Who is Sarah Palin?

A little known Governor from Alaska was selected by John McCain as his Vice-Presidential candidate.  He had met her once two years before.  Who pushed her nomination is a mystery to be revealed in the future.  How he selected her and for what reasons is open to speculation.  Nobody is taking credit for the selection now and McCain graciously says he selected her.

The selection surprised many and shocked a few more.  She had not appeared on the 'radar' in the lower 48 States.  She was supposed to be a reformer and attractive to the Republican base who elected George Bush to two terms.  McCain has a few opinions that the base did not like and it was felt by the experts that you cannot win as a Republican without the base.

They may have hoped to woo a few Hillary Clinton primary voters to McCain too, but nobody knows if that entered into her selection.  Clinton supporters have not come to McCain because of her.

She comes from Wassila Alaska which has a population less than Saugeen Shores.  It is an odd town.  It is between Anchorage and Fairbanks and along that highway the Town appears to consist of shacks.  They are about the size of a modest tool shed.  The shacks are close together and are in various stages of disrepair. There are better parts of  Wassila, but that's what a visitor first sees. I guess ugly would be the right word for the Town.  Strip Malls would be a beautification project.

You cannot see Russia from Wassila as Governor Palin implied. In fact you can't see much.  As you will note from the Map above, you're a very long way from Russia  If you look at their town web site, they feature the train as it skirts around Wassila. 

They like Hockey in Alaska and Mrs. Palin calls herself a hockey mom because a son plays hockey. 

When she came to office  in Wassila, she hired a lobbyist and she said they needed a community centre and hockey arena for their at that time less than 7,000 population.  You see it's hard to pin down the population in Wassila for census people because of the transient nature of the area.  It's harder still to collect taxes.  Most of the shacks are not quite complete.  That avoids some tax.

Mrs. Palin floated a 14 million dollar long term debt to build the new hockey and sports complex.  So the Town went from no debt to big debt.  It was quite a stretch because the annual budget of the town was $20 million.  In the US they sometimes call a referendum to get town approval by the citizens for big projects.  They did that in this case and the referendum passed 306 to 286.  Not exactly a great turn out or an overwhelming win for cause.  The close nature and small turnout might have given her pause, but she marched forward.

The only trouble was that the land was not owned by the city .... but they started building anyway.  The original price was about $126,000 and the owner said he would have taken that, but did not like them starting to build before he had a deal.  There has been a lot of litigation and appeals and it appears that the owner wins the day and the $126,000 has grown to $1,3 million and nobody in Wassila is happy with the big debt, but they like the arena.  The land owner on TV stated that he likes the fact that the last court awarded him $1.3 plus court costs.  Maybe it will go to the Supreme Court and she'll have some influence over the next Justice.

Mrs. Palin moved on to win  favour with Alaska voters when she quit an energy board that she was appointed to because of corruption.  This act endeared her to voters and she challenged the then Governor and won.

(next column)

13/01/2009 04:24 PM

(continued)

In a very odd debate the then Governor stated that "I don't know what you're talking about....", when she asked a  disjointed question, but she seemed to charm the voters.

She has not endeared herself to some, however.  It seems that her husband attends a lot of meetings and the people in politics find the "First Dude's" presence as she calls him, strange.

He left his job on the North Slope for a while, but may have gone back to it, but now seems to be on stage with her at all times.  At a recent swing out west, he was seen to come up and whisper in her ear, when she mistook friends for foes in the audience.

Anyway, she made a great splash at the Republican National Convention with her beauty and charm and it looked like a bright future for her until she opened her mouth for the first time to answer unscripted questions.

People were surprised when she could not answer simple questions like:

 "What books and newspapers do you read?  Answer: "Anything that is put in front of me."

"What Supreme Court Decisions attract your interest?"  Answer:  "I'm sure in the long history of this great nation, there have been many decisions...." 

Trying to help her the interviewer led her into the controversial Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision.  Palin said that it was a States Rights issue.  The decision was based upon personal privacy and not states rights.  She seemed totally unaware of the Supreme Court.

Later she showed she did not know the role of the Vice-President relative to the congress. She thought that the VP led the President's political agenda in the Senate, which is far from the case. She must have skipped civics.

So she made a mess of that interview, but on the stump has done well with the base except when she gets off message and stumbles over well known facts.

She has begun to contradict McCain on some issues that she is not familiar with at present.  She seems to revert to base principles on every question posed to her, whether they apply or not.

There is not one McCain campaign, but two now with in-fighting becoming known to the media .... a sure sign of something wrong.

She has become the brunt of jokes about her style and her $150,000 buying spree at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue paid for by the Republican National Committee.  The Saturday Night Live skits have caught her perfectly and are amusing except they are too close for comfort.

One final mistake she made as governor was to interject herself and her husband in her sister's marriage breakup.  Her sister's ex-husband was a State Trooper and according to a bi-partisan commission that she set up, she did not break the law, but violated the states ethics rules by pressuring the State Police Commissioner to fire her ex-brother in law.  She fired the boss instead, which was her right.

All that would be politics as usual except her husband called the Police Commissioner 24 times about the issue, before his wife fired the boss.

When confronted with the embarrassing facts of the commissions findings, she said they were biased against her because of politics.  The bad side of that argument is that she picked them to handle the issue.

Now she is on the National Stage and doing well with the base.  She has not done well with the conservative movers and shakers as one after another comes out against her selection.  No matter what happens in the election, the genie is out of the bottle and there will be a big war in the Republican Party as Palin wants to go her own way in the future.

If McCain loses, then she will be at the forefront of the 'new Republican' Party.  Whether she stays there will be another question.

According to Saugeen Times Sources in Alaska, they are embarrassed in the north.