Going Rouge (8 page)

By mid-September national media were reporting Palin’s refusal to cooperate. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, was doing everything it could to keep the discussion on McCain and the economy, offering little if any push-back. In Alaska, however, even conservatives were griping. “I want McCain and Palin to win too,” argued Dan Fagan, a popular right-wing Anchorage radio host. “But with Palin’s refusal to cooperate with the independent investigator and her transparent delay tactics, Americans deserve to know what Palin is trying to hide before we vote her a heartbeat away from the leader of the free world.”

Jay Ramras, the GOP Judiciary Committee chair, was frustrated. “It’s a shame for anybody who buys this bag of oats that the McCain camp is peddling,” Ramras said. His Democratic colleague Les Gara said, “Usually, the spin wins. We caught them on it here. But they’re still spinning. It doesn’t seem to matter, even when they’re confronted with the truth.”

Gara’s right. So the question is no longer merely, How did Sarah Palin abuse her authority? Or even, What did she know and when did she know it? The fundamental political question of the moment is whether the McCain camp will succeed in spinning Palin’s nasty home-state scandal into something just convoluted enough to get the fickle national media to give the Alaska governor a soft pass. If that happens, it will be because a crack campaign team, made up of veteran Bush/Cheney operatives and reporting directly to McCain campaign adviser Schmidt, stirred up sufficient confusion and partisan rancor to obscure what’s really happening in a small state that has never before been a prime battleground in a presidential race.

If spin wins, it will not just be the truth that takes a hit. As Troopergate and its fallout reveal, Sarah Palin is more than a hockey mom. She is a fiercely ambitious politician with a penchant for secrecy and a history of using positions of public trust to advance her personal and ideological agendas. It is no coincidence that Bush’s vice president has lavished praise on Palin—saying he “loved” her “superb” convention speech. Dick Cheney is often portrayed as the ultimate insider, just as Palin is packaged as the ultimate outsider. But Cheney recognizes in Palin someone who meets his warped standard for “an effective vice president.” That’s the inconvenient truth the McCain campaign is working overtime to hide until after November 4.

Examining Palin’s Record on Violence Against Women

Brentin Mock

Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska says that she’s a champion for women, professing that, as the Republican vice presidential nominee, she is the breakthrough that authenticates the 18 million cracks in the proverbial glass ceiling opened by Senator Hillary Clinton. But before Palin can claim any authenticity as a fighter for gender issues, she needs to address some important questions: With Alaska having the highest rates of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence in the United States, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, what did Palin do as a mayor, and as governor, to remedy these problems? And what would she do as vice president to address gender-based violence as a national issue?

Her previous and current governing acts signal that the protection of women’s rights is not much of a priority for her. For all of Alaska’s dismal statistics on violence against women, Palin took steps that worked against the interests of vulnerable women—especially Native Alaskan women. As mayor, Palin refused to have the City of Wasilla cover the costs of the forensic kits for women who said they had been raped. As governor, Palin stood in the way of efforts to expand legal-service resources to victims of sexual assault, and fired Walt Monegan, one man who had almost unanimous respect from police, urban Alaskans, and Native Alaskans alike for his dedication to this issue.

As mayor of Wasilla from 1996 to 2000, Palin decided she would defy a bill from then-governor Tony Knowles that said local law enforcements should foot the bill for “rape kits”—the forensic analysis needed to trace the identity of attackers—when victims filed complaints or sought treatment in medical centers. The kits cost between $300 and $1,200, putting them out of the reach of low-income women and adding a financial weight to an already burdened accuser. But Mayor Palin thought instead that the kits were too much of a financial drain on the city government.

The Alaska that Palin inherited as governor had a rape rate 2.5 times the national average. Its rates of sexual assault against children are six times the national average. And its per capita rate of women killed by men is the highest in the nation. For Native Alaskan women, reality is even grimmer. A major Amnesty International report on violence against American Indian and Alaskan Indian women found that an alarming one in three female Native Alaskans and American Indians (two distinct groups) are raped in their lifetime, and three in four have been sexually assaulted. Native Alaskan women are ten times more likely to be sexually assaulted than all other Alaskan women.

These women are often cut off from the avenues to justice—literally. Since many Native Alaskan women live in rural villages that have no connecting roads to the main cities with police stations, they have a difficult time filing complaints. The Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault reports that 30 percent of Alaskan women have no access to victim services where they live. According to the Amnesty International report, police are themselves handicapped—often underfunded—in trying to get to the villages when complaints arise. And in interviews Amnesty International conducted with Native Alaskan sexual-assault survivors, respondents said that police and medical professionals often wrote them off as being drunk when they complained. Doctors and police wouldn’t follow up on investigations.

In what was hailed as a step in the right direction, Palin appointed Monegan, the former Anchorage police chief, as public-safety commissioner in 2006, just after she was elected governor. The first Native Alaskan to hold this position, Monegan was a well-respected public figure among both city- and village-dwelling Alaskans. He’s a board member of the Alaska Native Justice Center, which advocates on behalf of Alaskan Natives. As commissioner, he established and supported measures to strengthen law enforcement in the native rural areas, and advocated for more protection of native women, who are the prime targets for assault, rape, and murder—mostly by non-native men. He also established a Citizens Police Academy, which empowered residents to report crimes as they surfaced. One program he hoped to put in place would have deputized villagers and eventually elevated them to official state troopers—a program which, if carried out, would have given sexual-assault victims a law enforcement service in their own front yards.

But Monegan bumped up against Palin’s staunch position that she wouldn’t support any programs that she felt would burden taxpayers. Monegan went to Washington, D.C., to request federal funds to combat sexual assault and domestic violence. It was this move that drew him into conflict with Palin and her way of governing. Palin reportedly had not “authorized” the program to expand the sexual-assault legal services that Monegan wanted to implement. According to her lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, Palin considered Monegan’s trip to D.C. to request funding “the last straw.”

Palin’s spokeswoman Sharon Leighow said Monegan was fired because the governor wanted the public-safety department to move “in a new direction”—although this “new” strategy seemed remarkably similar to what Monegan was already doing. Palin’s interim replacement for Monegan was Kenai police officer Charles Kopp, who at the time was facing accusations of sexually harassing a female employee—a “new direction,” indeed.

All of this stands in stark contrast to Palin’s counterpart on the Democratic ticket, Senator Barack Obama’s running mate, Senator Joseph Biden, who has a strong congressional record on these issues—most notably his long battle in establishing, promoting, strengthening, and sustaining the Violence Against Women Act. (It was, in fact, this signature piece of legislation that made funds for Monegan’s proposed programs possible.)

Palin’s record of standing in the way of progress and justice for those women suffering from the most egregious of crimes undermines her claim that she represents a step forward for women. Her record in Alaska makes clear that her chosen style of governing often means choosing to save a dollar rather than save a woman’s life.

Palin Enthusiastically Practices Socialism, Alaska-Style

Elstun Lauesen

I make a motion that we change the name of our state. Henceforth we should be known as the State of Irony, thanks to Sarah Palin’s sashay down the catwalk of national politics.

Todd and Sarah’s Excellent Adventure during the fiftieth anniversary of statehood is actually a great vehicle for a meditation on one of the unique aspects of our state: socialism.

Candidate Palin, along with such formidable intellects as Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber), Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and Victoria Jackson, attacked Barack Obama during the campaign for being, variously, a Marxist, a communist, and a socialist. Ironically, as Keith Olbermann of MSNBC noted last week, Sarah Palin just presided over a huge redistribution of wealth when she signed an energy “rebate” of $1,200 for every man, woman, and child in Alaska. The money for that wealth redistribution comes from our collective wealth, which we have thanks to our state constitution. Article VIII, Section 2 holds that the resources of the state will be utilized, developed, and conserved for the “maximum benefit of its people.” This precept of public management of benefit is precisely what makes Alaska today one of a handful of states that enjoy a budget surplus while other states are struggling with deficits. The framers of our constitution wisely didn’t want state resources to be privatized as they are in Texas, for example, where the people are separated from their wealth by billionaires. Thanks to the framers of our state’s constitution, our collective ownership of state resources guarantees low taxes and high revenues, not to mention a Permanent Fund dividend program, another socialist scheme that gave each Alaskan over $2,000 this year.

Alaskans like to boast that they are different, that they “don’t give a damn how they do it in the Lower 48.” Ironically, Sarah Palin and her handlers and many of her fans here in Alaska don’t understand how different we Alaskans really are.

Truth be told, when Governor Palin redistributes the wealth held in common by the people of Alaska, she is fulfilling the socialist dream of many of Alaska’s pioneers.

I’m from Fairbanks and each summer we celebrate “Golden Days,” a celebration honoring the mining days of yore. Golden Days has morphed into a cowboy, Western-style show since the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline; that’s understandable, considering where many of the pipeline immigrants come from. Ironically, many of the early miners and pioneers of Alaska were from Europe, with corresponding accents and political views including European socialist views. The history of mining in Alaska in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has a parallel history of socialist political organizing. Many of our forefathers and mothers here in Alaska were proud members of socialist parties or worker affiliates in Ketchikan, Nome, and Fairbanks.

A local blog, insurgent49.com, published a review of the early leftist history of Alaska. Regarding my hometown the review notes, “Lena Morrow Lewis started publishing the semimonthly
Alaska Socialist
newspaper in Fairbanks, which lasted for about three years. Two other left-wing Fairbanks publications from this period that were shorter-lived were the
Tanana Valley Socialist
and the
Socialist Press
. Around the same time, Gustave Sandberg served as secretary of the Alaska Socialist Educational Society, which did such activities as lecturing in mining camps. At least several times, a young writer named Jack London was one of the lecturers.”

In 1914 the Alaska Socialist Party was formed and the platform advocated typical socialist ideas like federal funding of railroads and highways in Alaska.

When Alaskans sing about the “gold of the early sourdough’s dreams” in the Alaska Flag Song, we should also remember an associated dream held by many of those pioneer Alaskans honored in that song: a world where all people would get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, and where the prejudices and inequalities among people disappear as the fruits of prosperity are shared by all.

Ironically, despite her posturing before adoring mobs in the Lower 48, Sarah Palin has so far been a pretty good socialist governor. I hope that when she returns, she continues her good work and stops worrying so much about how they do it Outside.

Letter from the Other Alaska

Shannyn Moore

Homer, Alaska

On the morning of John McCain’s announcement that he had picked our governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate, before she walked onto the national stage, Palin

called in to the radio show I was on. “Today is a great day for Alaska and Alaskans,” she proclaimed. “You accepted?” was my response. I couldn’t believe it. There was an awkward silence. (Maybe she blinked.) But I would have said the same thing if she had been invited to do medical mission work repairing cleft palates in third world countries.

I have more in common in with Sarah Palin than most anyone I know. Raised in small-town Alaska; both parents public school teachers; local pageants, state pageant, second runner-up and Miss Congeniality, respectively; hunting; commercial fishing; and a great pride in the independence and strength in being an Alaskan woman. We both know the comfort of ExtraTuf Boots and fishing gear. Part of me was proud and part of me knew she’d traded for a whole different set of heels. Heels I’d never be comfortable in.

“I have nothin’ to lose,” Palin told Rush Limbaugh weeks after our radio conversation. Palin’s statement was the most honest thing I’d heard her say. She had nothing to lose, and she didn’t. John McCain lost. The Republican Party lost. Alaska lost. But Sarah Palin didn’t lose.

Unlike Governors Clinton and Bush, Sarah wouldn’t relinquish her position to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell. Alaska state business was taken over by Storm Trooper–like forces from the McCain campaign. To this day, political shrapnel is still surfacing.

More recently, Palin said about her upcoming and heavily discounted book,
Going Rogue
, “There have been so many things written and said through mainstream media that have not been accurate, and it will be nice through an unfiltered forum to get to speak truthfully about who we are and what we stand for and what Alaska is all about.” Who is “we”? How could Sarah Palin possibly know what “Alaska is all about”? No one can sum this place up; that’s what I love about it. We are too mavericky to have one voice define us.

But Sarah Palin stole Alaska’s voice. During the campaign, “She Doesn’t Speak For Me!” bumper stickers were seen more often than McCain/Palin stickers. Sarah Palin didn’t speak for all Alaskans, yet our mountains, oceans, culture, and wild things became props in her campaign.

The weeks after the election/rejection of Palin were intense. Many of my friends—those who had become like family to me—had worked tirelessly, for no money, and managed to get the truth to the mainstream media about our governor. Yes, we declared victory on election night, but we knew she was coming home, and she wasn’t happy about it. Neither were we.

As if that weren’t bad enough, we’d been hearing loons talk about secession up here for years. In Alaska, the three top ballot spots—for president, Senate and House of Representatives—have candidates from the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party. In two of the three, the AIP holds at least 4 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the felonious Ted Stevens had convinced over a hundred thousand Alaskans what he couldn’t convince twelve jurors of a few weeks before the election—i.e., his innocence.

Talking heads had the temerity to ask if it’s too late to sell Alaska back to the Russians. Repeatedly. America’s liberal boy-wonder, Keith Olbermann, was breaking up with us. Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher, and various radio jocks suggested putting Alaska up on eBay. I could only handle one breakup at a time.

I’m like many Alaskans, just not the one America had been forced to get to know during the election. I knew what newspapers I read. I knew that Africa is
not
a country. I knew Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister of Canada, and I even knew which countries comprised NAFTA—which I thought was a crock when it passed. My favorite birthday present in 2008 was the return of habeas corpus in a 5–4 U.S. Supreme Court decision on June 12.

I was born in Alaska; Sarah Palin was not. I don’t have a
Fargo
accent that sounds like I make casseroles with leftover tater tots and mushroom soup. Numerous brilliant, artistic, articulate and cultured citizens call Alaska home. On November 4, 2008, many in the Lower 49 got to shake their shoes of our Governor. They slept easier. Gone were the train-wreck fantasies that kept them up at night; the 3:00 a.m. phone call and she, a heartbeat away from the “nukular” codes.

But for Alaskans, she was back, and we didn’t know what that would mean.

Progressive Alaskans had a target on our backs for speaking out about her archaic philosophies and faith-based policies. We waited for the January 2009 legislative session to include a bill allowing the aerial hunting of the exotic, endangered species,
Alaskan liberals
.

At the same time Palin was coming home, Alaska was in chaos over the Senate race between Ted Stevens and Mark Begich. Her ability to split her own party had left her with few Republican friends, and her campaign had alienated her from her allies among Democratic lawmakers.

The 2009 legislative session was one of the biggest wastes of time in Alaska history. Wars raged between the administration and legislators on both sides of the aisle. When word came of her book deal, there were constitutional questions about her dual role as governor and author as well as the resulting personal financial benefit. At the time, I thought, That’s fantastic! Great! Get a laptop and a bottle of Adderall... you’ll be fine. If you get stuck…well, make it up. It’s worked so far.

But I knew she couldn’t write a book that would capture why, to me, Alaska is one of the best things about America. We are the last frontier. What once was wild in America still is here. It takes my breath; the northern lights over Denali can trump a full moon; a phosphorescent glow in the wake of my row boat; bears fishing salmon out of Brooks Falls; glaciers bigger than cruise ships.

First Alaskans thrived in a frozen land for thousands of years and left no footprint. In 1867, Russia gave us a hell of a deal at 1.9 cents an acre. The Klondike Gold Rush was a quick payback, and it gave Charlie Chaplin some great material.

Homesteading pioneers farmed, fished, and flourished. In 1922, a Tlingit Chief, Charlie Jones was jailed for
voting
. His protest gave way to Native Alaskans getting the right to vote two years before Native Americans. In 1944, years before the Civil Rights movement in the States, Roberta Schenck, a Native woman, refused to budge from her seat in the “Whites Only” section of a movie theater in Nome. She was dragged out and jailed. Schenck was Alaska’s Rosa Parks—before Rosa Parks. Because of her bravery and the moving testimony of Elizabeth Peratrovich, on February 16, 1945, territorial governor Ernest Gruening signed an antidiscrimination law. Against the argument that the law would not eliminate discrimination, Peratrovich said, “Do your laws against larceny and even murder eliminate those crimes?”

We decriminalized abortion before
Roe v. Wade
. Our privacy laws are the strongest in the country. A man told me he moved here after studying the Alaska Constitution at law school; it could have been Section 22, which allowed Alaskans the right to possess marijuana.

During World War II the Japanese occupied the Alaska islands of Kiska and Attu for almost two years. Because of the harsh conditions, frostbite became worthy of a Purple Heart. In 1958, the Inupiat village of Point Hope protested Project Chariot, a proposal to create an artificial port on the North Slope by detonating nuclear devices there. As a thank-you, the federal government transported the contamination from the 1962 Nevada Test Site to the Chariot location and buried it there. Cancer rates among villagers are staggering. Where’s Erin Brockovich when we need her? In 1988 Homer, Alaska, voted to officially become a “Nuclear-Free Zone” in response to proposed nuclear subs. That same town—my hometown—twenty years later had the only known “spontaneous” Obama headquarters in the country.

It’s wrong to be hard on anyone for not knowing that Alaskans aren’t all Palinbots. After such a close Senate race, it would be fair to wonder if we suffer from Reality Deficit Disorder. Yet it’s easy to want to knock sense into folks who have ignored our history; rich with strength, true with characters and patriotism that deserve to be called American.

Not to play the blame game, but in the spirit of transparency you only get in therapy, the colonization of the forty-ninth state by Global Enterprise has gone largely unnoticed. We could use some help fighting to ensure that the fragile wild salmon runs of Bristol Bay stay pristine against the looming threat of Pebble Mine. Your aid would be appreciated in keeping our wolves and bears safe from aerial “hunting.” And were your voices lifted with ours in a message to Exxon, maybe our fishermen would have been able to maintain their industry despite an unprecedented environmental catastrophe, still wreaking havoc twenty years later.

Alaska will eventually recover from the damage of the Palin phenomenon. Will America take a lesson from us? I can only hope.