Palin: Here comes the report
Posted: Friday, October 10, 2008 9:17 AM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
Sarah Palin
As mentioned above, an Alaska legislative committee today will convene to consider a report on Troopergate, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie reports. The committee has nine Republicans and five Democrats, and it takes a majority (eight votes) to publish the report. And if it’s made public, independent investigator Stephen Branchflower, will likely present the report and take questions from lawmakers. The committee doesn’t have the power to censure Palin over this; such a reprimand would have to come from the full legislature.
In advance of today’s committee meeting, the McCain campaign released this analysis: “Beginning in October 2007, Gov. Sarah Palin and members of her administration repeatedly clashed with Department of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, a member of her cabinet, over budgetary issues and department direction. On July 11, 2008, after multiple efforts to reach a consensus had failed, Governor Palin offered Mr. Monegan a new position as head of the Alaska Alcohol Control Board. Mr. Monegan declined the offer and was dismissed as a result.”
Yet today’s New York Times reports that that reasons for Monegan’s dismissal have evolved over time. “Initially the governor said through a spokeswoman that the dismissal had nothing to do with a ‘personality conflict.’ Since then, her explanations have evolved, from saying that he was lagging on filling trooper vacancies and tackling alcohol-abuse problems in rural Alaska to showing an ‘intolerable pattern of insubordination’ and a ‘rogue mentality’ by resisting her authority and spending reforms, sometimes publicly.”
Also from the story: “Ms. Palin has denied that anyone told Mr. Monegan to dismiss Trooper Wooten, or that the commissioner’s ouster had anything to do with him. But an examination of the case, based on interviews with Mr. Monegan and several top aides, indicates that, to a far greater degree than was previously known, the governor, her husband and her administration pressed the commissioner and his staff to get Trooper Wooten off the force, though without directly ordering it. In all, the commissioner and his aides were contacted about Trooper Wooten three dozen times over 19 months by the governor, her husband and seven administration officials, interviews and documents show.”
More on the McCain’s prebuttal to the Troopergate report. "In an effort to head off the report, McCain campaign spokesman Taylor Griffin released the campaign's own version of events. That report, which Griffin said was written by campaign staffers, says the Legislature has taken a legitimate policy dispute between a governor and one of her commissioners, and portrayed it as something inappropriate. ‘The following document will prove Walt Monegan's dismissal was a result of his insubordination and budgetary clashes with Governor Palin and her administration,’ campaign officials wrote. "Trooper Wooten is a separate issue."
“Monegan had not seen the closely held report Thursday night and said he did not know what to expect. ‘I just hope that the truth is figured out,’ Monegan said in a telephone interview Thursday. ‘That the governor did want me to fire him, and I chose to not. You just can't walk up to someone and say, “I fire you.” He didn't do anything under my watch to result in termination.’”
David Brooks used Palin to describe the GOP’s current anti-intellectual/elite bent. “Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the ‘normal Joe Sixpack American’ and the coastal elite. She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.”
“And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away. "
The Alaska governor, whom McCain cited as probably knowing more about energy than anyone in this country, "seemed to have problems Thursday explaining whether the government bans oil exports -- especially from her state's North Slope fields…. No Alaska oil has been exported since 2004, and little if any since 2000, according to the Energy Information Administration and the Congressional Research Service. And Congress has never imposed outright bans on oil exports. Congress prohibited exports of Alaska oil in 1973 when the Alaska oil pipeline was built. But that ban was lifted in 1996 when there were large volumes of Alaska oil coming down from the North Slope and U.S. demand was soft. The Alaska ban has never been reinstated."
The Washington Post delves into Palin's calendar as governor for the last two years, and it finds that this last 12 months, she was a lot busier boosting her own PR than in the first 12 months. "During her first months in office, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin kept a relatively light schedule on her workdays in Juneau, making ceremonial appearances at sports events and funerals, meeting with state lawmakers, and conducting interviews with Alaska magazines, radio stations and newspapers.”
“But this spring, Palin's official calendar chronicles an extraordinary rise to national prominence. A fresh face in Republican politics, she was discovered by the national news media at least in part because of a determined effort by a state agency to position her as an oil and gas expert who could tout Alaska's determined effort to construct a natural gas pipeline. An outside public relations expert hired under a $31,000 contract with the state Department of Natural Resources pitched the ‘upstart governor’ as a crusader against Big Oil, a story line that Palin has adopted in her campaign as Sen. John McCain's running mate. The contract was the only time the Palin administration hired an outside consultant to set up media interviews, a function performed in many states by government employees."
