By ART CHANCE
Sarah Palin has been at war with all-things-Republican since the turn of the century beginning with attempts, mostly by proxy, to wrest control of the Republican Party away from then-party Chairman Randy Ruederich.
Palin made her move into state-level politics in 2002 with a second-place finish to Loren Leman in the Republican Primary for lieutenant governor. Frank Murkowski’s successful run for governor meant that his long-held U.S. Senate seat would be open; under the law in effect at the time he could appoint his successor.
At this stage of her career, Palin had a resume that would look fairly impressive for a Mat-Su Valley state House seat. She’d been on the Wasilla City Council and had been a two-term mayor of Wasilla, where she’d had a government about the size of a suburban real estate office, and for which she had a city manager to do all the detail work. She threw her hat in the ring for appointment to the U.S. Senate, and she did so vociferously. There were others who may have received some consideration, but the choice seemed to come back to Sarah Palin or businessman and former State Sen. John Binkley.
I think it is a fair assessment that the contrarian wing of Republican/conservative voters largely supported Palin and the Republican/conservative voters who had an inkling how government worked supported Binkley, though some did so reluctantly.
The new governor had two bad choices, so he made a worse one: He appointed his daughter, Lisa, whose resume was little if any more impressive than Sarah’s. His administration was doomed the day he did that. I know; I was there.
Gov. Murkowski tried to placate Palin with one of the best patronage jobs in state government under the governor’s direct appointment authority — a commissioner at the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, at the time the highest paid job in the Executive Branch that didn’t require some sort of professional credential. It actually paid more than the governor or any real commissioner was paid.
Sarah wasn’t placated. To make it worse, her old bête noir, Randy Ruedrich, was also appointed an AOGCC Commissioner, so they worked together. This didn’t end well. Her appointment went over so poorly that the Legislature passed legislation establishing qualifications for AOGCC commissioners, a bill known in the Capitol as “The No More Sarah Palins Law.” And the Legislature also took away the governor’s senatorial appointment authority. Now, when an Alaska U.S. senator resigns or dies in office, we elect rather than appoint the temporary placeholder.
AOGCC is administratively attached to the Department of Administration, where my Division of Labor Relations was located, so I spent a lot of my Monday in staff meetings with Palin. It’s fair to say that those of us who had real jobs and real responsibilities weren’t nearly as impressed with her as she was of herself.
It didn’t take long for the trouble to begin: Palin started complaining that Ruedrich was doing Republican Party business on state time. I’d had a couple of issues with Ruedrich about such things and Ruedrich was prone to pronounce the relevant state laws and rules as “stupid.” I wasn’t reticent to tell him that those laws were because of people like him. Ruedrich got a stern talking to or two and the kerfuffle seemed to have played out.
Some time later I was summoned to the commissioner’s office and into a meeting with our deputies and the governor’s special assistant assigned to Administration. The special assistant told us that Palin had written the governor with her complaints and said that she had brought them to the commissioner of Administration, who had done nothing. I don’t think the Governor’s Office believed it any more than we did, but we were told to “fix it.” One of the deputies and I adjourn to my office to try to figure out how to “fix it.”
For those of you who think you know about this from reading “Going Rogue,” almost nothing in Palin’s account is true. That said, I won’t call her a liar because I know her well enough to know that she believes whatever falls out of her mouth is true.
I suggested that we order her to Juneau for an investigatory interview. The deputy replied that she wouldn’t come to Juneau. I said, “Good. Order her to Juneau and if she won’t come, just fire her.” He said, “She’s Sarah Palin.” I said, “OK, we treat them like classified, unionized employees and do the whole due-process drill.”
I generated the notice memos to them; Ruedrich as the object of the investigation and Palin as a material witness. We set a meeting with each of them the following Monday in Anchorage. We instructed Ruedrich that he wasn’t to discuss the matter with anyone except as necessary to prepare his defense and, since she wasn’t accused of anything, we instructed Palin that she wasn’t to discuss it at all. Those memos were designed to raise the hairs on the necks of state employees, but I don’t think they had much effect on either of them.
The deputy showed up to meet with Palin, who acted surprised: “Oh, I should have called you; Randy and I had a good talk and worked it all out.”
There went a thousand bucks or so of the state’s money for a useless trip to Anchorage and we no longer had a complaint. So, maybe peace would descend on the land. It lasted a little while then the news exploded that Palin had resigned because we didn’t deal with her ethics complaints against Ruedrich. Palin immediately became the Anchorage Daily News‘ and every Democrat’s favorite Republican. Then the voters foolishly elected her governor.
Palin became the best governor the Democrats ever had since Bill Egan in the 1960s. In her two years as governor, the General Fund expenditures soared from $6.7 Billion to $9.3 Billion. She worked with the Democrats to get one of their fondest hopes of the oil era: a revenue scheme based on oil revenue rather than oil production. It’s known as ACES — Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share.
Those of us who had been around since the beginning understood that the state could never pay and supervise lawyers, accountants, and auditors who could go toe to toe with the oil companies, so we established a taxation and royalty scheme based on simply counting barrels of oil. Even so, we were in constant litigation with them. The complex ACES tax scheme put a lot of money in the State treasury but it has never been audited, and probably couldn’t be.
In the waning days of Murkowski’s term, his Administration negotiated a deal for a natural gas line with the producers. Malcontents in the Department of Natural Resources leaked the details to Pravda, excuse me, the Anchorage Daily News, before it could be announced and ADN/Democrat opposition killed the plan.
When she became governor, Palin sought out the malcontents from the Murkowski Administration and brought them into her Administration. The DNR malcontents, some with TransCanada ties, made a deal with TransCanada, which gave them a half-billion dollars of Alaska’s money for starting a gas line, and for which we have seen nothing. In the ensuing years nobody has shown any interest as to where the money went.
I was a front page writer on the Red State political blog back in 2008. The Red State management were big Palin propaganda fans. I said she’d never propose a budget cut and that her “Ethics Act” problems were of her own making. If you’re doing something privately, you go to the state’s ethics attorney, tell them what you want to do, and if the attorney clears it, the state defends you against ethics complaints. The only logical reason for Palin not going to the ethics attorney is she didn’t want to tell the Department of Law what she was doing. That got me banned from Red State; people who really like Palin really like her and facts and reason have no impact on them. Palin quit and her defenders haven’t had much to say.
Fast forward a little more than a decade: Palin is rich, single, trim, has had a bit of work done, and is letting herself be seen tete a tete at dinner in fancy New York restaurants with a former National Hockey League player. I thought she’d never put herself before a hostile press again. There some interesting allegations in Joe McGinniss’ book, “The Rogue,” but maybe she thinks memories have faded or nobody cares.
Palin has the money and name recognition to win the late Congressman Don Young’s seat. She’ll leave every other Republican bruised, bleeding, and broke. The communists, excuse me, Democrats will pour money into Alaska to defeat her and that will spill over into the other races. We face for the first time since 1973 having a Democrat U.S. Representative, as a result.
We may well have a Democrat/fake independent governor, too, with Bill Walker. And the one person Palin hates most, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, may well survive.
Palin has had a good run as the home wrecker of Alaska Republican politics.
And, before one of the trolls brings it up, she didn’t fire me. I retired June 30, 2006, long before she was even the nominee. I must confess she made me a good bit of money; when she did some really stupid things with the unions, they knew who to call. I named the new drives on my boat “Sarah.” Giddy-up Sarah!
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
