Sarah Palin, Rising Star or Disappointment

As a Alaskan I've been amazed at the transformation of our ex-governor from Alaska governor to national political personality for the republican party. The rhetoric that is being spoken now from Sarah Palin, and what we heard when she ran for governor, are two different political positions.

When Sarah Palin ran for governor we were coming off four years of our worst governor in the history of the state, which is compared to most states relatively short. Frank Murkowski started his tyranny by appointing his daughter, who was in state government, to his vacated senate seat in Washington D.C. He was so openly in bed with big oil that his gas line negotiations were held in secret and the first draft called for pathetically low royalty taxes that were set for the next thirty years. Luckily the Legislature didn't buy it and the Supreme Court of our state said it wasn't legal anyways.

So in walks Sarah Palin, ex mayor of Wasilla, sat on some petroleum regulatory board, a down to earth Alaskan who said the right things. She feuded with the head of our republican party and so disagreed with Murkowski's policies, that even the democrats and independents took notice. She had family values, but was soft on the religious spiel. Another attractive stance was she didn't trust big oil and would scrap both the old oil taxes and the gas line agreements, which had been in limbo anyways in the legislature.

The election was held and she was elected, not by a landslide as has been said since. Murkowski, a republican, was outed in the primaries. Sarah ran against our previous governor of two terms before Murkowski, Tony Knowles, who also was mayor of Anchorage for eight years and is a democrat.

Things went fairly well at first. She pushed through a huge increase in oil taxes that started at twenty five percent and increased enormously as oil went up, and man did oil go up. Suddenly even though the pipeline is down to about a third what it was in the eighties during the boom years the state is making billions again. She also rolled out a whole new bidding process for the gas line project, the verdict is still out on that one but at least they had a company named and the project finally was moving. With the huge oil price increase came gas prices and heating oil prices up around four dollars a gallon, six dollars plus in the villages off the road system. Again here comes Sarah with a one time twelve hundred dollar energy check for every man, women, and child in the state. It was added to our already healthy dividend checks and sped up to arrive a month early before the heating season started and the barges were froze out of the bush. So bang, Sarah got us what added up to thirty two hundred dollars each.

Then things began to slip a bit. The states top cop Walt Monegan was fired, strange since he was a very capable man. Ex chief of Anchorage police and a Palin appointee. The news here started running a story of how Sarah and her husband had pressured Walt to fire a trooper who was Palin's ex brother in law. Thus troopergate was born, and investigations were launched. The economy, after eight years of George Bush cutting taxes and fighting two wars and deregulating wall street so they could have a free for all with the nations invested capitol, was starting to heat up. Things both here and abroad were getting shaky.

In the midst of all this we wake up and Sarah Palin is running for vice president with John Mcain. The state was stunned, where did that come from? What about the gas line? What about the permanent fund for our state losing over ten billion on the stock market? And what about troopergate and all those subpenas flying around?

Well not much was ever said about all the unfinished business in the state government, and troopergate was written off by Mcains people as political infighting at the state level, it was smooth even the national press bought it for a while. That is not what I noticed though, what I noticed and many more than me was that something was different about Sarah. She sounded different, literally it seemed to me her voice was shriller and more defensive. There was more right wing us against them tone in her speeches. Suddenly government was out to take over our rights and it wasn't up to government to help out every time there was a problem. If you just cut spending and taxes corporate America would take up the slack. It sounded like Ronald Reagan was running not Sarah Palin.

Luckily Mcain didn't win and Sarah managed to make enough of a fool of herself with Katie Couric and the designer clothes scandal and a few other goofs I can't remember now. Oh well everyone up here figured we would get our governor back, none too soon as the gas line was now hardly feasible since natural gas prices were down considerably and an in state line that had been promised to bring north slope gas to the rest of the state was stalled also.

So Sarah came home and Obama was seated as president and almost immediately blamed for everything that was basically Bush's fault. We didn't hear a lot about Sarah for a while. Even when the Legislature went back in session there wasn't the flow of ideas and proposals there had been, things were pretty quiet.

Then at a hastily scheduled news conference she announced she was quitting effective in a few weeks at the governor's picnic. Bang she was off to write a book. She said she was no longer effective as governor due to too many frivolous ethics complaints. The once squeaky clean new governor, that nothing could stick to, was quitting two years later because everything was sticking too her. Nixon even crossed my mind.

Nixon hid out for over a decade however, Sarah spent only four months laying low and writing her book, or at least having it wrote for her. Now she's on a whirlwind book tour that feels like a political campaign more than a book signing and strangely there is not one stop on this tour in Alaska. That's okay she's not really the Sarah Palin we remember anyway.