Why sarah palin

Through it all, she remained tough and positive. Then the sky opened up and plucked her from this far-flung state. There she was, on national television. She quit calling us back. Soon afterwards came all the talk about God and guns. I rode along in the motorcade the day she came back to the state to vote. The outfit was self-conscious.

Alaska schtick. Not her thing. Then John McCain lost. She peaced-out on being governor. The internet Sarah-ploded. When I read the news story recently about Track Palin assaulting his girlfriend and threatening to kill himself, I remembered this sweet interview with Palin years ago in a running magazine.

It was about Track as a teen, planting water bottles for his mother on her training route. Could she have known how hard this would be on her children? Anybody who lives here has occasional bouts of a far-north inferiority complex. You imagine a larger stage. Palin probably felt that way, and then she got her stage. She made money. She got famous. But does she seem happy to you? The world has been mean. Beneath the toxicity, I detect brittleness.

I wonder if she thinks about what she left behind in Alaska. I wonder if she misses it. Nobody wants to talk about Palin. There is speculation from time to time about her running for state office, but chances seem remote. On occasion someone I know sees her in a yoga class or in the stands at a hockey game.

Once, a friend encountered her really early in the morning, with no makeup, in Wasilla Walmart. She looked tired, almost ghostly, the friend said. 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.

After taking office in December , she kept her word and hired Tom Irwin, and other members of the Magnificent Seven. They devised a plan to attract someone other than the oil companies to build the pipeline, and they bid out the license to move ahead with it—to the deep displeasure of the oil producers, who vowed not to participate. Palin came under serious political pressure. That spring, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act sailed to passage, helped along by criminal indictments in the Veco scandal, which were handed down just as the bill came up.

Still, Palin was the deciding factor. A new pipeline plan had seemed unlikely when she took over, but she kept the legislature focused on the task.

She kept herself focused, too: though priding herself on her well-advertised social conservatism, she was prepared to set it aside when necessary. Rather than pick big fights about social issues, she declined to take up two abortion-restriction measures that she favored, and vetoed a bill banning benefits for same-sex partners of state workers. Next came the oil tax. An explicit charge that the Petroleum Profits Tax was corrupt would imply, by extension, that the unindicted legislators who had passed it were corrupt, too—and she needed their votes.

Again Palin kept her worst impulses in check. And when she was drawn into the fight, she proved nimble and resourceful. Two things finally prompted her to move ahead: when tax season rolled around, the PPT yielded much less revenue than anticipated; and Democrats needled her incessantly about how much of a reformer she truly was.

Then as now twitchingly alert to any slight, Palin loathed the implication. Democrats, eager to capitalize on public anger, introduced several tougher alternatives that were particularly aggressive—that is, confiscatory—when oil prices rose. Palin focused on capturing more revenue when prices were low. At first, her team tried to win the Republicans over. So Palin did something that would be hard to imagine from her today: she pivoted to the Democrats.

What she signed into law went well beyond her original proposal: ACES imposes a higher base tax rate than its predecessor on oil profits. But the really significant part has been that the tax rate rises much sooner and more steeply as oil prices climb—the part Democrats pushed for. The tax is assessed monthly, rather than annually, to better capture price spikes, of which there have been many. ACES also makes it harder for companies to claim tax credits for cleaning up spills caused by their own negligence, as some had done under the old regime.

Plunging natural-gas prices have made the project uneconomical. Her oil tax is a different story: though designed to capture more revenue under most scenarios, ACES has raised a lot more money than almost anyone imagined. But it also shows that the law is working. Flush with cash, Alaska produced large capital budgets that blunted the effects of the recession. But given the corruption that plagued the PPT, a better benchmark might be the tax it supplanted—the one put on the books after the Exxon Valdez spill.

W hat happened to Sarah Palin?