One of the most basic ways in which a candidate can demonstrate the integrity voters are looking for is to build a record of standing up to corruption and waste - and doing so even when it appears in his or her own party, or on the part of his or her own allies or backers. This is not just a matter of honesty and prudence, but of toughness and courage. Let me offer a contrast between the two tickets on this issue - an Integrity Gap that Obama simply can't surmount and can only hope to obscure. If you look at the record of the McCain-Palin ticket and compare it to the Obama-Biden record in this regard, it really is no contest. I will start with the junior members of the two tickets. Governor Sarah Palin, in her short career, has fought many battles against her own party's entrenched interests; Senator Barack Obama, in a career of similar length and scope, has consistently looked the other way, and worse. Sen. Obama simply lacks the courage and the record of accomplishment of Gov. Palin. Today I will look at Gov. Palin's record; in Part II I will deal with Sen. Obama. Part III will deal with the senior members of the two tickets, Senator John McCain and Senator Joe Biden.
On the surface, Sarah Palin's career path looks much like Barack Obama's: both spent around a decade laboring in the vineyards of local politics before seeing their careers abruptly go up like a rocket all the way to the center of the national political stage. But look closer, and you will see all the difference in the world in the choices they made to get there.
I. Sarah Palin: The Whistleblower Who Took The Statehouse
I should add up front, as you'll see from all the Hat Tip links below, that I am very heavily indebted to Beldar for all the work he's done on Palin's career in Alaska. Additional supporting links marked with an asterisk.
A. The PTA Mom
Sarah Palin is, let's face it, an unlikely force for political change. In contrast to Obama, Palin didn't start off with two Ivy League degrees, a surplus of idealism, and an armload of theories about political and social organization; she seems hardly to have considered a career in politics at all. In high school, she was a jock, earning early plaudits as the point guard on an underdog state championship basketball team, playing the championship game with a stress fracture in her ankle. * * Her husband says she was shy in high school and not someone he would have pictured having a political career. She seems to have been an indifferent college student, more interested in sports than studies, and worked after college as a sportscaster before marrying, having children and helping out her husband's commercial fishing business (another example of the toughness that would serve her well in politics: continuing to help Todd on his fishing boat after breaking several of her fingers). Her entree into politics was the PTA, and from there the City Council in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, a fast-growing suburb of a few thousand people near the state's largest city, Anchorage. A lifelong Republican but not previously a political activist, she was elected to the City Council in 1992 after getting involved in a citizens' watch group that wanted Wasilla to have its own police force, ousting an incumbent, as she did in all of her significant races:
She did so by going door to door to campaign, pulling a red wagon with her son Track in the back. She ran her campaign out of her kitchen... Within weeks of her election, she'd taken on another councilman who had a city contract for garbage pickup that favored his own company.
Why do I mention Palin's apolitical roots? Because they help explain three things about her that become important later. One, how she's been able to stay grounded to have a normal, non-political person's reactions to the kinds of things politicians get inured to seeing. Two, why her views on reform, corruption and waste were not a pre-designed program but the evolving product of those reactions kicking in over time in response to things she observed first-hand. And three, how she was able to make the most important decision of her political career - to walk away from it all on principle with the significant chance that she was ending her career in politics.
B. Mayor of Wasilla
In 1996, Palin was elected Mayor of Wasilla, ousting the incumbent mayor, who had previously supported her. As Beldar explains, citing Palin's biographer Kaylene Johnson:
[Mayor] Stein had ignored the sentiments of Wasilla residents who'd approved term limits in 1994, and he continued to take advantage of a loophole exempting incumbents (he'd been mayor since 1987). Palin had originally crossed Stein by voting against a pay increase for the mayor's position shortly after she was first elected as a city councilman in 1992; accordingly, in 1996, she campaigned against him with a promise that she would start trimming the city budget by taking a voluntary pay cut as mayor (Which in fact she did.). She also promised to reduce property taxes. (Which in fact she did.) And she promised to promote new economic development that would increase the local tax base and permit higher levels of city services. (Which, again, she did.)
This was not the last time she would face a tough campaign against more experienced opponents. But while the 1996 race bore the early hallmarks of Palin's fiscal conservatism - as she battled to avoid expanding the city's budget - she was still a conventional Alaska Republican, supported by the state GOP establishment. Palin's success in Wasilla marked her as a leader among her peers, helping get her "elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors."
It was during Palin's two three-year terms as Mayor of Wasilla that she began a long practice, which I noted here and which Ed Morrissey discusses here based on New York Times and Washington Post profiles, of firing lots of people, basically anyone who cost too much, didn't get on board with the things she was trying to accomplish, was publicly insubordinate to her leadership, or was a holdover from prior administrations. As I've noted before, one of the principal obstacles to real change in any public-sector job is the inertia of entrenched incumbents; sacking them is a good way to get bad press and stir up lawsuits and trumped-up investigations, but it's also evidence of the unsentimentality and independent streak that any genuine reformer needs.
C. The Oil and Gas Commission
Following her loss in the Lieutenant Governor's race, Palin was out of a job, and as promising but unemployed politicians often do, she accepted an appointment from the powers that controlled her state party. In February 2003, she was tabbed by Murkowski to chair the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, a regulatory body with jurisdiction over the state's most important industries:
The commission and its 21 staff members usually labor in obscurity unless they are responding to a serious oil-well accident or violation. Founded in territorial days and modeled after commissions in other oil states, the AOGCC is a regulatory board charged with protecting public resources when oil or gas is developed. The AOGCC has three basic functions: to ensure that producing oil and gas fields achieve maximum recovery; to ensure that wells are safely constructed and operated; and to protect groundwater when oil and gas wells pass through aquifers or when drilling wastes are legally disposed underground.
The job was a plum patronage position, paying $118,000 a year, doubling her salary as Mayor and for the first time making her the family's chief breadwinner. The Anchorage Daily News has a lengthy and extensive description of the events that followed, as Palin uncovered significant ethical improprieties at the AOGCC, focusing on Alaska State GOP Chairman Randy Ruedrich, who the ADN noted had "played a major role in Gov. Frank Murkowski's election":
[S]he focused on ethical lapses by fellow Commissioner Randy Ruedrich, who was also (and unfortunately still is) the statewide GOP chairman. Ruedrich was refusing to complete and file disclosure reports that would have detailed his personal dealings with energy-related companies. When Ruedrich ignored her complaints, she went to the state attorney-general, Gregg Renkes. When Renkes ignored her (and threatened her with prosecution if she became a public whistle-blower), she went to the GOP governor who'd appointed her, Frank Murkowski. Murkowski was then, of course, one of the troika of Grand Poobahs of Alaskan GOP politics, along with Congressman Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens.
When Murkowski ignored her too, however, Palin resigned.
Think about that again. Palin wasn't independently wealthy, although her family is now well off; her husband made good money as a commercial fisherman and working in the oil fields, but with four children to raise, their status as a two-income family was undoubtedly financially important to them. Yet she was walking away from a plum job with a six-figure salary that had given her a more than 60% pay raise from her job as Mayor. Palin herself had worked only in politics since leaving her sportscasting job some 16 years earlier, and by picking up a crusade against the state's most powerful political figures, she stood an extremely good chance of burying her promising political future for good. But she was willing to walk away from all of that at age 40 to do the right thing. If you can picture Barack Obama doing that, you have a very vivid imagination.
As the ADN article explains, her investigation involved a fair amount of sleuthing by Palin, including a review of Ruedrich's computer files after he quit the AOGCC. There were a variety of ethical issues involved, including matters tied up in a number of criminal investigations, multiple conflicts of interest, failure to file required disclosure forms, and use of AOGCC time, facilities and resources to conduct Ruedrich's partisan activities with the GOP. While some of these issues may seem minor in isolation, they obviously added up. Palin's resignation in January 2004 eventually freed her to go public:
[W]hen Ruedrich settled state ethics charges June 22 by paying a record $12,000 civil fine and admitting wrongdoing, Palin said she finally felt some measure of vindication for bucking Ruedrich and members of her party. Over the months leading up to the settlement, Ruedrich had been saying the accusations were overblown, while other Republicans, including Murkowski, complained Ruedrich was unfairly targeted, primarily by the news media.
Originally muzzled by the confidentiality provisions of the state ethics law and unable to explain publicly what she had tried to do about Ruedrich, Palin found herself attacked from both sides: Ruedrich's opponents accused her of complicity with him, and his allies said she was providing ammunition for Democrats. She quit the commission in frustration on Jan. 16, months before the state's secret investigation and its formal charges became public.
And her dogged determination made her further enemies but resulted in ultimate vindication:
She wrote a famous op-ed for the state's largest newspaper ...And ...continu[ed] to direct public attention to the scandal.
She was helped along by criminal investigations that have since ended up with indictments and convictions of several public officials. Renkes was forced to resign as attorney-general. Reudrich ended up agreeing to pay a substantial fine for his ethics violations - not just the noncompliance with the disclosure forms, but substantive violations based on too-close ties with and favors from VECO, the drilling contractor that's been at the center of most of the Alaskan ethics scandals - and to quit the Commission.
Palin was unsparing even on the man who had appointed her:
After slamming Murkowski for "hiring his own counsel, paid for by the state, to investigate his long-time friend, confidant, and campaign manager [Renkes]," Sarah concluded by writing, "Despite those in Juneau who think otherwise, it's healthy for democracy to ask questions. And I'll bet there are hockey moms and housewives all across this great state who agree."
The result was a thorough burning of her bridges with the state party:
By that time, Palin was an outcast. The state Republican Party in May had just reconfirmed its support for Ruedrich, after party leaders assured the central committee that charges against him had been overblown by the media. Even Murkowski had voiced support for Ruedrich, calling him a "survivor."
One of Palin's Mat-Su mentors, district Republican chief Roy Burkhart of Willow, still thinks she went too far. When Palin came to him for advice, he said in a recent interview, he said she should pass along the evidence, which appeared serious enough.
"The impression I got was she didn't want to do it," said Burkhart. "But the evidence was there, and it was going to be worse if she didn't do it."
And she wasn't afraid to cross party lines to take a stand on ethics:
In 2005, she continued to take on the Republican establishment by joining Eric Croft, a Democrat, in lodging an ethics complaint against Renkes, who was not only attorney general but also a long-time adviser and campaign manager for Murkowski. The governor reprimanded Renkes and said the case was closed. It wasn't. Renkes resigned a few weeks later, and Palin was again hailed as a hero.
D. Taking Down Murkowski
Murkowski, meanwhile, was in the process of alienating the Alaskan public with a variety of high-handed and self-interested moves that came to symbolize the way in which the Alaska GOP establishment treated federal and state office as their personal property. One of the more egregious examples was his appointment of his daughter Lisa to fill out his term in the Senate. Palin considered running against Lisa Murkowski in 2004, but decided not to in deference to her son Track's reluctance at the time to endure a statewide campaign, although she did deepen her rift with the Murkowskis by endorsing one of Lisa Murkowski's primary opponents. Yet Palin's name ended up getting misused on Murkowski's behalf:
A measure of Palin's growing political stature came in the closing weeks of Lisa Murkowski's campaign against Tony Knowles. Voters started getting recorded messages from a chirpy woman saying, "Hello, this is Sarah," and urging their support for Murkowski and the Republican team. The calls were paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
a. The Bridge to Nowhere
The McCain campaign produced, belatedly, a detailed fact sheet with a chronology of the bridge dispute here, and if you are familiar with the saga, it checks out. Wikipedia, as usual, has an uneven and slanted account but one with a lot of useful links to primary sources.
The way transportation bills work in general is to distribute funds by state, and earmarks in the bill then direct funds to particular projects. The original controversy over the bridge earmark was in 2005, when the transportation bill included a $223 million earmark for the bridge, supported by Senators Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski, Gov. Murkowski, and Congressman Don Young, who at the time chaired the House Transportation Committee. Gov. Murkowski's wife, in fact, owned land on Gravina Island that would go up in value if the bridge was built. Coburn brought the controversy to a head with a bill to strip the earmark and the funds from the bill and redirect the money to rebuild a bridge in New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Ted Stevens gave a melodramatic speech threatening to quit the Senate if the bridge was defunded, and he and Young essentially threatened to retaliate against other Senators' pork projects in their own states; as Kos put it at the time, "the reason senators would vote against these amendments is because if any of them pass, it puts every single pork project in their own states in danger." In the end, Coburn got only 15 votes (McCain was absent, but supported the Coburn amendment) - Barack Obama and Joe Biden both voted "no." * Kos accurately summed up the vote thus:
Simply unconscionable. Those who voted against these amendments have zero credibility on issues of fiscal responsibility. Zero.
Obama and Biden also voted to support the final transportation bill that included the bridge earmark, but it was eventually stripped out in negotiations with the House in response to the outcry. (You can go here for Deroy Murdock's PowerPoint presentation on Obama's and Biden's role). That left the decision on how to fund the bridge up to Alaska's governor, subject to some limitations on how much of the transportation money could be allocated to the project. Gov. Murkowski set aside either $91 million or $113 million, depending on which sources you cite, but as of the end of 2005 there wasn't enough federal money for the project to be built, and cost estimates were starting to rise to over $300 million.
Enter Sarah Palin, then a private citizen and candidate for Alaska Governor. Of course, the core of the pork barrel/earmark problem is people in Washington trying to buy support back home with taxpayer money; Governors and candidates for Governor don't create earmarks, and Mayors in particular rather understandably like to agitate on behalf of their narrow parochial issues. Even today, Palin notes that her decision to kill the bridge was largely motivated by a desire first and foremost to protect state taxpayers:
After taking office and examining the project closely, realizing the Feds were not going to fund it as Alaskans had assumed was the case, I cancelled the project...Alaskans will have to prioritize for the Knik Arm Crossing if it is truly a top state priority because Congress won't fund it either.
That said, those of us who find the pork/earmark dynamic appalling understand that state/local politicians who support federal pork barrel spending are part of the problem, and those who resist are part of the solution; so her views on the matter are certainly relevant.
Now during her campaign, Palin did two things. One, which is entirely understandable although something she's reversed herself on when addressing a national audience, is to object to the rhetorical device of calling it a "bridge to nowhere," which naturally irked the residents of the Ketchikan area. Hence, her photo op with the "Nowhere" T-shirt and criticism of "spinmeisters".
And second, she supported the bridge project itself. See, e.g., here, here, here and here.
Palin entered office in December 2006 with the federal funds in hand but discretion whether to use them on the Ketchikan Bridge or less wasteful projects, as a result of the funds being provided without being earmarked. And from then on, as her budget team reviewed the project in the context of competing priorities, she began casting a more skeptical eye, building up to her killing of the project. 11 days into her term, she proposed her first budget which included no additional funds for the "Bridge to Nowhere" saying, "We need to make wise, sensible choices." State funds would have been needed because the federal dollars were not enough to keep up with the escalating cost estimates for the bridge.
In February 2007, National Review noted that the bridge's cost estimate had reached $395 million and that opponents were encouraged by Palin's hesitancy to fund the out-of-control project:
"This projected increase [in the bridge's cost] comes at a time when the governor has asked for all agencies to reduce spending by 10 percent," a spokesman for the governor tells National Review Online. Needless to say, building a half-billion-dollar bridge between a town of 8,000 and an island of 50 is not on her list of state transportation priorities.
+++
That leaves the Alaska DOT stuck between the local officials who want the bridge and a governor who hasn't set aside any money for it. Add a congressional delegation unable to bring home the bacon like it used to and it's no surprise that morale at the department has cratered. According to the AP, Gov. Palin's transition team discovered a department in which obtaining "federal earmarks in congressional appropriations trump all other priorities... and the state suffers as a result." The team's advice? Alaska needs to go on a diet from federal dollars and focus on "developing a state-funded transportation and maintenance program."
* The necessary state money was not included in the state budget in May, and the DOT put the project on hold in August. Finally, on September 21, 2007, Palin officially killed the bridge project, although her statement was couched in conciliatory terms:
"Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport, but the $398 million bridge is not the answer," Gov. Sarah Palin said in a prepared statement.
She directed the state transportation department to find the most "fiscally responsible" alternative for access to the airport.
+++
Palin on Friday said the Ketchikan project was $329 million short of full funding.
"It's clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island," Palin said.
"Much of the public's attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here. But we need to focus on what we can do, rather than fight over what has happened," she said.
The DOT will prepare a list of projects across the state where the $36 million in federal funds that was set aside for Gravina Island could be used.
Palin's decision instantly split those who had followed the saga, but nobody had any doubt who killed the bridge. ABC News reported on September 21, 2007:
Friday, the state of Alaska officially sank the Bridge to Nowhere. Governor Sarah Palin, also a Republican, said "Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport." "But," she said, the bridge "is not the answer." Palin has told state transportation officials to look for the most "fiscally responsible" alternative.
The McCain press release collects some of the immediate commentary:
September 22: Rep. Kyle Johansen, R-Ketchikan: "For somebody who touts process and transparency in getting projects done, I'm disappointed and taken aback ... We worked 30 years to get funding for this priority project."
September 24: "Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today celebrated a major victory over one of the most infamous pork barrel projects in recent history, the 'Bridge To Nowhere.'"
September 26: Anchorage Daily News Editorial: "Gov. Sarah Palin won few friends there with her decision to drop plans for the bridge, but she made the right call."
September 27: U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-AK, criticized Gov. Palin for killing the bridge and described their relationship as "a little frosty."
Sen. Stevens on Palin's decision: "(It) may well jeopardize further funding by the Congress of any bridges in Alaska, which I think is a dangerous precedent."
September 30: Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka: "Improving access to Gravina Island has been an economic priority for the community of Ketchikan, the state of Alaska and our congressional delegation for over 30 years. I'm shocked that the governor would ignore the significant energy, work and financial resources already invested in the project."
September 30: Lois Epstein, head of the Alaska Transportation Priorities Project, a watchdog group that monitors public transportation projects, praised Palin's action: "The move ensures that this controversial bridge will not be built."
Instapundit, who had given his megaphone to the Porkbusters crusade, wrote on September 22, 2007 of Palin's Vice Presidential prospects that "I certainly like her action on the Bridge to Nowhere" Alaska Democrats campaigning against Ted Stevens continued to credit Palin for stopping the bridge until she was tabbed as McCain's running mate. And here's Newsweek in October 2007:
In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Palin said it's time for Alaska to "grow up" and end its reliance on pork-barrel spending. Shortly after taking office, Palin canceled funding for the "Bridge to Nowhere," a $330 million project that Stevens helped champion in Congress. The bridge, which would have linked the town of Ketchikan to an island airport, had come to symbolize Alaska's dependence on federal handouts. Rather than relying on such largesse, says Palin, she wants to prove Alaska can pay its own way, developing its huge energy wealth in ways that are "politically and environmentally clean."
Writing during the election, Jim DeMint, himself a former earmarker who has sworn them off, credits Palin with killing the bridge, as does Tom Coburn himself.
Read the whole thing...an excellent researched article that the MSM should have done...
