I'm really kind of flabbergasted at this thing; Joshua, your wrists must be killing you after all that furious hand-waving. There is no "old Sarah"; she's always looked out for Number One, always been willing to throw old allies under the bus (starting with John Stein, her predecessor as Wasilla mayor and former political mentor), and always been unable or unwilling to face the long-term consequences of her acts.Also, WRT dancestoblue's comment: yes, I've been overpromoted myself, but here's the thing about Palin: there's never been any particular indication that Palin has ever been good at governing. She was good at getting elected, yes, but when she became mayor of Wasilla, one of the first things that she did was hire a city manager (for a town of what was then about 3000) and encouraged "growth" by basically inviting developers to turn the Mat-Su Valley into one big strip mall, and left behind a massively-expensive sports complex that's quite a bit bigger than a town of that size needs (not to mention rumors that she diverted materials and personnel from the project to build her half-million-dollar home, something that she couldn't have afforded on her salary, which she explains away by making vague claims that "some friends of theirs" built it). That's your naive, earnest, aw-shucks small town baseball player.
Let's start with that so-called oil reform. Yes, it was better than the Murkowski deal (almost anything short of abolishing the tax completely would have been), but more importantly for Palin's purposes, it allowed her to send a bigger check to the people of Alaska, and that, of course, made her much, much more popular. (At least until prices fell, and dividends with them.) She's also responsible for picking the ex-oil lobbyist as her running mate, responsible for quitting barely more than halfway into her term and putting him in office, and responsible for the scandals which she left office in an attempt to get away from (not to mention the promise of a significantly more lucrative career as Fox commenter and after-dinner speaker).
And as far as the natural gas pipeline goes: It's a little disorienting to read that, on the one hand, it's necessary for Alaska's future once the North Slope oil runs out; on the other hand, it's (supposedly) not being built because natural gas prices are currently low; and yet, on the proverbial third hand, Alaska is running a budget surplus. Isn't that what states are supposed to do, make long-term investments in their infrastructure for the common good? In fact, Joe McGinniss wrote an article on how Palin's administration stood in the way of the pipeline (at http://www.portfolio.com/execu... and that is the real reason why Palin added McGinniss to her very long enemies list, rather than the bordering-on-slanderous accusation that he could see into her daughter's bedroom window from next door.
There is no tragedy, unless you want to count the number of former political allies and associates left in Palin's wake, all the way from John Stein to John McCain. There is no former reformer, only a shameless exploiter of people who would make Eve Harrington blush. Anyone who believes that she could have been a fearless corruption fighter for the McCain Administration, let alone that she's interested in running for a job that would entail a severe pay cut and renewed accountability, is just setting themselves up for the con.
A big part of the answer [to why she failed] 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...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.That doesn't sound like Green is arguing for the Palin-as-secret reformer. More a "right place, right time" sort of thing.
Bradley looks to his writers for policy guidance. He was, he says, "a neocon guy" who was "dead certain about the rightness" of invading Iraq. He argued about this with his national correspondent, James Fallows, who wrote skeptically about the war, and now concedes Fallows was right.So, yeah, he was wrong about the Iraq war, but it's not like this guy is a Bush-worshipping right-wing ideologue.
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That's discounting, of course, the small bit about her resigning office. Aside from that little nit, she wasn't erratic or not up to the job at all. Right?
I'm guessing here that this article is why I've never read Atlantic monthly . It appears to have been written by Romney's time traveling kids?
posted by Poet_Lariat at 1:55 AM on May 14, 2011 [2 favorites]