Of course it has to be said that seemingly on Fox News, Palin gets treated like a serious statesman rather than an incoherent wingnut. Megyn Kelly might have had a hard time choking back chuckles when she interviewed Brit Hume about the speech , but she still conducted a straight interview where Hume simply talked about how the endorsement would affect the Ted Cruz campaign.
For Fox News the speech was a significant political moment, not a blathering of embarrassing nonsense. But then again Fox News once used a picture of Tina Fey impersonating Palin as a graphic on a story on Palin—when Palin actually worked there. So there is little reason to trust their coverage of her. Thankfully, the late night comedy crowd was prepared to correct the failures of Fox News reporting once again. She sounds wasted, right? James Corden compared her speech to a Dr.
Seuss book —if Dr. He is the second. Nobody talks like that. Her angle? Just basically repeat verbatim what Palin said. That simple comedic tactic worked to effectively destroy the McCain-Palin campaign in —and it is working again now. I know you think she has nothing to offer the national dialogue and that her speeches are just coded talking points mixed in with words picked up at random from a Thesaurus.
I know you think Sarah Palin is at best a self-promoting ignoramus and at worst a shameless media troll who will abuse any platform to deliver dog-whistle encouragement to a far right base that may include possible insurrectionists.
I know you think her reality show was pathetically unstatesmanlike and, at the same time, I know you believe it represents the pinnacle of her potential.
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? 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 and Rudy Giuliani spoke the same night. They both gave terrific speeches. Really fired up the crowd. But the speech had no actual content at all.
Fire the rage-filled synapses of angry white people. Palin strolled onto the stage drinking from a Big Gulp. The audience, if I may say so, lapped it up. But getting back to the topic at hand, the Senate: She would only aid in its destruction. But the Cruzes and Hawleys and Palins are a different ilk.
They are actual fascists. Palin would certainly have joined them. Stay home. You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser and improve your visit to our site. Michael Tomasky mtomasky. Michael Tomasky is the editor of The New Republic. Want more politics, health care, and media updates? Grace Segers. Jeet Heer.
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