Letter from Alaska: Palin a maverick? Please

Letter from Alaska: Palin a maverick? Please
By David Noon 9/16/08 8:26 AM
http://www.minnesotaindependent.com/8949/letter-from-alaska-palin-a-maverick-please

If John McCain manages to carry the 2008 presidential election, his victory will be due in no small part to his success in persuading a passel of independent voters that Sarah Palin was chosen for some reason other than her appeal to the variety of conservatives who continue to dominate the Republican party. In Palin’s selection, in fact, we can observe the distilled absurdity of McCain’s “maverick” pretensions. While claiming to have selected a consummate “outsider,” he actually selected someone who’d been promoted by William Kristol, whom history will forever recall as the intellectual godfather of the Iraq War; Larry Kudlow, the bog-standard free marketeer who yodeled gleefully when McCain rescinded his (hopelessly mild) approval for cap and trade carbon emissions policy; and fundamentalist elites like Richard Land and Dan Coats, who have consistently served as vital theological supporters and enablers of the Bush administration from its first days to the Last Days.

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On its own merits, the narrative of Palin herself as a mini-maverick is implausible, a fact that only underscores how little most Americans know about Alaskan politics and how little the McCain campaign cared to investigate the governor’s own mythology before selecting her. All local and state politics have a ring of provincialism about them, and Sarah Palin has done nothing to break the mold. As mayor of Wasilla, she hired Steven Silver — a former Ted Stevens staffer and a federal lobbyist with ties to Jack Abramoff — to secure tens of millions in federal earmarks for her town.

When she ran for governor in 2006, she openly promised to favor her own borough, a commitment that she has effectively fulfilled in office by sparing her home region from the line-item vetoes that have disgruntled other areas of the state. During the last budget session, for example, Palin cut grants for more than three dozen youth sports facilities around Alaska. As it turns out, one of the budget items that survived was a $630,000 appropriation to the Wasilla Sports Complex, a facility whose construction and subsequent legal troubles Palin facilitated as the city’s mayor less than a decade ago. And throughout her first 18 months in office, the governor — a longtime advocate for moving the capital to south central Alaska — presided over the continuation of “capital creep,” a baleful process that has drawn government jobs away from Juneau and toward the Anchorage area.

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One would think that in a country that’s committed itself to a $3 trillion dollar mistake in the Middle East, or a country enduring a historic credit meltdown, or a country that’s witnessed an “economic expansion” that’s actually made people poorer, a campaign predicated on the evils of pork-barrel spending, would either be ignored or driven angrily into the sea. That would, of course, mean that we lived in a country where the word “maverick” was more than a cheap marketing trick designed to separate fools from their votes.
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David Noon is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, the author of the great, sort-of-on-hiatus Axis of Evel Knievel blog, and a contributor to Lawyers, Guns and Money.