Between and , Mitch McConnell might have controlled the official levers of GOP politics in Washington, but no Republican occupied the public consciousness more than Sarah Palin. The country might have had its first Black president in office, grappling with seismic economic distress, but Palin was the entertainer in chief. Her face was splattered on magazines, on cable and broadcast news, on Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, on Oprah and CBN, on Facebook and Twitter, on weirdo fan blogs and international news sites alike.
She was inescapable. National Review launched a blog dedicated solely to observing Palin. As the Tea Party movement forced its way into the national conversation, she emerged as its de facto standard-bearer.
Political pundits were at once confounded and bewitched. Any of this sound familiar? Her arrival in politics came just as the legacy news media was succumbing to its current social media addiction, but Palin held attentional singularity, commanding clicks and TV ratings alike.
Fox even sidelined one of its own reporters after she delivered a tiny morsel of Palin criticism on air. Palin leaned into the media chaos with a smile and not an ounce of restraint, giving her limitless political abilities. Her appearances at conservative conventions and Tea Party rallies, often while wearing jewelry festooned with American flags, were aired in full on cable news, with reporters assigned to follow her every move. Her ability to raise small-dollar donations from grassroots conservatives was unparalleled.
When Palin started picking favorites in GOP primaries during the midterms, she instantly became the most coveted endorsement of the election cycle. A few weeks later she was the Republican nominee. Her flirtation with running for the Republican nomination—never ruling out a bid and allowing supporters to build an operation for her in Iowa—kept her in the headlines.
While dancing around a bid of her own, Palin threw carefree darts at declared candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Local TV news choppers chased the bus driving up Interstate 76 to air live coverage.
ABC News, clearly interested in service journalism, added a helpful interactive map of the Palin bus tour to its website. But some two months later, Palin was back at it, drawing a horde of press during her visit to the Iowa State Fair. Media attention drifted from Palin to the presidential race—and to wackier Tea Party characters like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and the birther kingpin himself, Donald Trump.
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More Stories. Financial trusts and secrecy in a U. Show more. Get Our Newsletter Subscribe. Oil taxes supply almost 90 percent of the general revenue, so oil is the central arena of state politics. The industry is forever trying to coax lower taxes, lighter regulation, and greater public investment by promising jobs and riches—or, on occasion, threatening to withdraw them.
They lost in every venue, including, finally, the U. Supreme Court. But the real battle was fought in the statehouse. The strategy paid off. In , the oil companies, through their allies in the legislature, launched a coup, ousting the speaker of the house and key committee chairmen.
Then they revoked the corporate income tax. For the next 25 years, oil interests ruled the state almost uninterruptedly. Little known and heavily outspent, she beat expectations, losing only narrowly and showing an exceptional ability to win fervent support. Afterward, she campaigned for Frank Murkowski, the four-term Alaska senator come home to run for governor.
Palin traveled the state speaking about Murkowski, and making herself better known. When he won, she was short-listed to serve the remainder of his Senate term, and even interviewed for the job. But it went to his daughter Lisa instead. Palin acidly recounts the patronizing interview with the new governor in her memoir, Going Rogue.
Palin got the low-profile chairmanship of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a regulatory body charged with ensuring that these resources are developed in the public interest. The industry controlled the state, and especially the Republican Party. Other than a modest adjustment to oil taxes that squeezed through in after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the hammerlock held.
Alaskans were coming to regard this situation with suspicion and anxiety. For this reason, building a gas pipeline has long been a political priority, and one the oil companies have balked at.
From her spot on the oil-and-gas commission, Palin touched off a storm over these anxieties. One glaring example of the unhealthy commingling of oil interests and Republican politics was her fellow commissioner and Murkowski appointee, Randy Ruedrich, who was also chairman of the state Republican Party.
Less than a year into the job, Ruedrich got crosswise with Palin for conducting party business from his office and, it was later revealed, giving information to a company that the commission oversaw.
So Palin laid out her concerns in a letter to the governor and the story leaked to the media. In the ensuing uproar, Palin became a hero and Murkowski was left no choice but to fire Ruedrich from the commission. Palin got strong support from an unlikely quarter: Democrats. It looked like real moral courage. Murkowski and Ruedrich still ran the party. Breaking with them made her no longer viable as an ordinary Republican or a recipient of oil-company largesse. To continue her rise, she needed to find another path.
Palin alone imagined that she could. In this and other ways, she displayed all the traits that would become famous: the intense personalization of politics, the hyper-aggressive score-settling—and the dramatic public gesture, which came next.
Palin was clearly the victor Ruedrich paid the largest civil fine in state history , but she quit the commission anyway. In Going Rogue , she says only that as a commissioner, she was subject to a gag order that Murkowski refused to lift. What it did was thrust her back into the spotlight and reinforce her public image. It also gave her a rationale to challenge Murkowski. Murkowski made up his mind to strike a deal with the major oil producers to finally build a gas pipeline from the North Slope.
He cut out the legislature and insisted on negotiating through his own team of experts, out of public sight. It was a breathtaking giveaway that ceded control of the pipeline to the oil companies and retained only a small stake for Alaskans; established a year regime of low taxes impossible to revoke; indemnified companies against any damages from accidents; and exempted everything from open-records laws.
In exchange, the state got an increase in the oil-production tax. In the end, the legislature rejected the gas-line deal. But, in a twist, it agreed to the oil tax—which had been intended as an inducement to pass the rest of the package. Palin came out hard on the other side of the philosophical divide from Murkowski—and made it personal. She announced she would challenge him for governor. And she declared her intention to hire Tom Irwin to negotiate the deal.
She knows how to pick her way down the political route that she feels will be the most beneficial to what she wants to do. Just after he signed the new Petroleum Profits Tax, the FBI raided the offices of six legislators, in what became the biggest corruption scandal in state history. During the legislative session, the FBI had hidden a video camera at the Baranof Hotel, in Juneau, in a suite that belonged to Bill Allen, a major power broker and the chief executive of Veco Corporation, an oil-services firm.
Several were later sent to prison. In the Republican primary, Palin crushed Murkowski, delivering one of the worst defeats ever suffered by an incumbent governor anywhere. She went on to have little trouble dispatching Knowles, an oil-friendly Democrat.
Maybe some others. But the five-letter word that people in Alaska associated with her name was clean. P alin has gained a reputation for being erratic, undisciplined, not up to the job. She began by confronting the two biggest issues in Alaska—the gas pipeline and the oil tax—and drove the policy process on both of them.
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