, and when her own fifth child was shown to be likely to have Down's syndrome, she went ahead and had the child, in accord with her beliefs. I give her full credit.
Personal traits
By the accounts of those who know her, including those who dislike her, Sarah Palin is energetic, hard-working, ambitious, and well-liked. All of those, including "ambitious", are appropriate in a national figure.
Hunting
Sarah Palin hunts animals with guns. While my personal ethic in regards to hunting is that knives and clubs are the only fair weapons to use -- let the moose's antlers and the grizzly's claws be in the game, or it's not a sport at all -- there are people I like who hunt with guns. I hate the hunting itself, but hey, they probably don't like my hobby of being a poncey judgmental twerp, so let's focus on each other's good points and get along.
As governor, Sarah Palin has proposed legislation, and cash incentives, to encourage Alaskans to hunt wolves _from helicopters_. When hunting goes from "hobby" to "the government wants you to commit massacre from the sky", then I have a real problem with it.
the Alaska Independence Party
Sarah's husband Todd Palin was for several years a member of the Alaska Independence Party. Sarah herself never was, but she attended the AIP's 1994 and 2006 conventions, and appeared via videotaped speech at the AIP's 2008 convention. The head of her gubernatorial campaign, Walter Hickel, was a longtime AIP member. Mark Chryson, former AIP chairman, claims a long record of easy behind-the-scenes access to Palin.
The Alaska Independence Party, for better or worse, is fiercely pro-gun, including the right to carry guns in public. It endorsed the Constitution Party's candidates for president: the Constitution Party platform promises "to restore American jurisprudence to its original Biblical common-law foundations". This is a problem for me, since the actual U.S. Constitution bans the establishment of religion, and our actual founders ranged from nominal-Christians-who-didn't-attend-church-or-ever-mention-God-or-prayer-in-correspondence (Washington, Adams) to deists who believed God created earth and perhaps life but then didn't interfere any father (Jefferson, Franklin, Madison) to the occasional atheist (Paine). Our constitution was written, in part, to protect us from religious dominance.
_On the other hand_, I've read insinuations that the AIP is a white supremacist party, and I don't buy that at all. The AIP is friendly to Lakota Indian separatists, Hawaiian separatists, Puerto Rican separatists, and left-wing Vermont separatists. The party is happy to support anyone who wants to leave the union: they don't believe membership in the United States should be compulsory.
It is unusual that a woman running for Vice President of the United States has a close relationship with an organization that wants to leave the United States. I don't think Obama could associate with views like that and get away with it. But know what? Personally, I think it's fine.
Mayor Palin of Wasilla
When Sarah Palin took over as mayor of Wasilla, she immediately asked six city department heads to resign. Five had supported her opponent in the election; none had supported her. This is normal at the presidential cabinet level, where experts from across the country are available for hire, but is unusual for a new mayor. She also pushed for layoffs in the museum, and tried to have the library director fired (the library director had resisted attempts at censorship).
During Mayor Palin's six years as mayor of Wasilla -- a town with a population under 10,000 -- general city spending (not counting special projects) increased 33%, adjusting for inflation. City tax revenue increased 38%. I'm not sure, however, how to interpret these numbers, since Wasilla was growing in population during her term.
Mayor Palin vigorously pursued federal "earmark" spending, in which Wasilla projects were charged to the American taxpayers as a whole. After two years, according to the Los Angeles Times, she hired a lobbyist affiliated with Alaska Senator Ted Stevens; in her last four years as mayor she secured $12 million in earmarks, or roughly $1,600 per Wasilla resident, from the U.S. government. Most cities get less than $100 per resident in earmarks. (As noted in my McCain essay, McCain personally has made a point of not securing earmarks for Arizona, and I respect that. Nonetheless, when I saw him asked by an interviewer about Palin's earmark record, his look of panicked blankness stretched for ten seconds. He didn't answer the question.)
Mayor Palin raised sales taxes, which even taxed food, while cutting property taxes. She oversaw a massive influx of big box stores and parking lots into Wasilla. She also left Wasilla $22 million in debt, all of it incurred on her watch, because of her special-projects borrowing.
$15 million of the debt was for a new sports complex, a project notable for having been mishandled by Palin, according to a Wall Street Journal report. City officials negotiated a $126,000 land purchase for the complex; several months passed without her signing the purchase; the seller gave up waiting, and a real-estate investor named Gary Lundgren ended up buying a much larger plot of land including the planned complex's land instead. Palin and Wasilla ended up starting the building anyway, and sued Lundgren, then imposed "eminent domain" to simply take the land for the city's use. They were ordered to pay Mr. Lundgren $836,000 by the arbitrator, on top of the $250,000 in legal bills the city had incurred. Lundgren, unhappy that his land was taken, is suing the city for more compensation.
Oil and Gas Commissioner Palin
An obvious question poses itself: is Sarah Palin's reputation as a reformer based on anything real? Yes: it is based on some of her actions in the three years after she left Wasilla.
In 2002, instead of running for re-election, she made a bid to become Alaska's Lieutenant Governor. When she failed, she was appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and made head of the Ethics Board. In January 2004, she resigned and filed a formal complaint against fellow Commissioner (and Republican Party state chair) Randy Ruedrich, accusing him of doing party work on state time, and of illegally close ties to companies he was supposed to regulate. She also helped file a complaint against Republican Attorney General Gregg Renkes for conflicts of interest.
These are admirable acts, in my opinion: brave ones that could have hurt her career, and strongly imply that Sarah Palin believes that rules apply to, well, most people anyway (but see below).
Governor Palin of Alaska
Because there seems to be confusion about the matter, the report on the Troopergate scandal -- a report produced by a commission of 10 Republicans and only 4 Democrats -- is here:
http://download2.legis.state.ak.us/DOWNLOAD.pdf
The main conclusions begin on page 8, starting with "Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110 (a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act". That is, she broke the law. The report also says Palin's attorney general failed to provide the emails of Palin's that were requested for the probe. In regards to the specific case of her firing Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monoghan as part of her vendetta against a former brother-in-law -- a vendetta which also involved dozens of harassing calls from Sarah and Todd, as well as her staff -- she is found legally within her rights, but morally guilty.
In other hire-and-fire news, there's a New York Times report I reference about how five of Palin's old friends from high school were personally named by her to state government jobs at huge raises. For example, real estate agent Franci Havenmeister was hired to head the State Department of Agriculture at $95,000 a year, citing as a credential her love of cows.
There's also the chef to which Palin was entitled by the state government. Instead she claimed a $60 per day food allowance, upwards of $20,000 per year, which she (illegally) did not declare on her taxes. Update, courtesy of reader Mark Stevens: the Associated Press has learned that she's also charged more than $20,000 to Alaska taxpayers for her children's travels outside the state.
As governor, Palin requested $589 million in two years as federal earmark money. Alaska receives far more money from the federal government than it pays in federal taxes.
She _did not_ "tell the Congress 'Thanks, but no thanks' on the Bridge to Nowhere"; instead, Congress made the money available without the need to spend it on the Bridge. (The access road to the Bridge was specifically part of the federal bequest; therefore, the access road was still built.) In her press release of September 21 2007, Palin's office said "Despite the best work of our Congressional delegation, we are about $329 million short of full funding on the Bridge project". In other words, and by the account of her own press office, she canceled the Bridge -- keeping the federal money -- because she wanted more earmarks and couldn't get them.
As governor, Palin regularly used her line-item veto to slash funds for education, health care, and hospitals, even as the overall state budget went up. She even reduced money that provided group-home support for teenage mothers ... which to me doesn't fit well with her opposition to abortion.
It is true that she defied the oil companies by sponsoring a "windfall profits tax" to raise bulk money from them for Alaska when the price of oil soared, and used the money to give tax refunds to citizens of Alaska. John McCain opposes the windfall profits tax, in part because the tax and its redistribution do quite literally count as "socialist". (Socialism is, among other things, the collective popular ownership of resources.) But her decision certainly counts as unpredictable and daring.
Sarah Palin, Energy Expert
Several times I have seen John McCain claim that "Sarah Palin knows more about energy than anyone else in America". To examine that claim, I will compare her to physicist Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute:
THINGS AMORY LOVINS HAS DEMONSTRATED KNOWING ABOUT ENERGY
* Where fossil fuels can be found
* How fossil-fuel-burning plants are designed and operated
* The inefficiencies and wastage inherent in the process in various designs, and the amount of wastage involved in transmitting that energy from the power plant to the home or business
* Strategies power system designers and power consumers can use to dramatically reduce wastage
* How to build a 100-mile-per-gallon car of normal, reasonable size
* How to build a home, even up in the snowy Rocky Mountains, so that it stays around 70 degrees inside with neither a heater nor an air conditioner (nor any electric equivalent)
* How nuclear reactions work
* How nuclear power plants are designed and operated, including plant safety features and some of their attendant risks
* Issues in nuclear waste storage
* How various methods of biofuel work
* How various methods of wind, solar, and water power work
* How to calculate the efficiency of any of these forms of power, at a given transmission distance
* A bunch of other stuff
THINGS SARAH PALIN HAS DEMONSTRATED KNOWING ABOUT ENERGY
* Oil can be found in Alaska!
* You drill oil and transmit it through pipes.
* Polar bears are mean.
I may be exaggerating slightly for effect, but honestly, I'm not sure I am. Certainly Senator Joe Biden of Delaware shows more knowledge of Alaska's oil reserves than Palin: he is correct that the United States (including Alaska!) has 3% of the world's known oil reserves while using 25% of the world's oil consumption, and that this does not balance. As far as I know, it is not Palin's fault that McCain keeps calling her an energy expert. It is her fault, however, for not breaking out in helpless laughter.
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So what do I make of this? To me, Sarah Palin comes across as an achiever, and a go-getter, but also as a classic narcissist, in love with herself and her friends to the exclusion of everyone else. Other people she's happy to "reform", but if she wants to hire all her friends, she can. If she wants to hide incriminating e-mails, she can. If she wants some guy's land to build a sports arena, she'll take it. If she doesn't want to pay for rich food or flights to New York or luxurious dresses, she'll send the bill to us. If her teenage daughter has the financial resources to care for an accidental child, who cares if other teenage daughters do?
If Sarah Palin wants the rest of the U.S. to pay for Alaska's projects, we'll pay. And she's a talented politician, give her that: lots of governors and mayors want earmark money. It takes skill for Palin to have grabbed so much of it.
But she shows no curiosity about the world ... and while she may be fairly smart, I can't imagine that she's _really_ smart. She spent weeks cramming for her appearance with Katie Couric, and, I mean, it's Katie Couric: an excellent, sympathetic celebrity interviewer with a gift for making the stars feel comfortable talking about what they want to talk about. Katie Couric didn't always understand what Sarah Palin meant, so like anyone in a conversation, Katie asked "What do you mean by that?". And Sarah DID NOT KNOW WHAT SHE MEANT.
Maybe smarts aren't the issue here. Maybe it's just such complete insincerity that she hasn't planned out how to pretend she believes her lines. Or maybe you disagree with all of these conclusions: please, think for yourself, it's cool. But keep the facts I reasoned from in mind: is there any way they add up to what you want in a president?
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Member: Brian Block
Location: Greensboro, NC
Reviews written: 200
Trusted by: 280 members
About Me:
Let's give a big Earth welcome to Everett Block, born 10-26-08. Daddy shall return shortly.
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