That spring, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act sailed to passage, helped along by criminal indictments in the Veco scandal, which were handed down just as the bill came up. Still, Palin was the deciding factor. A new pipeline plan had seemed unlikely when she took over, but she kept the legislature focused on the task.
She kept herself focused, too: though priding herself on her well-advertised social conservatism, she was prepared to set it aside when necessary. Rather than pick big fights about social issues, she declined to take up two abortion-restriction measures that she favored, and vetoed a bill banning benefits for same-sex partners of state workers.
Next came the oil tax. The corruption scandal had tainted Murkowski’s new law. The FBI tapes of Bill Allen revealed that it was central to the bribery. “It became clear,” Hollis French told me, “that filthy, filthy things had happened to influence that tax.” Most Alaskans were disgusted and open to revisiting, and possibly increasing, the tax. But Palin’s preferred mode of operating—charging righteously forth to attack her enemies—would make a new agreement harder, not easier, to reach. An explicit charge that the Petroleum Profits Tax was corrupt would imply, by extension, that the (unindicted) legislators who had passed it were corrupt, too—and she needed their votes.
Again Palin kept her worst impulses in check. And when she was drawn into the fight, she proved nimble and resourceful. Two things finally prompted her to move ahead: when tax season rolled around, the PPT yielded much less revenue than anticipated; and Democrats needled her incessantly about how much of a reformer she truly was. Then as now twitchingly alert to any slight, Palin loathed the implication.
In September, she released her proposal and, so no one missed the point, christened it Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share (ACES). Stronger than Murkowski’s PPT, it met a mostly hostile reception from her party. “I will stand in your way like the little man in Tiananmen Square to keep you from hurting the economy,” one Republican House member declared. Democrats, eager to capitalize on public anger, introduced several tougher alternatives that were particularly aggressive—that is, confiscatory—when oil prices rose. Palin focused on capturing more revenue when prices were low.
At first, her team tried to win the Republicans over. But it became clear this wasn’t going to happen. So Palin did something that would be hard to imagine from her today: she pivoted to the Democrats. “We sat down with her and said, ‘If you want to get something passed, it’ll have to be much stronger,’” Les Gara, a liberal House member, told me. “And to give her credit, she did what she needed to get a bill passed.”
In the end, Palin essentially grafted the Democrats’ proposal onto her own. What she signed into law went well beyond her original proposal: ACES imposes a higher base tax rate than its predecessor on oil profits. But the really significant part has been that the tax rate rises much sooner and more steeply as oil prices climb—the part Democrats pushed for. The tax is assessed monthly, rather than annually, to better capture price spikes, of which there have been many. ACES also makes it harder for companies to claim tax credits for cleaning up spills caused by their own negligence, as some had done under the old regime.
Four years later, Palin’s gas line hasn’t gotten going, but it’s not really her fault. Plunging natural-gas prices have made the project uneconomical. Her oil tax is a different story: though designed to capture more revenue under most scenarios, ACES has raised a lot more money than almost anyone imagined. That’s largely because of high oil prices. But it also shows that the law is working. ConocoPhillips, BP, and ExxonMobil have reported record profits—so it’s fitting that, in a sense, Alaska has, too. It’s no exaggeration to say that ACES has made the state one of the fiscally strongest in the union. Flush with cash, Alaska produced large capital budgets that blunted the effects of the recession. Moody’s just upped the state’s bond rating to AAA for the first time. While other states reel under staggering deficits, budget cuts, and protests, Alaska has built up a $12 billion surplus, most of it attributable to Palin’s tax. Galvin estimates that it has raised $8 billion more than Murkowski’s tax would have. But given the corruption that plagued the PPT, a better benchmark might be the tax it supplanted—the one put on the books after the Exxon Valdez spill. By that measure, Palin’s major achievement has probably meant the difference between a $12 billion surplus and a deficit.
What happened to Sarah Palin? How did someone who so effectively dealt with the two great issues vexing Alaska fall from grace so quickly? Anyone looking back at her record can’t help but wonder: How did a popular, reformist governor beloved by Democrats come to embody right-wing resentment?
A big part of the answer is that the qualities that brought her original successes—the relentlessness, the impulse to settle scores—weren’t nearly so admirable when deployed against less worthy foes than Murkowski and the oil companies. In Alaska, she applied those qualities to fulfilling the promises that got her elected, and in her first year was the most popular governor in the country. “It was very, very powerful stuff,” Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist for Knowles, and later for Barack Obama, told me. “She was this dowdy, but very attractive, person who drew a lot of support from progressive women. She was serious business.”
But even before she left the state, she let herself be distracted by the many grievances she harbored against a wide range of enemies. When I was in Juneau, a draft memoir by one of her former aides, Frank Bailey, was leaked to a number of political insiders, and from one of them to me. The manuscript’s memorable quality is its rendering of Palin and what it was like to work with her. Bailey was cast aside after years of loyal service and has an ax to grind. But his portrait is persuasive nonetheless, because he peppers his book with internal e-mails that he kept, from Palin and her staff.
Bailey says their “enemy number one” was a local conservative radio host to whom she would listen for hours, fuming. Ugly rumors of the sort common in politics were another fixation, as this e-mail furnished by Bailey attests:
From: Sarah
To: Scott Heyworth Cc: Todd Palin
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 10:19 AM
Subject: Todd’s son
Scott:
Todd just told me you had spoken with him awhile back and reported that some law enforcement friends of yours claimed some dumbass lie about Track not being Todd’s son? This really, really disgusts me and ticks me off.
I want to know right now who said it, who would ever lie about such a thing this is the type of bullshit lie about family that WILL keep me from running for Governor. I hate this kind of crap. I thought it was bad enough that my kids have been lied about recently regarding illegal activities that they had NO part in whatsoever. But a stupid claim like one of our kids isn’t fathered by Todd?
I want to know NOW what this latest b.s. is all about because I want to get to the bottom of this garbage rumor mill. People who lie like this may know me well enough to KNOW THAT I WILL ALWAYS PUT FAMILY FIRST, AND IF UGLY LIES LIKE THIS ARE BELIEVED BY ANYONE AND ADVERSELY AFFECT MY HUSBAND AND KIDS I WILL PULL OUT OF THE RACE BECAUSE IT’S NOT WORTH IT—AT ALL—TO LET MY FAMILY BE VICTIMS OF DARK, UGLY POLITICS LIKE THIS.
Sarah
Palin obsessed over her image, even more than most politicians. According to Bailey, she orchestrated a campaign to inundate newspapers with phony letters praising her. This evidently became a favored tactic. Bailey even includes a letter he says she wrote under another name accusing an opponent, John Binkley, of copying her Web-site design. (Excerpt: “This may not seem like such a big deal, but not having an original idea and taking credit for someone else’s work gives us a clue of how Johne [sic] works.”) In the idiom of the Web, Palin was a troll.
Much of this was harmless (if also pointless) and would not have undermined her political career. Politicians from Nixon to Clinton have been similarly consumed and still flourished. But Palin also committed more-serious ethical breaches. The most notorious of these involved her attempts to get her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired, and included Palin’s removal of the trooper’s boss when he didn’t comply with her wish. An investigation by the legislature found that, in some of her actions, she had abused her powers.
Palin seems to have been driven by a will to advance herself and by a virulent animus against anyone who tried to impede her. But this didn’t prevent her from being an uncommonly effective governor, while she lasted. On the big issues, at least, she chose her enemies well, and left the state in better shape than most people, herself included, seem to realize or want to credit her for. It’s odd that someone so preoccupied with her image hasn’t gotten this across better. And it raises the question of what she could have achieved.
“The thing that strikes me again and again is that she was so single-minded when she got here,” Gregg Erickson, a former senior state economist and co-founder of the Alaska Budget Report, an influential political newsletter, told me. “The problem with amateurs in politics is that they often lack that focus. She had it. She was terrible at running a staff, and given that, it’s amazing she was successful. But on the issues she made the focus of her administration—the oil tax and the gas line—she had good staff, listened to them, and backed them up. She was a transformative governor, no question. If it hadn’t been for her stunning ability to confuse personal interests and her role as governor, she could have gone on to be tremendously successful.”
John McCain’s advisers say he chose Palin because they believed that the race needed shaking up. But she must have appealed to him for reasons beyond her gender and vivacity. Palin was fresh from major, unexpected victories. She had challenged her own party’s corruption, at grave risk to her career. For this, she was wildly popular. Surely, that brought back McCain’s old battles against George W. Bush and the Republican establishment, and the glory they had won him.
But McCain and Palin didn’t run as mavericks. Instead, they turned hard right. Palin’s old colleagues were stunned. “The speech at the Republican convention that made her a star, that was just shocking,” French told me. “She could have said, ‘I’ll do for the nation what I did for Alaska: I’ll work with both sides and won’t care where the ideas come from.’ Her background supported that. Instead, they handed her a red-meat script she’s been reading from ever since.”
After the election, Palin returned to being governor, but she didn’t last long. She says unwarranted ethics investigations are what prompted her to quit. Most Alaskans seem to think she left to get rich. But she also had lost her political base. Republicans had never liked her, Democrats felt betrayed, and everyone believed she was now fixated on the presidency. Today, only about 33 percent of Alaskans hold a favorable view of her. She’s often referred to as “Sarah, Inc.”—just the latest powerful entity seeking to exploit Alaska.
Palin’s departure has had further consequences. Her successor and former lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell, is in many respects her opposite: a pleasant man who makes so little impression that some Republicans call him “Captain Zero.” You don’t imagine him going rogue. But Alaskans seem relieved to have him in charge.
Parnell is also a former oil lobbyist for ConocoPhillips. While serving out Palin’s term, he was a dutiful caretaker of her legacy. But in December, having been elected in his own right, he decided to make some changes, and began by firing the remaining members of the Magnificent Seven. Then, in January, he announced that his top priority was a bill cutting ACES by $2 billion a year. Parnell claims that the tax discourages oil investments in Alaska, although there’s little evidence to back that up. The Resource Development Council for Alaska, a leading business lobbying group, has taken up this cause in earnest. Most legislators give Parnell even odds of succeeding. Everyone agrees that the oil industry is reasserting itself, now that Palin has moved on.
Let’s stop here and go back for a moment to the convention speech—the alchemic moment of excitement and fantasy when Sarah Palin became the star of national politics. Listening to it today, you can practically hear her shift registers, the state figure morphing into a national one, the old Palin becoming the new. She touches on the pipeline, the corruption, how she broke the oil companies’ “monopoly on power” and ended a “culture of self-dealing.” But all of that is overshadowed by the full-throated assault on Barack Obama, rooted in deep cultural resentment, that became the campaign’s ethos and remains Palin’s identity. What resonate are her charges that Obama wanted to “forfeit” the war in Iraq and that he condescended to “working people” with talk of “how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns.”
That didn’t carry her to Washington, but it did reshape the contours of American politics. Today, there aren’t many Republicans of the type Palin was in Alaska; but nearly every Republican seeking the White House strives to evoke the more grievance-driven themes of her convention speech. Regardless of whether she runs too, her influence will be more broadly and deeply felt than anyone else’s. But it’s hard to believe that her party, or her country, or even Palin herself, is better off for that.
What if history had written a different ending? What if she had tried to do for the nation what she did for Alaska? The possibility is tantalizing and not hard to imagine. The week after the Republican convention, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the whole economy suddenly seemed poised to go down with it. Palin might have been the torchbearer of reform, a role that would have come naturally. Everything about her—the aggressiveness, the gift for articulating resentments, her record and even her old allies in Alaska—would once more have been channeled against a foe worth pursuing. Palin, not Obama, might ultimately have come to represent “Change We Can Believe In.” What had he done that could possibly compare with how she had faced down special interests in Alaska?
Where true Palinism could be most productively applied is on the issues consuming Washington right now: debt and deficits. Palin’s achievement was to pull Alaska out of a dire, corrupt, enduring systemic crisis and return it to fiscal health and prosperity when many people believed that such a thing was impossible. She did this not by hewing to any ideological extreme but by setting a pragmatic course, applying a rigorous practicality to a set of problems that had seemed impervious to solution. She challenged supposedly inviolable political precepts, and embraced more-nuanced realities: Republicans sometimes must confront powerful business interests; to govern effectively, you have to cooperate with the other side; you sometimes must raise taxes to balance a budget; and doing these things can actually enhance rather than destroy your career, whatever anybody says. True reform—not pandering to the base—established Palin’s broad popularity in Alaska. This approach is sorely absent from most of what happens in Washington these days.
You’d of course have to account for her flaws, already evident back home, which would undoubtedly have materialized. But had she run as a reformer, these would have amounted to a character trait—not her defining trait—and one shared by many successful politicians. It’s amazing what the media can see fit to forgive in someone who they are convinced is a true maverick. Just look at her running mate!
But Palin isn’t the type to feel regret. And her choice of a different kind of political celebrity isn’t likely to be her biggest obstacle. Rather, she’ll have to overcome a lack of experience, long odds of winning, and a Republican establishment whose leaders are deeply hostile to the idea of her candidacy. That’s why most people in Washington believe she won’t run. But in Alaska, they’re not so sure. The Palin they knew faced many of the same obstacles, and nothing about her charmed career, from mayor to governor to vice-presidential nominee and finally to global celebrity, suggests to them that she would ever be deterred.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/06/the-tragedy-of-sarah-palin/8492Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
