Sarah Palin's Deep Shades of Bush

If you are going to read just one article on Sarah Palin, I highly recommend that you make it this article, which will appear on page A01 of The New York Times tomorrow, but which has already been posted online.

This is both a damning and amazing piece. Quite honestly, it frightened me more than Sarah Palin's ridiculous inexperience, her gross lack of qualifications, and even her fringe extremist positions. This article astonished me because as I read it, just one name kept popping into my head:

George W. Bush

I know, I know. Liberals -- a label I do not think applies to me -- routinely argue that figures are like Bush for one reason or another, and often, those claims are far-fetched or just plain silly. Not so in this case.

In its first exhaustive piece on Palin's rise and political work in Alaska, the Times has drawn a detailed picture of a person who:

--is confident to the point of arrogance despite a lack of experience or real qualifications;

--demands dog-loyalty (read: unquestioned) from her allies, and strongly punishes any one who crosses her;

--lards government payrolls and high-paying positions with unqualified lackies and sycophants whose major asset is complete fealty to Palin;

--pursues long-term vendettas against individuals for even small issues or infractions;

--maintains an unyielding commitment to absolute secrecy, and actively searches for ways to undermine true oversight or her work or activities, whether legal or illegal, moral or immoral; and

--infuses her personal, political and even religious beliefs into her government policies.

Each of these types of behavior have been the calling card of the last eight years under the Bush administration, the difference being that Palin exercised this type of control over her little fiefdom in Alaska, while Bush ran the entire Federal Government.

In order to provide some of the article's more salient parts, I am going to highlight a several sections and quotes in italics, and then comment on their significance.


Hiring lackies, friends, and inexperienced people to key positions

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as one of her qualifications for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

That's comforting to see. So Palin filled a top state agricultural position with a high school friend because said friend liked heifers as a kid? Some shades of "heckuva of a job, Brownie."

Attacking critics: no slight is too small

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

I know Alaska is a small state, and this woman was from her hometown, but was it necessary that Palin send her aide to attack a critic in this manner?

Here, we see huge shades of President Bush. During much of his administration, there has been wrong-doing across the government, most notably in the Plame leak case, and just about every time, Bush has ensured that blame was never placed at his feet, but on aides. This is a form of governance that does not place a high premium on personal or professional responsibility.

Notably, after it was found that several of Palin's aides attempted to get her ex-brother-in-law fired as a state trooper, Palin disavowed knowledge of the aides' efforts, and said she had had no idea what they doing. Maybe she has been taking lessons for President Bush on how to handle her Troopergate problems?

Apparently, leaders like Bush and Palin have no need for Harry Truman's famous axiom -- one that sat prominently on his desk -- "The Buck Stops Here!"

Demonizing dissenters

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

Does anyone remember "I'm a uniter, not a divider"? Apparenty, any one who disagrees with Palin or dissents from her view, is labeled a "hater". In my mind, Bush's worst legacy at home has been the division he has sowed by his stubborn refusal to reach across the aisle on anything. The country could get the same division with Palin.

Maintaining complete secrecy, even to hide possible wrong-doing

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that it would cost $468,784 to process his request.

When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.

“Their secrecy is off the charts,” Mr. Steiner said [...]

While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a Blackberry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”

The governor’s office did not respond to questions on the topic.

Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”

Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”

We all know that the Bush White House has been the most secretive in American history, even more so than the Nixon administration. Working on the cues of Vice President Dick Cheney and his top aide David Addington, the Bush administration has gone to almost unbelievable lengths to maintain complete and total secrecy of the executive branch. For example, President Bush has repeatedly asserted a theory of executive privilege to keep many of his former aides from testifying to Congress after being subpoenaed that is broader than any privilege ever regularly exercised by a President.

Here, Palin's crew actively -- as well as comically -- tried to get around legal parameters to preserve secrecy, and maybe even illegal activity. It should be noted, and the article also mentions, that this gentleman, Mr. Bailey, is a central figure in the Troopergate scandal, and it was revealed that he tried to apply pressure to get Palin's ex-brother-in-law fired. Perhaps not surprisingly, Palin claimed she had no knowledge of his activities.

The last thing the United States is another executive who practices this kind of secrecy and has such contempt for even legitimate oversight. Yet, this precisely what we would likely get if somehow, God forbid, Palin ascended to the Oval Office.

Palin is not one who subscribes to Louis Brandeis' wise theory that "sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Pursuing vendettas, sometimes with her husband's help

Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice. The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.

“I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said.

“The Palin family gets upset at personal issues,” he added. “And at our level, they want to strike back.”

This is something that may even go beyond Bush. By now, most of us know all about Troopergate, where Palin, her husband, and her aides attempted to pressure the Alaska State Public Safety Commissioner into firing a state trooper who was involved in a messy divorce with Palin's sister, all before Palin fired the Commissioner for no real announced reason.

Clearly, there is a pattern by Palin that she will pursue vendettas against her enemies and detractors, whether personal or professional, through her government authority, not seeming to notice that she is crossing a line of conduct.

We also see here, again, her husband Todd, a commercial fisherman, trying to exert himself on government officials. Why exactly, considering his work outside of the government?

First it was his calls to the Public Safety Commissioner to get the trooper fired, and now we find out that he was trying to pressure the Alaska State House Speaker because he had hired a man Palin had a vendetta against. Even if Palin herself had no idea of her husband's calls - -total bunk, in my humble opinion -- this behavior is tremendously unethical. Mr. Palin had to have known that even if he was not acting upon his wife's wishes, his calls would have placed big and undue pressure on government officials. At worst, and I think that this is more likely, Todd Palin was working on behalf of and in concert with his wife in order to routinely carry out her vendettas.

Installing political hacks into government

In 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.
Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.

“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled. “But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.

Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr. Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus — then the State Republican Party’s general counsel.

“Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Mr. Deuser said.

Palin apparently accomplished a two-fer here in her time as mayor: she fired a city lawyer who had crossed one of her friends, and then replaced the employee with the general counsel of the Alaska Republican Party. Imagine what she would like to do with the Department of Justice? Her likely appointees could make Alberto Gonzales -- generally seen, even today, as the most overly political and patently incompetent Attorney General in modern history -- look like Robert Kennedy!

Infusing her extreme conservatism into government; looking to ban books

The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.

“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.

But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

This new account seems to lend increased credence to what we already know: that Palin is an extremist conservative, and that in the past she has allowed her personal beliefs to cloud, influence, and even sway her policies as an elected government official.

Furthermore, this story adds to the likelihood that Palin did indeed explore ways to ban books she deemed offensive.

Oh, but wait: she was only rhetorically asking about banning books, right?

No reformer, but a "slick" politician

Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.

In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.

“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich [a former state GOP chair, and a fellow commissioner with Palin on the State Oil and Gas Commission, Palin resigned for the body in protest for him conducting Republican business on state time, and overly favoring companies] did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ ”

Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.

Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.

What a reformer, huh? She was doing the same unethical and probably illegal activities as the very man she criticized in order to make a name for herself in politics.

Filling government payrolls with loyal friends and lackies

As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.

Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people,” he said.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

This may be the most frightening passage in the article, and it most reminds me immensely of President Bush. The evidence is clear that to Palin, absolute loyalty and friendship is more important than actual qualifications and experience.

We all know Alaska is a small state, but are we to conclude that there are no other qualified people for key positions outside of Wasilla and Palin's circle of friends?

Palin hired a total unknown and inexperienced legislator to be her #3 and serve as Alaska's Attorney General. She appointed dozens of old friends to high-paying state jobs. She seems to have made the head of the state's economic development office a man whose most expansive business experience was in starting up a Mailboxes, Etc franchise. I think that latter hire speaks for itself.

Operating in a cocoon and echo chamber

Many lawmakers contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated. Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show.

One of the biggest criticisms of President Bush's work has been that he surrounds himself with a small inner circle, and that he has generally cocooned himself away from any dissenting opinions on matters. Palin seems to share that trait.

This is in stark contrast to our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, who, as Doris Kearns Goodwin has chronicled in her great book, "Team of Rivals," stacked his cabinet with personal and professional enemies in order to both take away their potency as rivals and at the same time provide valuable dissenting advice.

Interestingly, one could draw a parallel between Palin's time away from Juneau, and President Bush's many, many days away from Washington at his Crawford ranch.

Contempt for the legislature, other officials

During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.

Many politicians say they typically learn of her initiatives — and vetoes — from news releases.
Mayors across the state, from the larger cities to tiny municipalities along the southeastern fiords, are even more frustrated. Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and interviews show.

Last summer, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, a Democrat, pressed Ms. Palin to meet with him because the state had failed to deliver money needed to operate city traffic lights. At one point, records show, state officials told him to just turn off a dozen of them. Ms. Palin agreed to meet with Mr. Begich when he threatened to go public with his anger, according to city officials.

At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau in January, mayors across the political spectrum swapped stories of the governor’s remoteness. How many of you, someone asked, have tried to meet with her? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines Borough. And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Ms. Palin soon walked in, delivered a few remarks and left for an anti-abortion rally.

Generally, President Bush has employed a "my way, or the highway approach" to working with Congress. For his first six years in office, this went well for him, as the pliant Republican-controlled legislature gave him every thing he wanted, and he issued not a single veto.

In Alaska, even though the legislature has generally had a GOP majority, Palin has still had her problems with legislators, the "old guard," if you will, and others she deems "haters." She has seemed completely unwilling to work with the legislature in Alaska on many issues, choosing instead to drop edicts and directives from her perch of 80 percent+ approval ratings, and push aside or demonize any one who dares criticize her objectives.

This does not seem like an individual who could work well with a Democratically-controlled House and Senate -- which is precisely what would greet her.

Conclusion: shades of Bush

The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.

Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a “hater.”

It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”

As Ms. Palin’s star ascends, the McCain campaign, as often happens in national races, is controlling the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.

At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor’s office. Diane Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.

“I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”

Overt secrecy. Pettiness. Lack of magnanimity in victory. Poor ethics. Placing unqualified friends or political hacks in high-paying and/or prominent positions. Demonizing critics. Ignoring dissent. Living in a cocoon and an echo chamber at the same time. Using extremist positions to set policy.

Each of these descriptions was in one way or another a hallmark of the Bush administration. Apparently, they are also perfect descriptions of how Sarah Palin has operated as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska.