OPINION: It has been almost a week since Sarah Palin rocked the news cycle by announcing her intention to quit her job as Governor of Alaska. Since then, pundits from Karl Rove on the right to Mark Shields on the left have offered diverse answers to the two questions that every Alaskan has been asking every other Alaskan: Is Sarah Palin really the Whack Job that Tina Fey made her out to be? If she's not, then What Could the Woman Have been Thinking?
Here is what Sarah had to say last Friday at the news conference she held on her lawn in Wasilla about her decision to be the first sitting governor in United States history to walk away. The incoherence is worth the length of the quote:
As I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks . . . And then I thought, "That's what's wrong." Many just accept that lame duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck, and milk it.
I'm not putting Alaska through that. I promised efficiencies and effectiveness. That's not how I'm wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old politics as usual. I promised that four years ago - and I meant it. It's not what's best for Alaska.
I am determined to take the right path for Alaska even though it is unconventional and not so comfortable. With this announcement that I am not seeking reelection . . . I've determined it's best to transfer the authority of governor to Lieutenant Governor Parnell. And I am willing to do so so that this administration - with its positive agenda, its accomplishments, and its successful road to an incredible future - can continue without interruption and with great administrative and legislative success.
My choice is to take a stand and effect change. Not hit our heads against the wall and watch valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars, go down the drain in this new environment. Rather, we know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time, on another scale, and actually make a difference for our priorities. And so we will. For Alaskans and for Americans.
No wonder the pundits are confused.
After watching Sarah think for the past three years, my view it is that her big decision to quit was the logical result of several smaller decisions. Like a Slinky flopping methodically down a flight of stairs, each of those decisions flowed one after the other from Sarah's realization at the conclusion of the 2008 presidential campaign that she had transcended politics. That thanks to media like People Magazine and the National Enquirer, she now is playing way above the rim with cultural icons like Paris Hilton and the recently deceased Michael Jackson, rather than below it with common vote-grubbing politicians like Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.
After watching the Friday news conference, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said that he thought Sarah "seemed more like a spoiled celebrity than a serious public official."
What Gerson got wrong is that Sarah is a spoiled celebrity. But it's not entirely her fault that she's spoiled. Because the media attention that has swirled around Alaska's governor-girl for the past ten months has altered the brain chemistry of a narcissistic personality that somewhere way back along the line was damaged decades previous.
An Australian friend of mine has theorized that Sarah's odd behavior suggests that she has been afflicted since childhood with Reactive Attachment Disorder, a rare psychological condition that is described in volume four of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders. Many of the symptoms do seem to fit: superficially engaging and charming, lacks cause and effect thinking, inappropriately demanding, engages in lying, lacks a conscience, has poor impulse control, has abnormal speech patterns, etc. But I am not a psychiatrist. So I don't know if that's Sarah's problem.
What I do know is that in 2002 when she began her statewide political career, Sarah Palin already was a legend in her own mind whose it's-all-about-me sense of entitlement already was pathological.
One morning early in the winter of 2001-2002 I bumped into a woman named Judy Patrick at Sagaya City Market, Anchorage's version of Whole Foods where the (mostly white) neighborhood locals (many with graduate degrees) drink coffee with each other and read The New York Times. Judy, a wonderful woman who I had met on an airplane several months earlier when we both were flying to Washington, D.C., was reading a book. When I asked what she was reading, Judy said that it was a book about how to run a political campaign that she had checked out of the library because her best girlfriend was going to run in the Republican primary election for Lieutenant Governor. When I asked who that was, Judy said her girlfriend was Sarah Palin, the mayor of Wasilla. I had been active in Alaska politics for 25 years. But until Judy Patrick said her name, I had never heard of Sarah Palin.
Because she was a political unknown who had no statewide name recognition, during the 2002 Republican primary election Lieutenant Governor candidate Palin was able to raise only $50,000, as compared to the $250,000 that Loren Leman, a state senator from Anchorage who was favored to win, raised.
Since four years later she would be elected Governor by campaigning as the anti-corruption candidate, it is noteworthy that when she began her campaign for Lieutenant Governor the first people candidate Palin put out her hand to for money were Bill Allen and other executives of VECO, the oil field services company that for more than 20 years had been the oil industry's bagman conduit to the Alaska Legislature. In 2007 Bill Allen would confess to having bribed numerous members of the Legislature, after which he would start a second career as a government snitch by testifying, first against the legislators he bribed, and then against his purported longtime friend, former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. Sarah knew who she was dealing with. But in December 2001 she had no problem kicking off her political career by depositing eight VECO checks totaling $4,000 in her campaign bank account.
Having little money for TV and radio commercials, candidate Palin spent the spring and summer of 2002 mostly driving around on the south-central Alaska road system campaigning at each stop along the road one-on-one and before small groups. In August her world-class talent as a campaigner enabled Sarah to startle the professionals by losing the primary election to Loren Leman by less than 2,000 votes and defeating Gail Phillips, a former speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives who was a popular figure in conservative Republican political circles, by more than 5,000 votes.
Seeing Sarah as a new, young and attractive, if still raw, political talent, Randy Ruedrich, the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party, suggested to Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski, who had won the Republican gubernatorial nomination, that he ask Sarah to team up with Alaska Senator Ted Stevens to campaign during the general election for Frank.
By all accounts Sarah did a journeyman job of that, which meant that in November when Frank was elected Governor she was entitled to a patronage position in the Murkowski administration. But what Sarah thought she was entitled to was not a job, but Frank Murkowski's seat in the United States Senate.
In December 2002 when Frank was sworn into office, Alaska's election law allowed Governor Murkowski to appoint Senator Murkowski's replacement. Sarah had enough juice to get on the long list of Republicans Frank interviewed. During her interview she came off as vapid and uninformed. But that's not how Sarah saw it. Several weeks later Frank astounded Alaskans by giving his Senate seat to his daughter, Lisa, who had never been publicly mentioned as a candidate for the seat and who had not been interviewed. Sarah, a 38-year-old former small town mayor who had never won a statewide election, reportedly was livid and reportedly never fully forgave Frank, because in her self-absorption she was certain that she should have been the obvious choice.
Which brings me to why Sarah decided, as the conventional political wisdom in Alaska had been predicting for months, that she would not stand for reelection as Governor of Alaska in 2010.
When Greta Van Susteren asked Sarah less than a week after the 2008 election whether she would be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, Sarah answered: "If there is an open door in 2012 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."
When Sarah voiced that ambition the advice she received from Republican Party professionals was that the way for her to preposition herself to plow through the door if it opened was to return to Alaska, stuff her celebrity in a sack, and establish the track record she doesn't have as a competent and effective Governor. And when he was asked to handicap her chances, Ed Rollins, who is as seasoned a Republican political operative as seasoning gets, predicted that for 2012 Sarah's "not starting at the top but starting at the bottom." Rollins also said that before Sarah could be taken seriously as a top tier presidential candidate she would have to spend years campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire.
And there's the disconnect.
Any and everyone in Alaska who has watched her handle herself knows that this winter Sarah is not going to start spending her spare time driving for months on end without a media entourage from small town to small town in Iowa and New Hampshire attending coffee klatches and Rotary Club lunches.
I know that's not going to happen. And Sarah knows that's not going to happen. So let me say it for her: Sarah Palin will not be a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
What during the run-up to the 2012 presidential election Sarah will be is a Republican celebrity the way that Bill Clinton is a Democratic celebrity. Giving speeches in convention halls packed with true-believing party faithful and being fawned over by the network paparazzi will be a whole lot more fun, and way more profitable, than being a candidate. And it certainly will be more fun and way more profitable than being the Governor of a backwater state that is an hour's drive from Wasilla to the Anchorage airport and then three-plus more hours of flight time from anywhere important.
Once Sarah made the easy decision that she would not run for reelection in 2010 so that during the two years prior to the 2012 presidential election she can be a full-time celebrity, the decision to become one immediately, rather than waiting another year and a half for her term as Governor to expire, was a no-brainer.
First, because Sarah Palin's celebrity no longer is dependent on her status as Governor. And second, because from the moment she was sworn into office Sarah has demonstrated over and over and over and over again that she has no idea what she's doing. And when she's in over her head, Sarah's instinct is to find a face-saving way to make her way to the nearest door marked "Exit."
When he became governor in December 2002 Frank Murkowski was not prepared to reward Sarah for her service during his campaign by making her a United States Senator. But if Sarah is to be believed, and I think she should be, Frank was prepared to bring her into his cabinet as Commissioner of Commerce, Community & Economic Development.
However, until Governor Palin shredded the rule by refusing to move there herself, every Governor has required the members of his cabinet to live in Juneau, the state capitol six hundred air miles south of Anchorage. Frank Murkowski was no exception. And Sarah refused to leave Wasilla.
So Frank found Sarah a state job to which she could commute from home.
In 1978 the Alaska Legislature had created a three-member Oil and Gas Conservation Commission whose duties include fixing the gas-oil/water-oil ratios that well operators must maintain, monitoring oil and gas pool pressures, and regulating the drilling, plugging, and spacing of wells, the disposal of salt water and oil field wastes, and the quantity and rate of production of oil and gas from particular wells.
If by education and work experience Sarah was not qualified to run a bureaucracy like the Department of Commerce, Community & Economic Development, she was completely unqualified to regulate the oil and gas industry. But while the statute that created the Commission required one member of the Commission to be a petroleum engineer and one member to be a petroleum geologist, in 2003 the statute authorized the third member of the Commission to be unqualified. So in February 2003 when Governor Murkowski appointed Randy Ruedrich, the chair of the Alaska Republican Party who was a petroleum engineer by trade, to the petroleum engineer's seat on the Commission, he appointed Sarah to the third seat.
Appointments to seats on the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission are subject to confirmation by the Alaska Legislature.
When she was asked at her first confirmation hearing by the chairman of the Senate Resources Committee to explain why she wanted the job and "what you bring to the mix," Sarah answered that because Alaska needed a healthy oil and gas industry she was "absolutely motivated, excited, and challenged to be able to serve in this capacity."
That non sequitur non-response to the question engendered a long and uncomfortable silence in the hearing room; after which another Senator asked:
There are a lot of really smart people that work in the industry that have a lot of technical expertise. You're going to be asked to make rulings on things of a very technical nature. I don't see where you've had any background in oil and gas development and some of these technical issues. I realize that's not a requirement for this job because you're the public member. But how are you going to keep people from blowing a bunch of smoke up your skirts?
Cheerfully ignoring the sexist framing of the question, Sarah's answer to that heart-of-the-matter query was to note that "thankfully we have a technical staff here at the Commission" and that she had "confidence that they do with their technical knowledge give objective and fair advice to the Commissioners." "But you're right, I don't have all the technical background." (Five years later John McCain would tout Sarah Palin's qualifications as an oil and gas expert as one of the principal reasons he had selected her as his running mate.)
In 2006 the Alaska Legislature would amend the statute to require the "public member" of the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to "have training or expertise that gives the person a fundamental understanding of the oil and gas industry in the state." While Sarah Palin did not have that qualification, in 2003 she didn't have to. As a consequence, that March the Legislature confirmed her appointment as a Commissioner by a vote of 51 to 3.
Within weeks of her arrival at the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Sarah knew she was drowning. That she had no understanding of, and no interest in, the Commission's highly technical work. And not only that, but, like every state employee, she was expected to be at work five mornings a week. To get to the Commission's office in Anchorage required an hour commute from Wasilla that during the winter she had to make by driving in the pitch dark down an icy, moose-strewn highway.
So according to people who knew her at the time, soon after she arrived at the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Sarah began searching for a face-saving excuse to quit a job she never should have been given.
The excuse she found was Randy Ruedrich.
When the Alaska Legislature considered Ruedrich's appointment to the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission during the same joint session at which it confirmed Sarah's appointment to the Commission, Ethan Berkowitz, the Democratic Minority Leader of the Alaska House of Representatives, urged the Legislature to reject Ruedrich's appointment on the ethically obvious ground that it was a conflict of interest for the chairman of a political party to regulate an industry that employed individuals from whom the chairman would be soliciting campaign contributions. Representative Berkowitz argued:
It's just wrong to confirm a sitting chair of a political party to a quasi-judicial body. There is a conflict of interest that's built in. I urge the members to reject this nomination at this time. I don't know how you can take proprietary information from oil and gas companies, many of whom are the largest political donors in the state, at the same time you're serving as a political party chairperson. The conflicts of interest are inherent, they are omnipresent. Mr. Ruedrich has a choice. He can either be on the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission or he can be chair of the Republican Party. He can't be both.
When the debate ended, on a party-line vote all 36 Republicans voted to confirm Randy Ruedrich and all 18 Democrats voted to reject the appointment.
For several months thereafter Oil and Gas Conservation Commissioner Palin, who also served as the Commission's ethics officer, had no ethical problem with Randy Ruedrich serving as a Commissioner. But then she suddenly had a huge, and very public, problem when the news leaked that during his workday Ruedrich had been using his office computer to conduct Alaska Republican Party business.
The year previous when she had been a candidate in the Republican primary election for the party's nomination for Lieutenant Governor, Sarah not only had used her computer in the Wasilla mayor's office for campaign purposes, she had used it to communicate about the progress of her campaign with Randy Ruedrich. But now she not only expressed outrage about Ruedrich's ethical lapse, she had the brazen temerity to file an ethics complaint against him. And then in a public fit of professed pique, in January 2004 she quit the Commission because, since the Attorney General's investigation of Ruedrich's violation of the Alaska Ethics Act was ongoing, she was precluded from publicly discussing what she knew about it. As Sarah went out of her way to tell the Anchorage Daily News, the state's largest newspaper: "I'm forced to withhold information from Alaskans, and that goes against what I believe in as a public servant."
Sarah's self-serving seizure of the ethical high ground made her reputation with socially conservative, mostly white, rank-and-file Republican voters. Two years later when she challenged Frank Murkowski in the 2006 Alaska Republican gubernatorial primary election, her reputation for having fearlessly fought "good old boy political corruption" in the guise of the chairman of her own party was a principal reason she was able to defeat Frank, who by then was the most reviled Governor in Alaska history, by an astonishing 32,000 votes.
What does that well-known story of Sarah Palin's rise from small town mayor to Governor have to do with her decision to quit the job that less than three years ago she double-crossed her patrons Randy Ruedrich and Frank Murkowski to win?
It's the same pattern.
As Lyda Green and Gary Stevens, the past and present Republican presidents of the Alaska Senate will tell you, Lyda publicly, Gary more privately, Sarah Palin's tenure as Governor of Alaska has been a disaster. And a majority of the other members of the Alaska Legislature, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, alike, will tell you that Sarah has next to no interest in public policy and knows next to nothing about the nuts and bolts of governing. And what's worse, she has no interest in learning.
Sarah Palin is a smart woman. So she knows that she is no more qualified to be Governor of Alaska than she was qualified to serve on the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. So even if she still needed the governorship, which she doesn't, my bet is that, as she did when she was a member of the Commission, she would be looking for a way out.
For Commissioner Palin, the way out was to use her professed abhorrence of Randy Ruedrich's ethical transgression as her excuse to leave a job she couldn't handle. For Governor Palin, the way out is to use her professed abhorrence of the public's purported misuse of the Alaska Ethics Act as her excuse to leave a job she can't handle.
In the interest of full disclosure, I represent Andree McLeod, a citizen-activist who, to hear Sarah tell it, has been one of Governor Palin's principal tormentors, in two lawsuits. The first concerns Sarah and her senior staff's intentional use of their private email accounts to conduct state business. The second concerns the question of whether the Governor's Office waived the "deliberative process privilege" in the Alaska Public Records Act when Sarah decided to share confidential emails with her husband, Todd Palin, knowing when she did so that Todd, who works for British Petroleum, is not a state employee.
During her news conference last Friday, Sarah called the ethics complaints that Andree McLeod and other Alaskans have filed against her over the past year "silly accusations" and she then bragged that "every one - all 15 (actually 18) of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We've won!"
But neither of those assertions is true.
Some of the complaints were frivolous. But many others were not, including the complaint that a senior member of her staff unlawfully manipulated the state civil service system to obtain a job for a Palin campaign supporter, the complaint that Sarah used state money to transport her children to events they had no official reason to be at, the complaint that two members of her staff spent time during their work day in the Governor's Office attending to Sarah's political interests, the complaint that Sarah has been unlawfully collecting per diem for living at home in Wasilla using the ruse that she lives in the Governor's Mansion in Juneau when everyone - including all of Juneau - knows that she never really has, and, most importantly, the ethics complaint that Sarah filed last September against herself as part of the Troopergate scandal in order to have the Attorney General investigate whether she had ordered Walt Monegan, her Commissioner of Public Safety, to fire her former brother-in-law from his job as a state trooper.
Because Alaska's Attorney General serves at the Alaska Governor's pleasure, Talis Colberg, a friend of Sarah's from the Matanuska-Susitna Valley who was Attorney General at the time, hired an Anchorage attorney and former prosecutor named Tim Petumenos to conduct the investigation of Sarah Palin that Sarah Palin had asked be made. In the report on his investigation that he issued the day before the 2008 presidential election, Tim gave Sarah a benefit-of-the-doubt pass on the allegations of misconduct. Sarah then triumphantly claimed that she had been vindicated, while a lot of other people dismissed the Petumenos report as a politically motivated whitewash.
What got lost in all that hullabaloo is that when Tim Petumenos interviewed Sarah and Walt under oath they told flatly contradictory stories. Walt testified that Sarah had a conversation with him in Juneau during which, until he curtly told her that her doing so was legally inappropriate, she tried to raise the subject of firing Wooten. In his report, Tim stated that "Governor Palin denies that this conversation took place" and had "testified under oath that this is not a failure of recollection on her part since the nature of the conversation as described is such that she would have remembered having had it."
In other words, either Walt Monegan, Alaska's former chief law enforcement officer, committed perjury. Or Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska, committed perjury.
Article II, Section 20, of the Alaska Constitution provides that "all civil officers of the State are subject to impeachment by the legislature" and that "impeachment shall originate in the senate."
In 1985 when it came to public attention that Alaska Governor Bill Sheffield may have committed an impeachable offense, the Alaska Senate initiated an investigation at the conclusion of which it concluded that Governor Sheffield had not done so. But the Alaska Senate did its constitutional duty by initiating an investigation.
As Bill Clinton educated the nation, perjury is an impeachable offense. But the Alaska Senate has not initiated an investigation to determine whether Sarah Palin committed perjury, even though more than eight months ago Tim Petumenos publicly reported that she may have done so.
Last March I had a conversation about that with Alaska State Senator Hollis French, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the conclusion of that conversation Hollis begrudgingly admitted that the Alaska Senate had a constitutional duty to investigate whether Sarah should be impeached. But neither he nor any other member of the Alaska Senate has taken any action in that regard. In March when he and I chatted, it was well-known in Alaska political circles that Hollis, a Democrat, intends to run for Governor in 2010. And it was assumed that the job he wants would be open because Sarah would not seek a second term. So Hollis had - and today continues to have - no reason to provoke the ire of the thousands of Palinistas who will be voting for someone other than Sarah for Governor next year.
Whether allowing personal political ambition to trump constitutional duty explains Senator French's refusal to urge the Alaska Senate to initiate an impeachment investigation only Hollis knows. But I can guarantee that if Sarah had decided to stay for her full term the perjury issue would have circled back on her.
In any event, she can spin it however she wants. But Sarah Palin is not quitting because Andree McLeod and other Alaskans have hounded her out of office by filing ethics complaints. The closest Sarah's come to admitting her true motivation happened on Monday when, while holding court on the beach at her husband Todd's fishing site in Dillingham, she told the national press corps that "when all these lawmakers are lining up for office their desire would be to clobber the administration left and right so that they can position themselves for office" and that "I'm not going to let Alaskans go through a year of stymied, paralyzed administration and not getting anything done."
Translated from Palinese, what Sarah said was that the real reason she is quitting is that she understands that she's lost control of the Alaska Legislature, a majority of whose members are fellow Republicans, many of whom hate her guts.
In April it was Republican votes that caused Sarah to suffer the public humiliation of being the first Governor in Alaska history to have a cabinet appointment rejected when the Alaska Legislature rejected Wayne Ross, an affable gun-nut who Sarah hung out to dry politically, as Sarah's choice to succeed Talis Colberg as Attorney general. And this January it would have been Republican votes that would have overridden Sarah's veto of the State of Alaska's acceptance of a big hunk of federal stimulus money.
Given all that, and given that in 2010 the TransCanada Alaska Company's solicitation - called an "open season" - of bids to transport natural gas from the North Slope through the pipeline that when her political capital still was high Sarah several years ago bamboozled the Alaska Legislature into giving TransCanada 500 million public dollars to build will be an abject failure, it is no wonder that Sarah decided that there was no reason to wait until the end of her first term before devoting herself full-time to promoting her celebrity and to raking in the multi-millions of dollars to which celebrities of Sarah Palin's rank are entitled.
The real surprise about Sarah's resignation announcement last Friday is that it took her more than ten months from her (and Bristol, Willow, and damaged Baby Trig's) first appearance on the cover of People Magazine to make it.
So thanks Sarah. We've all had a terrific time.
Sayonara governor-girl.
Donald Craig Mitchell is an attorney in Anchorage, Alaska. Mitchell is the author of Sold American: The Story of Alaska Natives and Their Land and Take My Land Take My Life: The Story of Congress's Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, which in 2006 the Alaska Historical Society recognized as two of the most important books ever written about the history of Alaska.