Category: politics

I dreamed last night that I was brought into a room containing two upholstered chairs on raised platforms. “These are for Bristol and Levi,” someone told me, and I realized the chairs were thrones.

The alarm felt by many people by the advent on the national stage of Sarah Palin is not easy to explain. Objectively considered, she hardly seems threatening. She is uninformed and inexperienced, and her political past is riddled with costly errors, which it will be easy to expose. She has been compared to Dan Quayle, because of the speed with which humorists have pigeonholed her, and to Clarence Thomas, because of the heavy-handed tokenism behind McCain’s choice of her.

But I’m afraid that the better comparison is to George W. Bush, whom Palin did not mention in her speech last night. Bush, after all, was a governor when he was first tapped by the Republicans for nomination to the presidency. He had failed in business over and over before falling into politics, and like Palin, he had scandals in his past so embarrassing that most liberals assumed he would be easily discredited. (And in their eyes, he was.) Like Palin, Bush speaks in a thin voice, and his face is always tightly, thickly controlled when he speaks. When challenged, he has a peevish manner, suggesting that he hasn’t been appreciated, that he has been underestimated. And Palin toyed in her speech with a very similar chip on her shoulder. Eight years ago, Bush’s induction was very much a laying on of hands; there was a dynastic feel to it that transcended the mere fact that his father had been a president. And so with Palin. It is a neat trick—claiming to be an outsider when one’s presence on the national stage is owed to an anointing.

It succeeds, because underlying the intellectual contradictions is myth. In the case of George W. Bush, the myth was Prince Hal. He repudiated his Falstaffian past of drinking and unaccomplishment. But according to this myth, it was exactly his long history of having achieved little that was to make him great—he knew what it felt like to be for a long time someone dismissed as a loser but who senses within himself unrecognized power. He would remain one with the little people, among whom he had dwelt for so long. He would carry their hatred with him to the top of the world, and there he would launch war.

Sarah Palin comes with a slightly different myth. She is the princess, whom the aging king has chosen for his own and the nation’s rejuvenation. Her accomplishments, too, needn’t be scrutinized. As with Bush, her hollowness improves her political function. Accomplishments aren’t essential to the myth. More relevant are her children, whom she held to herself last night like a cornered bank robber taking a series of human shields. She was living in a small village in a remote corner of the kingdom, and the great king saw her and brought her to the palace. There he put her on the throne, and as queen she rewarded the little people who had been good to her when she was among them and she punished her cruel step-mother and her wicked ex-brother-in-law.

The appeal of Sarah Palin isn’t merely reactionary. It’s feudal. She was sour last night because feudalism, beneath the fairy-tale sugar coating, is sour. The mafia is the modern survival of it. It is about putting personal loyalties over principle and about rewarding that loyalty with spoils, seized from the weak. Palin’s Alaskan past suggests that if she were to become president, the betrayal of the public interest to private profit and personal vendetta, brought so far by George W. Bush, would go even farther.

UPDATE, 12:30pm: The Obama campaign has itemized some of the many lies in Sarah Palin’s speech accepting the vice presidential nomination. No one will be surprised to read that Obama has serious legislative achievments under his belt, or that Palin loves to raise taxes. Elements new to me: In addition to firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan without cause, Palin improperly hired one of her fundraisers, Tom Lamal, to a state job. And there are actually two bridges to nowhere, and Palin still supports one of them.

In the New York Times, Monica Davey reports that Palin scotched her husband’s stepmother’s chances of succeeding her as Wasilla’s mayor:

In 2002, when Ms. Palin was completing her second and final term as mayor, her husband’s stepmother, Faye Palin, began campaigning to succeed her. Faye Palin, though, favored abortion rights, people who recalled the race said, and Ms. Palin sided instead with Dianne M. Keller, a City Council member who won the race and remains mayor there today.

“I said, ‘Faye, my God, what is Thanksgiving going to be like at your house?’ ” said Michelle Church, a member of the borough government that includes Wasilla. “She was just like, ‘Well, I just won’t say anything.’ ”

Faye Palin declined a request for an interview.

Add the crushing of her mother-in-law’s political ambition to her recruitment of her teenage son as co-eavesdropper on her sister’s dissolving marriage and to her vindictive and hypocritical campaign against her ex-brother-in-law: Palin family values meltdown.

Also in the Times, Elizabeth Bumiller gives a round-up of the weekend’s Palin revelations, and David Brooks disapproves of Palin as a vice presidential candidate. Trying to soften the blow with a compliment, Brooks writes that Palin “made mortal enemies of the two people McCain has always held up as the carriers of the pork-barrel disease: Young and Stevens.”

Nope. According to Paul Kane of the Washington Post, while Palin was mayor of Wasilla, she won $26.9 million in federal funds for the town of 6,700 people by hiring the law firm of

Robertson, Monagle & Eastaugh, an Anchorage-based law firm with close ties to Alaska’s most senior Republicans: Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens, who was indicted in July on charges of accepting illegal gifts. The Wasilla account was handled by the former chief of staff to Stevens, Steven W. Silver, who is a partner in the firm.

So much for Palin’s claim to be a foe of earmarks. Last, Greg of Hermits Rock, who manages to be more dispassionate than I am, has a nice summary of how useless Palin will be to McCain the day after the election and how wretched her environmental policy is.

The pregnancy of Bristol Palin, the unwed, seventeen-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin, is no reflection on her mother’s morals or judgment, and it shouldn’t be of more than passing interest to the American public. It will be of interest, nonetheless, because the Palins are up for consideration as America’s Second Family, and they and the nation are still getting to know one another. But it oughtn’t disqualify Sarah Palin as a vice presidential candidate.

If, on the other hand, it emerges that Sarah Palin failed to tell John McCain about her daughter’s pregnancy before he announced that he was selecting her—and McCain’s spokesman is refusing to say when McCain learned of it—that would be evidence of poor judgment on Palin’s part, and the failure would be relevant to the larger conversation about her. And if McCain failed to vet Palin adequately enough to find out such facts whether or not she chose to tell him, it would show lack of judgment on his part.

As near as I can tell, Moe Tkacik of Gawker was the first in the East Coast mediasphere to break the Bristol Palin story. A rumor had been going around the Internet that not Sarah but Bristol was the mother of Trig, the Palin child with Down syndrome. Moe had the enterprise to interview by email an Alaskan teenager whose car Bristol ran into in February 2008, when she would have been in her seventh month of pregnancy, if the rumor were true. The teenager told Moe that he remembers no signs of pregnancy. Moreover, Moe discovered an Alaskan blog post where a commenter calling herself Sue Williams wrote that she sees the same physician that Sarah Palin sees, that the physician would not collude in a cover-up, and that it’s common knowledge around Palin’s hometown Wasilla that Bristol is five months pregnant. “Trust me,” Williams wrote, “this is a Valley of few secrets. Everyone knows everyone and everything. There’s no way at all the hospital staff would be able/be willing to pull off that kind of a cover-up.” Today Williams’s claim was proved true by Palin’s admission. Oddly, the rumor about Trig’s maternity is showing remarkable tenacity. If Moe’s evidence and the Palin family’s announcement aren’t sufficient to disabuse people of it, there’s also a photo of Sarah Palin looking substantially pregnant when she was supposed to be pregnant.

I repeat, Bristol’s pregnancy has no political meaning in itself. Christian conservatives forgive such lapses; liberals don’t care about them. And the absurd rumor about Trig’s maternity has less than no political meaning. It’s a distraction that will turn some away from wanting to investigate Palin’s past. That would be a pity and a foolishness, because her past is pertinent to any judgment of her. It’s hardly necessary to resort to outlandish claims to expose the flaws in Palin’s character. There is a wealth of cold hard documentary fact. Just a few hours ago, the Washington Post reported that Palin ran a political fundraising group in Alaska named after Ted Stevens, the senator indicted for corruption in July. This follows the revelation that she was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it and the earlier embarrassment of being caught out in a lie in the matter of her firing Walt Monegan, the commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Public Safety. Literally as I write this, I hear that ABC is reporting that before Palin became a Republican, she belonged to a party that promulgates the idea that Alaska should secede and sent a special video message to the fringe group earlier this year.

I began writing this post with the intention of urging the sleuths of the internet to look further at the extensive documentation of Palin—to skip the pregnancy hunting and focus on such smoking guns as the email that Palin received from a victim of sexual harassment shortly before Palin appointed the harasser, Chuck Kopp, to be the Public Safety commissioner in Monegan’s stead. (A treasury of such documentation was digitized during the Troopergate scandal, and is available at the website of the Alaska CBS affiliate KTVA and at that of the Anchorage Daily News.) But in the onslaught of revelations, I throw up my hands. May I make a suggestion to the Republican Party? I hesitate to make it, because I honestly think it would be a good idea: Give up on Palin. Instead use your convention as conventions were first designed to be used, to choose a candidate by haggling and (more important) by comparing notes.

And for those outside the Republican party, here’s an anonymous plea from the comments to Matthew Mosk’s Washington Post story revealing that Palin ran a fundraising group for Stevens:

I live in Juneau, Alaska and work with Sarah professionally and also with countless others that work with her as well. I also voted for her. Please someone start asking the right questions. I know the babygate issue makes for hot news but people need to start asking about her weak management style. Ask if people the work with her respect her and are motivated by her. Ask about the turnover rate on her staff. Do more research into the troopergate issue. Report more on the fact that she supported countless things, including the bridge to nowhere and later flip-flopped and is now using it to promote your reformer status. And also don’t make the mistake of believing all government folks in Alaska are corrupt. They are not so please don’t dismiss their concerns or comments. Please continue to look deeper. Those of us that know her best know this is not the end of this story and there is still more to come out.

If Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and John McCain’s new running mate, were a private citizen, her campaign against her brother-in-law Michael Wooten would be sympathetic, if not quite admirable. Wooten took a new girlfriend in the winter of 2005, and his divorce from Palin’s sister, Molly McCann, and custody battle with her seem to have been bitter. Palin has written that she believes that Wooten assaulted McCann and threatened to kill Chuck Heath, who is Palin and McCann’s father.

These charges have not been substantiated [UPDATE, Sept. 3: In fact, longtime Palin foe Andrew Halcro claims that when Wooten went to court to challenge a restraining order against him, Molly McCann “testified that Wooten never hit her or never physically abused her or ever touched the children”.], but some of Palin’s other charges against Wooten have been, and he hardly sounds like a model citizen. He has admitted to using his Taser on his ten-year-old stepson, for example. In his defense he claims that the stepson asked him to, because he wanted to know what it felt like. A child’s request is no extenuation; the act is appalling. And there is evidence suggesting that Wooten drove a state vehicle while drinking out of an open can of beer. Many people might feel that if it were their sister getting a divorce from Wooten, they would be tempted to be a little casual with the truth in their haste to protect their sister and to force Wooten out of a job that provided him with social authority and firearms.

Palin is not a private citizen, however. For someone who might soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency, the standard is higher. A person of presidential caliber is not supposed to take an expedient view of the truth, however personal and intense her motive. I joked in yesterday’s post about the Great Moose Carcass Controversy, but there are real issues of character and judgment involved in Palin’s pursuit of her brother-in-law.

In the moose-hunting incident I described yesterday, there is something a little odd about Palin’s knowing in 2003 that her brother-in-law shot a moose in technical violation of the law (Wooten didn’t have a permit, though his wife, Palin’s sister, who was standing beside him at the time, did), her overlooking that fact for two years, and then her recalling it after his marriage to her sister had broken down. When you factor in that Palin’s father helped carve up the moose and that Wooten may have shared the moose meat with Palin herself, the delay in reporting looks even dodgier.

Consider another of Palin’s charges. In an email to Colonel Julia Grimes of the Alaska State Troopers, dated 10 August 2005, Palin accused Wooten of bragging about “a wolf hunt where he illegally chased down the animal with his snowmachine to kill it unfairly.” After an extensive investigation of this and other charges, Sergeant Ronald Wall wrote in his Memorandum of Findings, dated 29 October 2005, that the charge was “Not Sustained.” Here’s Wall’s report:

During the investigation it was also alleged that Investigator Wooten had illegally chased a wolf down with a snowmobile and killed the animal. Chuck Heath was interviewed and acknowledged that he witnessed the event. Heath advised that Investigator Wooten had been wolf hunting in an area off the Denali highway with him. Heath stated that he shot a wolf and wounded it and the animal ran. Heath stated that Investigator Wooten pursued the animal with his snowmobile and shot it several times. Investigator Wooten acknowledged that he did chase the animal with his snowmobile and that he shot the animal. Investigator Wooten stated that he did not shoot the wolf while riding the snowmobile. After I spoke with Lieutenant Waldron, of the Wildlife Investigations Unit, I learned that the Butte Lake area, where Heath and Investigator Wooten were, is a predator control area and wolves may be legally shot from aircraft and motorized vehicles.

Aside from the fact that it was legal for Wooten to shoot the wolf from the snowmobile, if in fact that’s what he did, there is the complication that the witness to the alleged but nonexistent crime was Heath, Wooten’s father-in-law and Palin’s father. If the family sincerely felt that this wolf shooting represented an instance of outlawry by Wooten, how do they explain that Palin’s father was the one who shot the wolf first? Did it occur to Palin that she might here be incriminating her father?

And, as with the moose-shooting incident, why the delay in reporting? If you witness a crime but fail to report it until later, when the supposed criminal has antagonized you for other, unrelated reasons, it is fair for others to infer that your decision to report it isn’t motivated by a concern for justice. It’s motivated by something else, something akin to revenge or blackmail.

And here’s yet another upsetting episode. In his analysis of charges that Wooten physically abused McCann—charges that Sergeant Wall deemed “Not Sustained”—Wall wrote this:

It should also be noted that Sarah Palin stated that she listened to Investigator Wooten and McCann argue over an open telephone line with her son, Track, for Molly’s safety. Track, however, states that they listened solely for the purpose of maybe hearing Investigator Wooten acknowledge that he was having extramarital affair.

That’s not a pretty picture: a future vice presidential nominee eavesdropping on her sister’s conversation with her husband, in hopes of hearing an admission of adultery. Not only that, a future vice presidential nominee recruiting her son to help her eavesdrop for an admission of adultery by her brother-in-law. In 2005, Track would have been sixteen years old.