Governance, Palin-Style
According to an LA Times investigation, she seems to have conducted business in Alaska in the best traditions of the Bush administration:
* More than 100 appointments to state posts — nearly 1 in 4 — went to campaign contributors or their relatives, sometimes without apparent regard to qualifications.
* Palin filled 16 state offices with appointees from families that donated $2,000 to $5,600 and were among her top political patrons.
* Several of Palin’s leading campaign donors received state-subsidized industrial development loans of up to $3.6 million for business ventures of questionable public value.
* Palin picked a donor to replace the public safety commissioner she fired. But the new top cop had to resign days later under an ethics cloud. And Palin drew a formal ethics complaint still pending against her and several aides for allegedly helping another donor and fundraiser land a state job.
Of course despite this she’s been super-popular in Alaska. That’s common in small states but also, I think, reflects the unique nature of Alaska politics. Basically, it’s this kind of nice conservative fantasyland where public ownership of valuable natural resources (but don’t call it socialism) combined with huge net transfers from the federal government (but don’t call it socialism) and a small population, combine to create a where somehow everything can go smoothly without such inconveniences as taxes or competent administration of government. You can indulge in all kinds of wingnutty goodness and not suffer the consequences that would follow from trying this stuff in a more normal place.
34 Responses to “Governance, Palin-Style”
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October 24th, 2008 at 10:29 am
1) The USS Titanic is getting kinda sluggish at the bow and yet Matthew is still strolling around on the deck in his tux, grabbing free drinks and distracting the passengers with political snark. He must think he has a lifeboat reservation.
2) I think he will discover he is wrong. Along with the giddy Democratic leadership, who are happy to inherit a pile of ashes just so long as they are in charge.
3) The Social Democrats in Weimar thought that. Ten years later ,they were staring at the barbed wire.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Yeah, she can actually see crony capitalism from Alaska. Oh, wait, that’s not Russia, it’s the state.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Good point. I live in Austin, TX, (that socialist outpost deep in the heart of the red states) which, despite only being the 4th largest city in Texas, has a population larger than that of all Alaska.
Our mayor, Will Wynn, has a great name for running in election campaigns, but I doubt his experience of running a city the same size as Alaska has given him much on an inside track to the presidency.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:30 am
I told you so two years ago. You still aren’t listening.
http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2006/12/the_sweet_sweet_fed/index.php#039025
October 24th, 2008 at 10:33 am
How about the underreported “Dairy-gate”?
Matanuska Maid scandal
In short:
Gov. Palin engineers giveaway of dairy business at taxpayers’ expense.
- fires oversight board and hires friends/relatives
- runs dairy company further into the ground racking up huge losses
- awards company assets in no-bid fashion to friend/political backer’s shell company
- supplements crony’s new private company with Ted Stevens earmark
October 24th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Palin is sort of a combination of Huey Long and Eva Peron.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Don’t forget ‘doing business through off-books email accounts’.
Sheikh Sarah of Saudi Alaska. Seriously. It even has the migrant workers in the oil and fishing industries.
A semi-autonomous petrostate is going end up being run like Norway or like Saudi Arabia, and I don’t see it ending up like Norway. Makes you wonder about the whole statehood deal.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Her popularity rating in Alaska has been slipping – http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/favorables/governors_approval_ratings
She’s still in the top ten, but no longer holding onto that coveted “Most popular governor” spot that the McCain campaign keeps repeating.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:07 am
I’m curious, why does a state where the average income(?) is higher than the US get federal subsidies? I thought the idea was for the feds to subsidize poorer states?
October 24th, 2008 at 11:17 am
To be fair, there doesn’t appear to be anything particularly wingnutty abuot what she did as governor. It’s just good old-fashioned cronyism.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Palin is kind of like Hugo Chavez with lipstick.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:49 am
I have to laugh out loud every time I hear McCain say accusingly about Obama, “He wants to spread the wealth,” as if that’s a bad thing.
Someone should point out that spreading the wealth is exactly what Sarah has done in Alaska by raising taxes on oil companies to give a portion of their profits to every citizen.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:50 am
More than 100 appointments to state posts — nearly 1 in 4 — went to campaign contributors or their relatives
I’m just curious if Matthew is going to do a post looking at how many of Obama’s appointments to federal posts have (or have relatives who have) donated to Obama’s campaign. I’ll bet the ratio is more than 1 in 4.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
McCain & Palin have been touting the fact that she is responsible for overseeing 25,000 employees of the state of Alaska. Isn’t that a high percentage of the total population working for the state?
October 24th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Re: good old-fashioned cronyism
During an election campaign, are politically active potential appointees supposed to sit on their wallets? If they feel like donating money, they will give to the candidate who is most likely to give them a job — not because of a quid pro quo, but because their views coincide.
You can’t tell cronyism simply by comparing appointee lists with campaign donors, is what I’m saying.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
You can’t tell cronyism simply by comparing appointee lists with campaign donors, is what I’m saying.
This is a weakness of the LA Times story. More interesting, documented elsewhere, is that she handed out positions to old friends from high school to fill posts they were unqualified for. I think that for many political reporters “jobs for donations” is an easy story to tell, so they just ran with that, not realizing that correlation is not causation. Palin is corrupt, she did handout jobs to cronies, those cronies are unqualified, but her reasons for doing so and her connections to them are not due to campaign money.
January 25th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Ciekawy blog, dodalem go do ulubionych, bede tu napewno wpadal czesciej
February 18th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
There’s this hairstyle website that’s claiming Sarah Palin visited their site yesterday. What is this world coming to? Did anyone see her daughter Bristol on Greta on Fox News last night?
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