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I'm already subscribed. Do you have two minutes? Please take our anonymous survey to help us learn why you're visiting our website and what you're hoping to find here. No thanks. 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? How did someone who so effectively dealt with the two great issues vexing Alaska fall from grace so quickly? In Alaska, she applied those qualities to fulfilling the promises that got her elected, and in her first year was the most popular governor in the country.
She was serious business. But even before she left the state, she let herself be distracted by the many grievances she harbored against a wide range of enemies.
When I was in Juneau, a draft memoir by one of her former aides, Frank Bailey, was leaked to a number of political insiders, and from one of them to me. Bailey was cast aside after years of loyal service and has an ax to grind. But his portrait is persuasive nonetheless, because he peppers his book with internal e-mails that he kept, from Palin and her staff.
Ugly rumors of the sort common in politics were another fixation, as this e-mail furnished by Bailey attests:. Palin obsessed over her image, even more than most politicians. According to Bailey, she orchestrated a campaign to inundate newspapers with phony letters praising her.
This evidently became a favored tactic. Bailey even includes a letter he says she wrote under another name accusing an opponent, John Binkley, of copying her Web-site design. Much of this was harmless if also pointless and would not have undermined her political career. Politicians from Nixon to Clinton have been similarly consumed and still flourished. But Palin also committed more-serious ethical breaches. An investigation by the legislature found that, in some of her actions, she had abused her powers.
Palin seems to have been driven by a will to advance herself and by a virulent animus against anyone who tried to impede her.
On the big issues, at least, she chose her enemies well, and left the state in better shape than most people, herself included, seem to realize or want to credit her for. And it raises the question of what she could have achieved. She had it. But on the issues she made the focus of her administration—the oil tax and the gas line—she had good staff, listened to them, and backed them up.
She was a transformative governor, no question. But she must have appealed to him for reasons beyond her gender and vivacity. Palin was fresh from major, unexpected victories. For this, she was wildly popular. Bush and the Republican establishment, and the glory they had won him. Instead, they turned hard right. She says unwarranted ethics investigations are what prompted her to quit. Most Alaskans seem to think she left to get rich. But she also had lost her political base.
Republicans had never liked her, Democrats felt betrayed, and everyone believed she was now fixated on the presidency. Today, only about 33 percent of Alaskans hold a favorable view of her. But Alaskans seem relieved to have him in charge. Parnell is also a former oil lobbyist for ConocoPhillips. But in December, having been elected in his own right, he decided to make some changes, and began by firing the remaining members of the Magnificent Seven.
The Resource Development Council for Alaska, a leading business lobbying group, has taken up this cause in earnest. Most legislators give Parnell even odds of succeeding. Everyone agrees that the oil industry is reasserting itself, now that Palin has moved on.
Listening to it today, you can practically hear her shift registers, the state figure morphing into a national one, the old Palin becoming the new. What if history had written a different ending? What if she had tried to do for the nation what she did for Alaska? The possibility is tantalizing and not hard to imagine. The week after the Republican convention, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the whole economy suddenly seemed poised to go down with it.
Palin might have been the torchbearer of reform, a role that would have come naturally. The time her family got into a bloody, shirtless drunken brawl. Sound bite: No sound bite. The time she was stopped for speeding, which she called "qualifying". Palin was reportedly pulled over in July for speeding in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska. She was allegedly driving her Toyota Tundra at 63 mph in a 45 mph zone.
Well, then go ahead and carry a sign too. Sound bite: "Come on. The time she launched a digital channel dedicated to herself. Well, I am! I always have been. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.
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