Originally posted by Dj Smitty20
Dude you will ing say ANYTHING to defend these two horrible candidates who are so ing blind and ignorant.
So you're really going to take on the Russian Federation over Georgia joining NATO?? (the Georgians are also at fault in this mess)
How do you propose to do that exactly? Their armed forces are still quite formidable and they have THOUSANDS of nuclear weapons probably still pointed at your country. Is provoking the Russians with inflammatory statements like this really something a prospective VP should be saying when your military is currently over taxed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Don't pull any of that "the army is fine" either, because Judy Woodruff confirmed what I"ve said a few times on here that the Army is in trouble, enlistments are down, officers are leaving, etc, etc in front of BOTH candidates at the Presidential Forum on Thursday night.
This is not the 1990s anymore. America is not the super power that it once was. This aggressive cowboy foreign policy is not going to work anymore. People around the world absolutely detest your country for this very reason! Wake the up.
I didn't even notice this reply until now. Who ing said anything about "taking on the russians" (militarily I assume you mean)? NATO is just part of a foreign policy chess game... your boy Obama supports georgia and ukraine joining NATO too so STFU. All Palin was saying that the point of NATO is to assist and defend other countries if they are attacked... that's the deal and the idea behind NATO countries binding together. strength in numbers and the lesser the liklihood of a smaller country being overrun if they are part of a treaty organization. You're so ing delusional with your hatred for Palin and McCain that you buy into every knee jerk pundit interpretation of their words with their secret "extremist" decoder rings. Why are WE provoking the Russians? You don't think they are provoking anyone? Yeah yeah, I know... America is the enemy, America is the bad guy, all of the world's ills are America's fault, and if we would just do whatever we can to pacify hard ass heads of state in other places, maybe they'd like us. I mean, if Judy Woodruff makes a point, I guess is set in stone. You can bitch all you want from Canada about how evil America is and how we aren't so strong anymore... but then what does that say about Canada? If you think anyone in America really cares about Canada or what Canadians think, you're wrong.
The17sss
quote:
Originally posted by Dj Smitty20
actually the church she USED to be a part of before 2002 was Pentecostal where they DO speak in tongues. She has also recently said that God is on the side of the United States in the war in Iraq.
Dude, if that isn't extremism, then I don't know what else is. There is no way you can spin this. She is a religious extremist and if you don't think extremism exists in Christianity, then you shouldn't even be posting in this forum.
There is a reason that I despise organised religion in all forms. It's too bad the United States doesn't seem to want to be a secular nation anymore. God is talked about way too much in your politics. It really turns people off.
Palin's "God" quote was chopped up and taken out of context, and as usual, you failed to research the whole thing and decided to go knee jerk style again. Here is the full quote:
“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.” She expounded on that to Charlie Gibson and said the following:
"But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said — first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words. But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God’s side. That’s what that comment was all about, Charlie."
The AP version left out the first part of her statement... the part that makes clear she’s not asserting that we’re doing God’s will but simply praying that we are. It’s the difference between me saying “McCain will win” and “I pray McCain will win.” The first is an assertion of fact/secret knowledge, the second is an expression of desire/hope. The AP actually stoops to picking up the quote mid-sentence to make it better fit the stereotype of the holy-roller yokel claiming divine inspiration for Bush’s Crusade.
You're so desperate to hate her that you'll believe anything that the liberal media will say without understanding the context of it. ing typical. I can't stand organized religion too, but I know Palin is not an "extremist"... you can't just toss that word around so casually. You're out of your mind dude.
EDIT: AND.... your busted ass "Pentacostal extremist tongue speaking" comment is way off. None other than the NY Times debunks this bull. Sample quote from the article:
quote:
One of the musical directors at the church, Adele Morgan, who has known Ms. Palin since the third grade, said the Palins moved to the nondenominational Wasilla Bible Church in 2002, in part because its ministry is less “extreme” than Pentecostal churches like the Assemblies of God, which practice speaking in tongues and miraculous healings. “A lot of churches are about music and media and having a big profile,” Ms. Morgan said. “We are against that. That is why it is so attractive to politicians because they can just sit there and be safe.”
“We’ve gotten a lot of their people when the other churches get too extreme,” Ms. Morgan continued. However, she added, “If you lift your hands when we’re singing, we’re not going to shoot you down.”
So much for the Palin-as-religious-extremist theme. Even if one was inclined to think of Pentacostalists in such terms, Palin clearly wanted a quieter form of worship. The Miami Herald story this is from didn’t make the significance of their move clear, and wanted to leave the impression that Palin’s religious beliefs somehow made her part of a fringe movement.
Exit question: How long did it take for them to investigate the political radicalism at Trinity United Church of Christ and Jeremiah Wright? 15 months. How long did it take for them to start with Palin and her religious beliefs? Less than a week. I think you need to stop telling other people, obviously better informed, to wake the up.
"I am prepared. I am prepared. I need no on-the-job training. I wasn't a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn't a governor for a short period of time."
The "mayor for a short period of time" is Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor of the most populous city in the United States (population 8.2 million) for 8 years.
The "governor for a short period of time" is Romney, who was governor of the 14th most populous state (population 6.4 million) for 4 years.
But that was back in 2007. In 2008, the straight talk express took a u-turn. We now have a 6 year mayor of Wasilla (population 5500) and 21 month governor of Alaska (population 683,000) who Mccain says is qualified and ready to be commander in chief on day one. No "on-the-job training" needed. :stongue:
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by The17sss
I didn't even notice this reply until now. Who ing said anything about "taking on the russians" (militarily I assume you mean)? NATO is just part of a foreign policy chess game... your boy Obama supports georgia and ukraine joining NATO too so STFU. All Palin was saying that the point of NATO is to assist and defend other countries if they are attacked... that's the deal and the idea behind NATO countries binding together. strength in numbers and the lesser the liklihood of a smaller country being overrun if they are part of a treaty organization. You're so ing delusional with your hatred for Palin and McCain that you buy into every knee jerk pundit interpretation of their words with their secret "extremist" decoder rings. Why are WE provoking the Russians? You don't think they are provoking anyone? Yeah yeah, I know... America is the enemy, America is the bad guy, all of the world's ills are America's fault, and if we would just do whatever we can to pacify hard ass heads of state in other places, maybe they'd like us. I mean, if Judy Woodruff makes a point, I guess is set in stone. You can bitch all you want from Canada about how evil America is and how we aren't so strong anymore... but then what does that say about Canada? If you think anyone in America really cares about Canada or what Canadians think, you're wrong.
Actually, he was more or less right. Obama and Biden are both on record as supporting the candidacy of Ukraine and Georgia for admission into NATO... eventually. They support Georgia and Ukraine being given access to the Membership Action Plan (MAP), a program whereby states work with NATO on reducing differences between policies and procedures over a period of time before gaining accession to NATO itself. Previous countries that have joined NATO spent up to ten years in this program.
The point here is this: Obama and Biden support a nuanced approach to Georgia and Ukraine eventually joining NATO. Bush eventually came around to this same position. Sarah Palin just gave the most un-nuanced answer I've ever heard in my life. "Absolutely they should be part of NATO." Anyone hazard a guess as to why she left out the when and the how? Because she has no flipping idea about any of this other than the fact that she knows McCain is for it.
McCain stands completely alone on this issue, as his "We are all Georgians" comments might suggest. Nobody else wants to circumvent NATO procedure to get Georgia into the treaty. Randy Scheunemann (former lobbyist for Saakishvili and current McCain foreign policy top advisor) obviously coached her well.
The bluntness and the lack of nuance in any of her answers suggests a real failure to have even thought intelligently about any of these issues before she was put on the ticket two weeks ago. And when you combine that incompetence with a hawkish view of American power in the world... well, even Bush didn't seem hawkish during the election.
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by The17sss
I'm sorry, but I had to really laugh when you cited the AP as proof of a liberal media. The AP is a joke - they've been giving McCain the most sympathetic coverage of any news outlet.
Furthermore, if you're so "informed" as you say, why haven't you answered a single one of the questions that I've now posed to you three times in this thread?
josh4
So maybe Palin has some experience, and lacks in some areas of knowledge in foreign policy. I think its a ridiculous notion to be drumming up her time as a small time mayor and short term as governor of Alaska. This is the office of the Vice President of the United States, one of the most powerful positions in the world. The decisions made there will affect millions of people. The job is hard. Joe Biden gets criticized for advocating to split up Iraq, an idea I believe was a mistake, and he made that mistake on 36 years of experience. When mistakes like that are possible with experience, I dare think of the mistakes possible on practically no experience.
Who is she going to turn to for council? You might say she'll turn to McCain, and he wants to continue a majority of the policies under Bush. Maybe she'll turn to her advisers, which right now are all Bush people.
quote:
With new reports coming out daily about Ms. Palin’s record in Alaska, and a more aggressive offensive from Senator Barack Obama’s campaign, Mr. McCain’s team has issued a partywide, all-hands-on-deck.
It has hired several veterans from President Bush’s campaigns, making them part of a team dedicated to defending Ms. Palin from unsubstantiated Internet rumors, Democratic attacks and potentially damaging news reports about her record produced by the investigative journalists now in Alaska. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/u...ml?ref=politics
The party in power, the same people under Bush, the same people these two are going to "shake up." These are the people being leaned on to mold Palin into a Vice President in 50 days.
quote:
But all this talk of whether or not she would be experienced enough to lead the nation in the event of John McCain dying in office, rests on a naive (or wilfully obtuse) premise. Many, if not most, vice-presidents have lacked the experience and the tested judgment that would ideally be expected of a president. This is largely because they are not usually chosen for their qualifications for the presidency but for the electoral advantages that they bring to the ticket.
In truth, if a relatively untried VP succeeded to the White House, he or she would instantly be enveloped by the Cabinet, the Pentagon chiefs and the national security advisers who had been appointed by his (or her) predecessor. Major decisions on foreign policy would not be left in the hands of an individual neophyte: they would be taken over by the team which had taken power with the elected president.
Whatever happens to Mr McCain in office, it is his judgment and his Cabinet which would sustain Mrs Palin if she had to take over from him. So it is his experience, not hers, that should be the deciding factor in the election. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/janet_...the_white_house
Both McCain and Palin are being and would be supported by the very same lobbyists and special interests they're going to "shake up." When Palin has a foreign policy question these are the people that will be whispering in her ear. That makes me feel so much better.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
It was born out of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States and touted by Condoleezza Rice.
WRONG. the Bush Doctrine predates that. Enduring Freedom duh.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
Spreading democracy isn't part of the Doctrine.
wow man you sure you're not thinking of Bush 41?
quote:
And the Doctrine doesn't say that we are compelled to act whenever - it says that in the case of a real or perceived threat to the national security of the United States in the future, the US can and will act preemptively.
what documentation, if any, are you getting this from?
quote:
Obviously there is a pretty big debate going on in policy circles about whether Iran meets those criteria. As for Sudan, there's no credible threat, so there's no preemption.
since the Palin interview i've read a lot of bush Doctrine retorts, but the Krauthammer has it down.
quote:
It Was Gibson’s Gaffe
Which made the smug condescension all the more precious.
By Charles Krauthammer
“Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she
agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what
he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed
her that it meant the right of ‘anticipatory self-defense.’ ”
— New York Times, September 12
Informed her? Rubbish.
The Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong.
There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today.
He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”
She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”
Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, he grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”
Wrong.
I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard titled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.
Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. In his address to Congress nine days later, Bush declared: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This “with us or against us” policy regarding terror — first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan — became the essence of the Bush doctrine.
Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq War was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of pre-emptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine.
It’s not. It’s the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of Bush foreign policy and the one that most distinctively defines it: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
This declaration of a sweeping, universal American freedom agenda was consciously meant to echo John Kennedy’s pledge that the United States “shall pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” It draws also from the Truman doctrine of March 1947 and from Wilson’s 14 points.
If I were in any public foreign-policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about Bush’s grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda.
Not the Gibson doctrine of pre-emption.
Not the “with us or against us” no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.
Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.
Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed “doctrines” in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines, which came out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few conflicting foreign-policy crosscurrents.
Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.
Yes, Palin didn’t know what it is. But neither does Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know — while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, “sounding like an impatient teacher,” as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the phenom who presumes to play on their stage.
Dj Smitty20
quote:
Originally posted by The17sss
I didn't even notice this reply until now. Who ing said anything about "taking on the russians" (militarily I assume you mean)? NATO is just part of a foreign policy chess game... your boy Obama supports georgia and ukraine joining NATO too so STFU. All Palin was saying that the point of NATO is to assist and defend other countries if they are attacked... that's the deal and the idea behind NATO countries binding together. strength in numbers and the lesser the liklihood of a smaller country being overrun if they are part of a treaty organization. You're so ing delusional with your hatred for Palin and McCain that you buy into every knee jerk pundit interpretation of their words with their secret "extremist" decoder rings. Why are WE provoking the Russians? You don't think they are provoking anyone? Yeah yeah, I know... America is the enemy, America is the bad guy, all of the world's ills are America's fault, and if we would just do whatever we can to pacify hard ass heads of state in other places, maybe they'd like us. I mean, if Judy Woodruff makes a point, I guess is set in stone. You can bitch all you want from Canada about how evil America is and how we aren't so strong anymore... but then what does that say about Canada? If you think anyone in America really cares about Canada or what Canadians think, you're wrong.
Nobody cares what Canadians think? This ignorant view you have on the world is exactly what contributes to the increasing dislike of your country's government. I have never said that I hate the United States or Americans (I'll be in Virignia Beach next weekend if you want to say hi), but the world is quickly changing and I don't think a lot of people in your country are really grasping this reality. You're on the way down, not up and your leaders have to stop making ridiculous and inflammatory statements on national television about situations like the one in Russia. Russia is CLEARLY not 100% at fault here and the people of Georgia are not "all Georgians" as your favoured candidate has pointed out.
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
WRONG. the Bush Doctrine predates that. Enduring Freedom duh.
I don't think you understand what the Bush Doctrine is either. The Bush Doctrine is not the doctrine of pre-emption - the internationally recognized right of states to pre-emptively attack in the face of imminent threat. That doctrine is the very same that has been used by states for years.
The Bush Doctrine represented a radical extension of the normalized standard of pre-emption by expanding it to include "preventative" war - military action in the face of a "probable future threat" - this is what Colin Powell went in front of the UN to argue, and the main reason they threw it back in his face. There is no internationally-recognized right to attack a country based on a hypothetical future threat. The United States built a case not that Iraq represented a real or immediate threat, but that in the future - if they developed a weapons program - they COULD become a threat to American security.
This is why Bush remarked in September of 2002 that it is not ok to wait for a threat to emerge, because by then "it is already too late."
Any other interpretation of the Bush Doctrine is just wrong, so I'm not sure where you're getting your information from. In foreign policy circles, the 2002 National Security Strategy (issued by Condoleezza Rice in conjunction with the White House) is viewed as the document that outlined this idea into formal adopted US policy.
Enduring Freedom is a whole different story (and a quite recognized legitimate one at that).
edit: I just saw that you disagree with me on the spreading democracy bit. I really think you're confusing "The Bush Doctrine" with this administration's sweeping foreign policy aims.
Lebezniatnikov
Ok, that Krauthammer article is complete bollocks. I don't really care what wikipedia says about the evolution of the term - I'm certainly not going to trust the opinion of a known partisan talking head over the institutional knowledge of foreign policy wonks (such as Condi or Powell) who quite clearly recognize the preventative war nature of the Bush Doctrine and its radical departure from previous policy.
Spreading freedom and democracy? That's not even new. Congratulations to Krauthammer for jumping the gun in 2001 and coining a term prematurely. I can sit here and tell you that the Obama Doctrine is the policy of pursuing men in turbans to caves in Tora Bora and that doesn't mean that the foreign policy establishment will adopt it as such.
edit: I'll add that Krauthammer was right in one respect. Gibson was wrong. He used the word "pre-emptive" instead of "preventative" - this did not indicate the radical department from previous internationally-accepted policy that the Bush Doctrine really represented.
josh4
quote:
September 14, 2008
In Office, Palin Hired Friends and Hit Critics
By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN AND MICHAEL POWELL
This article is by Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman and Michael Powell.
WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.
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.
When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.
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!”
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.
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.
Still, Ms. Palin has many supporters. As a two-term mayor she paved roads and built an ice rink, and as governor she has pushed through higher taxes on the oil companies that dominate one-third of the state’s economy. She stirs deep emotions. In Wasilla, many residents display unflagging affection, cheering “our Sarah” and hissing at her critics.
“She is bright and has unfailing political instincts,” said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. “She taps very directly into anxieties about the economic future.”
“But,” he added, “her governing style raises a lot of hard questions.”
Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. The McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and that of her husband, while referring others to the governor’s spokespeople, who did not respond.
In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.
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.
State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.
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.”
Hometown Mayor
Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996, recalled the night the two women chatted about her ambitions.
“I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,’ ” Ms. Chase recalled. “She replied, ‘I want to be president.’ ”
Ms. Palin grew up in Wasilla, an old fur trader’s outpost and now a fast-growing exurb of Anchorage. The town sits in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, edged by jagged mountains and birch forests. In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration took farmers from the Dust Bowl area and resettled them here; their Democratic allegiances defined the valley for half a century.
In the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They filled evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party. Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for Ms. Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to abortion and the ouster of the “complacent” old guard.
After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin presided over a city rapidly outgrowing itself. Septic tanks had begun to pollute lakes, and residential lots were carved willy-nilly out of the woods. She passed a road and sewer bond, cut property taxes but raised the sales tax, and loosened the reins on enforcing zoning laws.
And, her supporters say, she cleaned out the municipal closet, firing veteran officials to make way for her own team. “She had an agenda for change and for doing things differently,” said Judy Patrick, a City Council member at the time.
But careers were turned upside down. The mayor quickly fired the town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one.
Ms. Palin cited budget difficulties for the museum cuts. Mr. Cooper thought differently, saying the museum had become a microcosm of class and cultural conflicts in town. “It represented that the town was becoming more progressive, and they didn’t want that,” he said.
Days later, Mr. Cooper recalled, a vocal conservative, Steve Stoll, sidled up to him. Mr. Stoll had supported Ms. Palin and had a long-running feud with Mr. Cooper. “He said: ‘Gotcha, Cooper,’ ” Mr. Cooper said.
Mr. Stoll did not recall that conversation, although he said he supported Ms. Palin’s campaign and was pleased when she fired Mr. Cooper.
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.
Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use — employees sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile.
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.”
Reform Crucible
Restless ambition defined Ms. Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from the state; finished second in the 2002 Republican primary for lieutenant governor; and sought to fill the seat of Senator Frank H. Murkowski when he ran for governor.
Mr. Murkowski appointed his daughter to the seat, but as a consolation prize, he gave Ms. Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship of a state commission overseeing oil and gas drilling.
Ms. Palin discovered that the state Republican leader, Randy Ruedrich, a commission member, was conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies. When Mr. Murkowski failed to act on her complaints, she quit and went public.
The Republican establishment shunned her. But her break with the gentlemen’s club of oil producers and political power catapulted her into the public eye.
“She was honest and forthright,” said Jay Kerttula, a former Democratic state senator from Palmer.
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 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.
Ms. Palin won the primary, and in the general election she faced Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, an independent.
Not deeply versed in policy, Ms. Palin skipped some candidate forums; at others, she flipped through hand-written, color-coded index cards strategically placed behind her nameplate.
Before one forum, Mr. Halcro said he saw aides shovel reports at Ms. Palin as she crammed. Her showman’s instincts rarely failed. She put the pile of reports on the lectern. Asked what she would do about health care policy, she patted the stack and said she would find an answer in the pile of solutions.
“She was fresh, and she was tomorrow,” said Michael Carey, a former editorial page editor for The Anchorage Daily News. “She just floated along like Mary Poppins.”
Government
Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.
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.
Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell 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.
To her supporters — and with an 80 percent approval rating, she has plenty — Ms. Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering lobbyists. And she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of oil and gas sale proceeds.
“Does anybody doubt that she’s a tough negotiator?” said State Representative Carl Gatto, Republican of Palmer.
Yet controversies have marred Ms. Palin’s reform credentials. In addition to the trooper investigation, lawmakers in April accused her of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.
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~!”
Mr. Bailey, a former mid-level manager at Alaska Airlines who worked on Ms. Palin’s campaign, has been placed on paid leave; he has emerged as a central figure in the trooper investigation.
Another confidante of Ms. Palin’s is Ms. Frye, 27. She worked as a receptionist for State Senator Lyda Green before she joined Ms. Palin’s campaign for governor. Now Ms. Frye earns $68,664 as a special assistant to the governor. Her frequent interactions with Ms. Palin’s children have prompted some lawmakers to refer to her as “the babysitter,” a title that Ms. Frye disavows.
Like Mr. Bailey, she is an effusive cheerleader for her boss.
“YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” Ms. Frye typed in an e-mail message to Ms. Palin in March.
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.
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 most often learn of her initiatives — and vetoes — from news releases, including her decision to veto $237 million from last year’s budget.
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.
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.”
Mr. Fagan has been inundated with critical calls. “Do you have any idea how much this state hates me right now?” he said.
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.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/u...&hp&oref=slogin
Loyalty vs competency. Friends vs qualified professionals.
This sounds really familiar. Where's heckava job Brownie?
