Palin's gas pipeline power play: Wasilla rink redux?

Alaska political gadfly Andrew Halcro, who ran for governor as an independent against Sarah Palin, has the goods on Palin's inept attempts to strong-arm the oil companies into developing a major Alaska gas field (Point Thomson) on terms that are not economically viable. (Building the proposed gas pipeline across Alaska is not viable without developing Point Thomson.) Having stonewalled the Exxon et al and rejected their offer to go to mediation over the terms of development, Palin is now requesting (demanding?) a meeting with oil company heads. Question: what kinds of pressure and/or bribery will the national Republican machine employ to get the oil chiefs to deal and hand Palin a real or apparent victory, enabling her to boast that she got the oil companies to end forty years of stalling and start developing? (According to Halcro, gas prices did not rise high enough to consider building the pipeline until 2002).

Palin's dealings with the oil companies seem to recall her dealings with the developer who bought the land on which she wanted to develop Wasilla's hockey rink: refuse to negotiate in good faith, litigate, attempt to create "facts on the ground" by moving forward without resolving the conflict, then continue to litigate. The result: Wasilla has paid over $1.3 million in legal fees, interest and inflated land prices for land the town could have had for $126,0000, had it accepted the Nature Conservancy's initial offer.

Kroon may be Crazy, but he's not Wright

Some are plucking out of this sermon by Larry Kroon, Sarah Palin's pastor, a promise that America will be destroyed in God's "day of wrath" and holding it up as a Reverend Wright moment:

And what Zephaniah says—‘Listen, He is going to remove everyone from the earth. He is gonna deal with all the inhabitants; so, as a result, understand He is going to deal with you, Jerusalem and Judah. There’s no exceptions here.’ And if Zephaniah were here today he’d be saying, ‘Listen, He is gonna deal with all the inhabitants of the earth. He is gonna strike out His hand against, yes, Wasilla; and Alaska; and the United States of America. There’s no exceptions here—there’s none.

These scare-the-children ravings about the end of all things are not going to pack a toxic wallop for millions of Americans, as Wright's fulminations did. Wright, fancying himself truly a second Jeremiah, mimics the Jewish prophetic practice of promising destruction to his own nation for its own specific sins. Kroon's thesis isn't particularly anti-American. It's merely garden variety fundamentalism: God will destroy the world, motivated by his personal wrath at human sin, then he will raise up a remnant of the faithful. Nothing special about the U.S. (or Alaska, or Wasilla) in Kroon's view -- it's destroyed in the general destruction, and its faithful remnant is presumably a proportionate part of the faithful remnant from all nations. .

Like tens of millions of Americans, Sarah Palin professes, with her pastor, to take the fever dreams of the Jewish and Christian Bibles literally: God will end the world out of personal wrath. According to Kroon, there can be no Christianity without belief in this end:

What we’ve talked about today...what we’ve talked about today is one of the most defining things in the Christian worldview. It’s at this one point of teaching that you’ll probably decide whether you’ll accept Christianity or reject it, whether you’ll take it seriously or not. If there is no great final day of the Lord there’s really no reason to take Jesus seriously. If there is such a day and God has taken your sin very personally, then it’s absolutely essential that you take Jesus seriously. This is the issue you gotta respond to. If you choose to respond you make it personal. You call out to Jesus and you simply say, “Save me. Save me.”

Personally, I find it alarming that a person who might have her finger on the nuclear trigger could view, say, a full-scale nuclear exchange as a fulfillment of prophecy. We profess to worry that Iran's leaders view mass destruction with this kind of equanimity. But I don't see how Obama, who has accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, could object to Kroon's sermon. If asked whether he believes in this "teaching" he would probably give a nuanced answer, something to the effect that visions of apocalypse frame in symbolic and moral terms the inevitable eventual end of our world or universe, along with a faith that spirit or soul is eternal. Such a view might be in sync with even more Americans than the straight-up Left Behind vision of apocalypse.

In short: no blood drawn by exposing this sermon.

Barracuda watch

An Alaskan friend of Christopher Orr reinforces my vibe that Sarah Palin is no Dan Quayle. If Troopergate or some as-yet unknown scandal or the sheer near-impossibility of prepping for a national campaign from scratch don't fell her (okay, a lot of ifs), she's going to be trouble for Democrats:

What the Republicans missed about Sarah Palin then--and what the Democrats seem poised to miss now--is that she is a true political savant; a candidate with a knack for identifying the key gripes of the populace and packaging herself as the solution. That keen political nose has enabled her to routinely outperform her resume. Nearly two years into her administration, she still racks up approval ratings of 80 per cent or better.

She also won some three quarters of the vote in her reelection as Mayor of Wasilla. Many local observers of her performance in both offices cast her as authoritarian, ill-informed and politically opportunistic. But the mass of voters think otherwise.

Sarah Palin: No Dan Quayle

I don't think that McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate was a screw-you pick, and I don't think it was particularly from the hip. McCain was trying to square a circle -- shore up the base and appeal to independents. Politically, he had no good choices - except maybe Palin.

Palin is far from qualified to be president (and therefore veep), but from a distance at least she does look like an impressive person and emerging executive. From her rather parochial Alaskan perspective, she's got some solidly held beliefs that she's acted on with conviction (expand U.S. energy producing capacity, keep the development process clear of corruption, keep taxes low and government spending accountable). She doesn't come off as a reflexive ideologue; her Christianity is nondenominational. She seems to have imbibed nondoctrinal feminism with her mother's milk, having grown up feeling there were no gender restrictions on what she can do. And it takes courage to give birth to a Down Syndrome baby with your eyes open.

Palin may be a neophyte on national and international issues, but she's no lightweight. In an August 14 2008 interview with Time, she projects intelligence and conviction. I take James Fallows' point that getting up to speed w/ national/international issues with zero prep time would tax the resources of Socrates, Machiavelli and Clausewitz rolled into one. But I suspect she'll prove a quick study. She'll have the expectations advantage in debate with Biden, who's notoriously gaffe-prone.

Note too what seems a kind of mutual recognition between Palin and Obama. Philip Gourevitch has this from Palin:

“The theme of our campaign was ‘new energy,’ ” she said recently. “It was no more status quo, no more politics as usual, it was all about change. So then to see that Obama—literally, part of his campaign uses those themes, even, new energy, change, all that, I think, O.K., well, we were a little bit ahead on that.” She also noted, “Something’s kind of changing here in Alaska, too, for being such a red state on the Presidential level. Obama’s doing just fine in polls up here, which is kind of wigging people out, because they’re saying, ‘This hasn’t happened for decades that in polls the D’ ”—the Democratic candidate—“ ‘is doing just fine.’ To me, that’s indicative, too. It’s the no-more-status-quo, it’s change.”

And Obama might have been talking about himself in his first public reaction to Palin:

"she seems like a compelling person"... with "a terrific personal story."

All this is not to say that Palin is not a problematic pick, or that her selection doesn't raise serious questions about McCain's judgment. Most troubling, she seems to have pressured Alaska's public safety commissioner to fire her ex brother-in-law, then fired him after he refused, then lied about her role. The pending investigation of that escapade may well cause serious --and deserved -- trouble for McCain.

As Mayor of Wasilla, she also may have fired city officials on questionable grounds. Her taking credit for cutting loose the "bridge to nowhere" when she originally supported its Federal funding while running for governor (as any prospective state official would) is another blemish (though perhaps no more so than Obama's taking credit for moving people in Illinois from welfare to work when he initially opposed the welfare reform bill signed by Bill Clinton).

Finally, while Andrew Sullivan has been over the top with his serial denunciations of the Palin pick, I agree with his core point -- that it's deeply irresponsible of McCain to potentially entrust U.S. national security in the hands of someone who not only has zero experience in international relations but seems to have thought very little about them.

But, unless Troopergate blows up big-time, I don't think that Palin will wound McCain's credibility to the extent that Dan Quayle did George Bush Sr.'s. I think she has more intelligence and substance than Quayle demonstrated.

Thrilla in Wasilla: Palin wrestles with city offiicals

See also: Palin learns quick: torture is American

Below, a few newsbytes from Sarah Palin's two terms (1997-2002) as Mayor of Wasilla AK (pop.9780, up 66% since 2000). A small town outside Anchorage is such alien territory that I would not presume to interpret/judge the facts retailed below. A bit of context though: 1) the local outlook is strongly libertarian, which means not only pro-gun but hostile to pesky regulations such as designated bar closing times); and 2) Palin ran as an insurgent on a tax-cutting platform and had to deal at the outset with city officials loyal to her opponent. Plainly she's not afraid of conflict or decisive action, and she seems to have an authoritarian streak; she reminds me a little of Rudy Giuliani. I'd like (okay, fear) to hear what she has to say about torture, suspension of habeas, and FISA.

Of course, Palin was running a town with less than 1/1000 the population of Giuliani's New York (and later moved up to run a state with less the 1/10 of NYC's population).

The source for all the information below is the Anchorage Daily News (ADN).

1. In her first run for Mayor of Wasilla , Palin won by a 616-413 margin, beating an eight-year incumbent (ADN, 10/3/96). She said that she knocked on the door of every registered voter, except a few with vicious dogs, and sent a handwritten letter to every “supervoter,” those who had voted consistently in prior elections. She won reelection in 1999 by a 826 to 255 margin. Her approval rating as governor was in the high sixties at the time of her selection as McCain’s running mate. It would seem that Alaska voters have consistently seen her as an able executive.

2. Having run an insurgent campaign against a longtime incumbent, Palin began her tenure by asking all four of the city’s top managers, all presumed loyalists to the outgoing mayor,to resign and re-apply for their jobs “in order to test their loyalty to her administration” (one had already resigned upon her election). She also issued a gag order, requiring them to obtain her approval before talking to reporters (ADN 10/26/96)

3. Shortly thereafter, she fired the police chief and the head of the library, asserting that they did not support her goals for the city. Both claimed that they had previously hashed out differences with her and thought they had established willingness to work with her. The police chief, Irl Stambaugh, sued for wrongful termination, claiming that he was fired at the behest of bar owners and the NRA, the former because he favored earlier bar closings as a way to combat alcohol-related traffic accidents,"and the later because he opposed a concealed gun law (ADN 2/22/97). The suit was dismissed on grounds that city officials serve at the Mayor's pleasure.

4. Palin was elected on a platform of cutting taxes and eliminating wasteful spending. In her first year in office, she took aim at the local museum, which three women had been running for more than 15 years on a total budget of $200,000, or about $25 per town resident. Palin cut the budget by $32,000, which meant that the staff of three would have to choose one who would lose her job. All three quit in protest. One of three “gray-haired matrons” Ann Meyers, 65, said, “If the city were broke, it would be different,” but the city was flush with $4 million in reserves at the time. Palin countered that the museum could be run more efficiently and that voters wanted their tax dollars spent on road repair and extending sewer lines. The museum showcases mining material, homestead memorabilia and early Wasilla history (ADN, 8/6/97).

5. Palin is not indiscriminately anti-tax. She began her career on the Wasilla city council by supporting a sales tax to create a police department. As mayor, she upped the sales tax to pay for a new hockey rink and sports complex.

6. A radio clip has been circulating online in which Palin, during her tenure as governor, titters in response to a radio shock jock’s assertion that her political rival, state senate president Lyda Green, a cancer survivor, is “a cancer on the progress of the State of Alaska" and "a bitch." Apparently, Palin’s fondness for far-right broadcast demagoguery goes way back. In 1998, the owner of a local TV station discontinued an independently produced, shoestring-budget local news show notorious for slanted coverage of local politics, because she feared that continuing to air the show would expose her to liability. According to the ADN (10/14/98), "[Station owner] Schatz said she has received complaints that the election coverage is one-sided and has had concerns of her own about particular shows. She cited a New Year's Day spoof newscast that included a skit with a white man dressed up as a pimp pretending to speak like a black man." Palin reacted to the closing of Valley News with disappointment. "She said it presented a conservative view that balanced out more liberal coverage elsewhere."

Win or lose, I suspect that Palin will always have Fox.

Related posts:
Palin learns quick: torture is American
Barracuda Watch
Sarah Palin: No Dan Quayle