(Senator's Mommy & Daddy paid for sonny's sexual affair! EmbASSing!!! hk)
The Nevada Republican's lawyer says $96,000 was given legally and ethically 'out of concern' for Cynthia Hampton's family. The revelations follow an interview in which her husband criticizes Ensign.
Ashley Powers and Mark Z. Barabak LA Times
From San Francisco and Las Vegas — Nevada Sen. John Ensign's wealthy parents gave his mistress and her family $96,000, the conservative lawmaker revealed Thursday, an admission that further darkened his once-bright career and caused even allies to question his continued effectiveness as a U.S. senator.
The "gifts" to Cynthia Hampton; her husband, Doug, and two of their children in April 2008 were made "out of concern for the well-being of long-time family friends during a difficult time," said a statement from Ensign's attorney.
The money, given in $12,000 increments, was "consistent with a pattern of generosity" by Ensign's parents, the statement said. Ensign's father, Michael, is a former casino mogul who helped bankroll his son's political rise from congressman to onetime GOP White House aspirant.
The admission came after Doug Hampton alleged in an television interview this week that Ensign paid his wife "a lot more than" $25,000 in severance when she left his campaign and political action committee. Doug Hampton also worked for Ensign, as his top aide. A Washington watchdog group, the Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility, asked the Justice Department to investigate the allegation because neither the campaign nor the PAC had reported the expenditure.
Ensign lawyer Paul E. Coggins, a former U.S. attorney who specializes in white-collar criminal defense, said Thursday that it was the parents who paid the Hamptons, and that Ensign had followed "all applicable laws and Senate ethics rules."
The payments began after the Hamptons stopped working for Ensign.
The latest revelations into Ensign's affair follow the interview, aired Wednesday and Thursday, that Doug Hampton gave to local political pundit Jon Ralston, a commentator and Las Vegas TV host. Hampton painted Ensign as something of a "Desperate Housewives" character: the unrepentant wife-chaser who tried to buy his mistress' silence.
"Nevadans are very forgiving," said conservative activist Chuck Muth, who called the financial revelations highly damaging. "Live and let live -- what doesn't affect me doesn't affect me. But the fact this occurred with someone who worked for Sen. Ensign and may have felt coerced . . . make this a whole different story altogether."
Politically, Ensign may be saved by the poor state of the Nevada Republican Party. GOP Gov. Jim Gibbons has faced his own set of scandals, including accusations of infidelity. Lacking strong leadership and absent an obvious candidate to replace him, the state party establishment is not likely to pressure Ensign to step aside.
He also has the advantage of time. He was reelected in 2006 and won't face voters again until 2012. However, Ensign's budding presidential hopes -- he had visited Iowa recently -- seem permanently dashed. Nevada's congressional delegation, including Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, remained silent Thursday about Ensign. But Steve Wark, a Republican strategist and former state party chairman, said his longtime friend was surely mulling his future in Washington.
"This makes it very difficult for him to be effective. . . . I would have to think this would give him pause as to what he wants to do with his political future," he said.
Asked whether Ensign should consider resigning, Wark said: "I believe that he's compelled to do that. I don't think he needs to be pushed in that direction by anybody."
Political observers said it would be tough for Ensign, a Christian conservative who belongs to the Promise Keepers ministry, to rebuild his image with voters.
"There is no way to spin this to make it positive," said Joseph Valenzano, who studies political communication at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "It smacks of 'I'm not responsible if I have someone else do it.' It's like having your father pay your parking ticket."
Valenzano said that though he found Doug Hampton to be calculating and unsympathetic, "if he really is a wronged husband and wanted to destroy Ensign's national ambitions, this was a good way to do it."
In December 2007, according to the interview on "Face to Face with Jon Ralston," Doug and Cynthia Hampton's house was broken into. They temporarily moved in with John and Darlene Ensign. That's when the affair began, said Doug Hampton, who discovered the liaison via a text message on his wife's phone.
Even after confronting John Ensign, Hampton said, the senator continued to pursue his wife, who worked for Ensign's campaign and political action committee. In February 2008, Hampton said he enlisted friends involved in a Washington Christian fellowship -- including Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) -- to help end the affair.
Hampton described the advice the friends gave Ensign: "These men were the ones that said what we need to do is get Doug Hampton's home paid for, and we need to get Doug Hampton some money. We need to get his family to Colorado."
While Coburn admitted to admonishing Ensign, he told reporters Thursday that he "never made any assessment about paying anybody anything."
Though Ensign reportedly sent Cynthia Hampton a handwritten letter that said that he used her for his own pleasure and that their relationship was a sin, Doug Hampton said that the senator quickly disavowed the letter and continued hounding his wife. At one point, Hampton said, Ensign bought cellphones for himself and Cynthia Hampton so their spouses couldn't track their calls.
In April 2008, Hampton said, he and his wife were forced out of Ensign's offices, though the senator's camp said the affair continued through August of that year. Meanwhile, Ensign secured Hampton a job at a political ally's consulting firm and then at Las Vegas-based Allegiant Air.
That could have discreetly ended the saga. But a few weeks ago, Hampton begged Fox News in a distraught letter to expose Ensign, who Hampton said "ruined our lives and careers" and left their family "in shambles." Hampton suggested that former Sen. Rick Santorum, a Fox News contributor, might have alerted Ensign to the letter. (Santorum could not be reached for comment.)
Regardless, when Ensign learned that Hampton had tipped off the media, he abruptly flew from Washington to Las Vegas. Nearly a year after it had ended, Ensign publicly apologized for the affair.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
WHORE PAYING SENATOR GETS IT RIGHT!
Senate votes to permit drug imports from Canada
By ANDREW TAYLOR
Associated Press Writer
People in the United States could get lower-cost drugs from Canada over the Internet under a plan that has passed the Senate.
The plan, sponsored by Louisiana Republican David Vitter and approved 55-36, dealt a defeat to the powerful drug lobby, which has so far prevailed in defeating widespread imports of drugs from Canada and other places where prices are far lower than in the United States.
Vitter's plan was attached to a bill funding the Customs Department and other homeland security agencies. It's unclear whether the idea will survive House-Senate talks on a final version of the bill.
Currently, visitors to Canada can return with a three-month supply of drugs.
Opponents of the idea say it will open the door to Internet scam artists.
By ANDREW TAYLOR
Associated Press Writer
People in the United States could get lower-cost drugs from Canada over the Internet under a plan that has passed the Senate.
The plan, sponsored by Louisiana Republican David Vitter and approved 55-36, dealt a defeat to the powerful drug lobby, which has so far prevailed in defeating widespread imports of drugs from Canada and other places where prices are far lower than in the United States.
Vitter's plan was attached to a bill funding the Customs Department and other homeland security agencies. It's unclear whether the idea will survive House-Senate talks on a final version of the bill.
Currently, visitors to Canada can return with a three-month supply of drugs.
Opponents of the idea say it will open the door to Internet scam artists.
Health care overhaul suffers another setback
By DAVID ESPO and ERICA WERNER Associated Press
The drive to remake the nation's health care system suffered yet another setback in Congress on Thursday when a pivotal group of House Democrats demanded changes in legislation the leadership was drafting on a fast track.
The emerging bill "lacks a number of elements essential to preserving what works and fixing what is broken," 40 members of the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate to conservative Democrats wrote party leaders. To win their support, they said, any legislation would need to be much more aggressive in reining in the growth of health care as well as in addressing a disparity in Medicare payments they said adversely affects rural providers.
A group of the moderates met into early evening with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and arranged to sit down with committee chairmen on Friday to go over proposed changes. Officials said the public release of the bill, originally set for Friday, would occur no earlier than Monday.
It was the second setback in three days for President Barack Obama's top domestic priority, although it was unclear whether it would amount to anything more than a brief delay for a bill of enormous complexity and controversy.
There was upheaval earlier in the week in the Senate, where the Democratic leadership is intent on scuttling a proposed tax on health care benefits that has long been key to attempts at a bipartisan compromise. At the same time, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and others went out of their way during the day to emphasize eagerness for Republican support.
As an alternative to the benefits tax, Democrats are considering raising taxes on wealthy investors to help pay for health care legislation, along with numerous other options, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The proposal to extend the current 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax to capital gains earned by high-income taxpayers would bring in an estimated $100 billion over 10 years.
In the House, Hoyer sought to minimize the day's developments, which occurred as Democrats on one committee were making final decisions on provisions to pay for the legislation.
"Let me make it very clear that everybody in that room thinks we ought to pass health care reform," the Maryland Democrat said.
One conservative Democrat, Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., said he believes no House vote should take place until September. That is well past a midsummer informal deadline set by Pelosi, D-Calif.
"I promised the president that we would have legislation out of the House before we went on an August break," Pelosi said earlier in the day. "That is still my goal."
Despite some success — the nation's hospitals agreed to a cut of $155 billion in projected Medicare and Medicaid payments — progress has been scant and internal differences magnified.
In general, any bill that emerges from Congress is expected to follow Obama's blueprint for reining in health care costs overall while extending coverage to 50 million who lack it.
Another objective is to make sure that insurance companies can no longer deny coverage or raise premiums to unaffordable levels to individuals with pre-existing medical conditions.
But literally hundreds of details are involved in drafting legislation, and gaining a consensus even among Democrats is proving to be remarkably — if predictably — difficult, despite their large majorities in both houses.
As an example, some Democrats are demanding legislation that permits the government to sell insurance in competition with private companies. Republicans overwhelmingly oppose such a plan, deeming it a stalking horse for universal government-run insurance, and many Democrats have concerns, as well.
Some Democrats prefer a plan for a nonprofit cooperative to take the place of government in competing with private companies. Others favor a government role only in cases in which consumers lack a choice in coverage.
Similarly, Democrats are divided on paying for the bill, some preferring more tax increases than others, some favoring more cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
"We've just got a lot of question and the top of the list would be how to pay for it," said Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., one of the Blue Dogs.
"I don't think we have significant cost-containment mechanisms in the proposal yet," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. He said he favors provisions aimed at preventing overtreatment of patients and overpayments to doctors, hospitals and other providers.
A dispute over tax increases was at the core of upheaval in the Senate earlier in the week.
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and chairman of the Finance Committee, has been working for months with Republicans in hopes of gaining support for a bipartisan bill that can command 60 votes.
Efforts to raise money to pay for subsidizing the cost of insurance had focused on a tax on health care benefits for workers with high-cost coverage provided by their employers.
Baucus and Republican supporters argued it would also have tended to reduce the cost of health care overall, as well as offset the cost of the bill. But the Democratic leadership stepped in forcefully, citing poor public polling, opposition of organized labor and concerns about taxing middle-income workers.
The drive to remake the nation's health care system suffered yet another setback in Congress on Thursday when a pivotal group of House Democrats demanded changes in legislation the leadership was drafting on a fast track.
The emerging bill "lacks a number of elements essential to preserving what works and fixing what is broken," 40 members of the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate to conservative Democrats wrote party leaders. To win their support, they said, any legislation would need to be much more aggressive in reining in the growth of health care as well as in addressing a disparity in Medicare payments they said adversely affects rural providers.
A group of the moderates met into early evening with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and arranged to sit down with committee chairmen on Friday to go over proposed changes. Officials said the public release of the bill, originally set for Friday, would occur no earlier than Monday.
It was the second setback in three days for President Barack Obama's top domestic priority, although it was unclear whether it would amount to anything more than a brief delay for a bill of enormous complexity and controversy.
There was upheaval earlier in the week in the Senate, where the Democratic leadership is intent on scuttling a proposed tax on health care benefits that has long been key to attempts at a bipartisan compromise. At the same time, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and others went out of their way during the day to emphasize eagerness for Republican support.
As an alternative to the benefits tax, Democrats are considering raising taxes on wealthy investors to help pay for health care legislation, along with numerous other options, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The proposal to extend the current 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax to capital gains earned by high-income taxpayers would bring in an estimated $100 billion over 10 years.
In the House, Hoyer sought to minimize the day's developments, which occurred as Democrats on one committee were making final decisions on provisions to pay for the legislation.
"Let me make it very clear that everybody in that room thinks we ought to pass health care reform," the Maryland Democrat said.
One conservative Democrat, Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., said he believes no House vote should take place until September. That is well past a midsummer informal deadline set by Pelosi, D-Calif.
"I promised the president that we would have legislation out of the House before we went on an August break," Pelosi said earlier in the day. "That is still my goal."
Despite some success — the nation's hospitals agreed to a cut of $155 billion in projected Medicare and Medicaid payments — progress has been scant and internal differences magnified.
In general, any bill that emerges from Congress is expected to follow Obama's blueprint for reining in health care costs overall while extending coverage to 50 million who lack it.
Another objective is to make sure that insurance companies can no longer deny coverage or raise premiums to unaffordable levels to individuals with pre-existing medical conditions.
But literally hundreds of details are involved in drafting legislation, and gaining a consensus even among Democrats is proving to be remarkably — if predictably — difficult, despite their large majorities in both houses.
As an example, some Democrats are demanding legislation that permits the government to sell insurance in competition with private companies. Republicans overwhelmingly oppose such a plan, deeming it a stalking horse for universal government-run insurance, and many Democrats have concerns, as well.
Some Democrats prefer a plan for a nonprofit cooperative to take the place of government in competing with private companies. Others favor a government role only in cases in which consumers lack a choice in coverage.
Similarly, Democrats are divided on paying for the bill, some preferring more tax increases than others, some favoring more cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
"We've just got a lot of question and the top of the list would be how to pay for it," said Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., one of the Blue Dogs.
"I don't think we have significant cost-containment mechanisms in the proposal yet," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. He said he favors provisions aimed at preventing overtreatment of patients and overpayments to doctors, hospitals and other providers.
A dispute over tax increases was at the core of upheaval in the Senate earlier in the week.
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and chairman of the Finance Committee, has been working for months with Republicans in hopes of gaining support for a bipartisan bill that can command 60 votes.
Efforts to raise money to pay for subsidizing the cost of insurance had focused on a tax on health care benefits for workers with high-cost coverage provided by their employers.
Baucus and Republican supporters argued it would also have tended to reduce the cost of health care overall, as well as offset the cost of the bill. But the Democratic leadership stepped in forcefully, citing poor public polling, opposition of organized labor and concerns about taxing middle-income workers.
HEALTH CARE USA?
America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.” Walter Cronkite
We are told Single-Payer Health Care is off the table, that it cannot possibly get enough votes. Even President Obama, who while he was Senator Obama and in favor of single-payer, has changed his mind. Even President Obama can be bought.
Ironically, many do not know what single-payer is, yet it is quite simple: There is only ONE payer: the government.
Republicans call this Socialized Medicine; the stuff we’ve been warned of since the late fifties.
My father was a physician. He told me that socialized medicine would destroy our medicine. However, this was before HMOs, insurance companies, the AMA, the FDA, and Pharmaceutical interests destroyed medicine. This was before we began paying billions to the CEOs of HMOs.
It is not socialized medicine. It is publicly funded, privately delivered health care. It is health care that is not profit based. Thank God.
Today over 15,000 physicians (many Republican physicians too) and health care workers want single-payer Health Care. A majority of nurses want single-payer.
Why?
The answer is simple: They want to practice medicine. They don’t want to sit around on the phone for hours arguing with an insurance agent about what procedures they can or cannot perform.
Consider this: the ONLY change in medical care will be who pays. Instead of the insurance company paying for your care, the government will be paying. This is the ONLY change in health care. You will get the doctor of your choice. You will get the medicine you need. And if you are on vacation, 1000 miles from home and you need a doctor, you’ll get it, and nobody will ask you if you have insurance.
This one simple change has set the US topsy-turvy. Right wing talking heads have turned up the volume; senators are pleading with us to keep the government out of health care; network television has played half hour programs decrying socialized medicine and how it will destroy us.
“Don’t let government takeover of medicine kill the best health care system in the world!”
In past issues we have debunked a lot of the crazy stuff circulating the web and the country. The massive attack on single-payer is one issue that must be debunked and debunked thoroughly.
Why?
Because there are TRILLIONS of dollars that stand to be lost.
Not millions, not billions; trillions.
Trillions of dollars stand between YOU and your RIGHT to Health Care, and you will be lied to in Technicolor over and over and over until you drink the Kool-Aid. Expect the opposition to wheel out someone who’s been screwed over by the Canadian health care system (who says we have to adopt theirs?) to prove that Universal Health Care is bad for us. Expect the battle to get dirty and every person associated with Universal Health care to be slandered. Expect the worst. That’s what greed brings out; the worst in human beings.
One has to ask himself why every Republican in Washington is against Universal Health Care.
Besides the obvious money issues and the Republican bent of supporting corporations over individuals, there is one reason that seems to fly under the radar:
In England, the party that passed Universal Health Care stayed in power for 40 years.
If the Democrats pass Universal Health Care, the Republican party will be insignificant for an entire generation.
It is hard to fathom why any Democrat would not want to push through Universal Health Care. My guess would be a lack of spine.
“I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.” Will Rogers
The following video is a segment of the movie Network. Apparently, after Barak Obama was elected, someone sat him down and gave him this same speech.
"… you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!"
And yes, health care is a right. It’s something that is given quite freely to the persons we elect to represent us. It is NOT a privilege to represent us; it is not an honor. It is a mandate, by the people, that those we’ve sent to Washington represent the will of the people. When a representative of the people gets health care, this is proof enough that health care is a right.
We are the only industrialized nation on the planet that doesn’t have Single-Payer, Universal Health Care. We are the only nation in which a person can go bankrupt (over 50% of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills) because of medical bills, even if you have insurance. In most countries with Single-Payer, it is illegal to sell the type of medical insurance offered in this country.
Your representatives and even your president have been bought and paid for on this issue of health care. Senator Max Baucus of Montana has received more money from the insurance and health care industry than any other Democrat; is there any question why Single-Payer was not on the table when his hearings began? Is there any question why nurses went to jail forcing Baucus to hear their point of view on Single-Payer?
Why aren’t single-payer advocates allowed to testify before Baucus’ committee? Follow the money. Campaign donations explain why, and demonstrate that the Senate Finance Committee should not be in charge of health care. Senator Reid should remove the health care reform bill from Baucus and start all over before the Health Committee in the Senate.
Here’s why Baucus is not doing the people's business:
According to OpenSecrets.org, over his career he has taken donations from:
The Insurance Industry: $1,170,313
Health Professionals: $1,016,276
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products Industry: $734,605
Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $541,891
Health Services/HMOs: $439,700
That is a grand total of $3,902,785. Can we trust Baucus to put aside the profits of the industries that have kept him in the Senate? Will he put the people’s necessities ahead of the profits of his contributors? Baucus has shown his bias and should be removed from leading the health care reform effort by the Democratic Party leadership.
In 2008 Baucus had virtually no challenger in Montana. A little-known Republican was on the ballot, and Baucus won with 73% of the vote. But, Baucus sought big donations from big business anyway. He used his connections to corporations with business before his committee to raise an immense campaign fund of more than $11 million. In 2008, 91% of his donations come from individuals living outside of Montana, which is why he is more the “Senator for K Street” then the Senator for Montana. Corporate health profiteers who invested in Baucus will now benefit from his stewardship over health care reform. His 2008 donations from health care profiteers included:
Insurance: $592,185
Health Professionals: $537,141
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: $524,813
Health Services/HMOs: $364,500
Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $332,826
That is $1,826,652 Baucus took from these industries, and now he can reward them by deforming health care reform.
The health care profiteers knew that Baucus would determine their fate and ponied up. Now the only thing standing between them and their payback is a single-payer national health care plan. Yet single-payer, which would end private insurance and control the cost of pharmaceutical drugs, is not being considered—not even allowed to participate in the conversation before Baucus.
It is not just the chairman of the committee who has received massive donations. The full Finance Committee is a gluttonous embarrassment of campaign pay-offs. In 2008 the committee members received a total of $13,263,986 from industries affected by health care reform. Can we trust this committee to put the interests of the people before their donors?
The donations to the Finance Committee in 2008 included:
Insurance: $5,103,900
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: $3,308,831
Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $2,809,353
Health Services/HMOs: $2,041,902
These industries expect to be rewarded with billions, even trillions, in profits and hundreds of millions in corporate welfare. Senator Baucus’s behavior shows they have made a good investment—they've bought themselves a senator who should be called Chairman Blagojevich. He is doing his best to make sure the single-payer message is not heard because he knows it is the fairest, most efficient and cost-effective way to ensure health care access for all Americans—but he can't let that be implemented because it would put some of his donors out of business and control the profits of others.
It is time to remove Baucus from the leadership of health care reform. It is time to move the critically important priority of reforming America’s health care system from the Finance Committee and put it before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. At least their mission is health care, not money.
Kevin Zeese is the executive director of the FreshAirCleanPolitics.net, which is urging a single-payer national health care system as part of its ProsperityAgenda.US project. Along with seven others, Zeese was arrested when he testified from the audience of a recent Senate Finance Committee meeting on health care. See the video on YouTube.
Antonia
We can only pray that any new health care bill will include spine transplants for Democrats.
Everyone in Washington feels that if they want to get re-elected, they’re going to need the support of, the money of, the health care industry (HMOs, insurance companies, the AMA, and the Pharmaceutical Industry).
“Members of Congress are the only people in the world expected to take large amounts of money from strangers and then act as if it has no effect on their behavior.” Bill Moyers
Yet this one issue is big enough to get anyone re-elected, including the president without any money from the health care industry. In fact, the most beloved politician in Canada is Lester B Pearson, the Prime Minister who brought Universal Health Care to Canada.
Barak Obama could go down in history as the most beloved President in our history over this one single issue. But when he tells us that if only we were starting from scratch, Single-Payer would make more sense, we know that he's thinking about the insurance industry; we can't just ruin the insurance industry no matter how many people die because they've turned them down for procedures.
“When a Democrat runs on change, the only change we'll get after the election is he becomes more like a Republican.” Anonymous
This next election, coming up in less than 17 months, should be a single issue election: health care. But there is a slight problem: to keep money out of health care, we have to keep money out of our election process.
You see, for progressive candidates to get elected (those representatives who work for the people interests), they need money. To get that money, they have to pander to special interests, and not the interests of the people. So, this next election will be a two issue election: take the money out of both the health care system and the election process. And it is going to be tough, because when money is involved, when greed is motivation, expect lies, deception, and hypocrisy to rise to the realm of sainthood.
Money Talks ― Universal Health Care Walks
To someone who has lost everything because of medical bills there is no left or right, no Liberal, no Conservative. There is only the pain of losing everything.
If health care costs continue to rise at their current rates, it will cost $24,000 a year to insure a family of four by 2016, an 84 percent increase from today. At these rates, half of American households would have to spend at least 45 percent of their income to be insured. (Congressional Hearings 2008)
A majority of health care workers, a majority of Americans, wants Single-Payer, Universal Health Care. Screw bi-partisanship. The American public has voted. Let it be known that the American public expects their representatives and their president to work for them and not for the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and the HMOs.
When the Republicans had a smaller majority than the Democrats have today, they rammed their agenda down the throats of the American people. They put Justice Roberts on the Supreme Court; a judge who in his career on the bench always ruled against any individual who was up against a corporation. They rammed false intelligence and an illegal war down our throats; tax breaks to the wealthy; extreme rendition and torture; a complete agenda that most Americans felt was un-American was rammed down our throats.
The Democrats have a majority. The people have spoken. Screw bipartisanship. It’s time to ram Single-Payer Health Care down the throats of the Republicans.
Yet many Democrats, including the President (who called for Single-Payer Health Care on the campaign trail, June 29th 2008), are backing away from Single-Payer. Obviously, something is wrong when major changes to the ridiculous Medicare Part D have yet to come about.
Within his first hundred days, President Obama could have reversed the rule that disallowed the government from negotiating with drug companies.
Apparently “Yes We Can” didn’t actually mean “Yes We Will.”
Editor's Note: Bill Maher got it right, twice in a row, in his New Rules. They are posted below in Tid Bits: New Rules.
We must let our representatives know: If a Republican wants to get re-elected, vote YES on Single-Payer Health Care. If a Democrat wants to get re-elected, vote YES on Single-Payer Health Care. If an Independent wants to get re-elected, vote YES on Single-Payer Health Care.
Health care to be true health care must be non profit. The bottom line for any profit based industry is profit. This is a simple fact. True health care must be non profit.
We can do this. We just have to get on the phones, write letters, write emails, and keep on our representatives. We can do this.
Debunk This!
· The US has the best health care system in the world.
This is pure bunk. Flag waving chauvinists constantly tell us: “We’re number one! We’re number one,” even if we’ve done nothing to prove it or earn it.
The American health care system is the most expensive system in the world, yet the World Health Organization ranks us 34th in the world.
In infant mortality, out of the 33 industrialized nations, we’re right at the bottom.
Chauvinists who proclaim that our modern medicine is why the average longevity in America grows each year are blowing smoke; in the past two years, our longevity figures have begun to shrink.
· Government takeover of health care.
The far right likes to play with words. They took the Inheritance Tax and renamed it the Death Tax. Smart move. Most Americans will never see an inheritance, but they’ll see death, and suddenly more people are worried about this tax that won’t ever affect them.
“Single-payer” has become “Government Takeover,” and that sounds really bad. The government “paying” for health care doesn’t sound that bad; but the government taking over health care; well, we all know that’s bad.
I heard a Republican ask the other day if we wanted the government bureaucracy that brought us Katrina bringing us health care.
I always smile when a Republican is stupid enough to bring up Katrina. So let’s look at the myth he’s trying to promulgate:
· Government bureaucracy is always inefficient.
The implication of this statement is that private corporations are much more efficient than government agencies. This has led to privatization. However, privatization is just another term for profitization, and there goes all the savings a private corporation could ever have over government agencies.
Yes, we all know about government bureaucracy. We’ve all stood in line at the DMV. We all know the stories of the military handing out winter clothes in the summer. But for every person who’s ever stood in line at the DMV, there are 1000 elderly getting their Social Security checks on time from a government agency, delivered to these people by another government agency, the post office. For every soldier who’s ever gotten winter clothing in the summer time, there are thousands of hungry children getting hot meals because of a government agency. Yes, bureaucracy can be inefficient, but the only thing single-payer will change, once again, is who pays. The government pays. That’s it.
Ironically, the bureaucracy and paperwork of private insurance now eats up 30% of our health care dollars.
A “streamlined” single-payer system can save more than $350 billion yearly. Take the profit out of the system, and the savings is mind boggling.
· Higher taxes, longer waits, rationed care, substandard care.
We’re going have to take these one at a time.
Higher taxes: perhaps. Taxes might go up, but insurance rates will drop. It’s a wash.
Sadly, because the previous administration took the tax burden off the wealthy and heaped it onto the backs of the middle class, it is the middle class who have been paying for the war in Iraq. England realized a very simple concept: if we can pay to kill people, we should be able to pay to heal people.
We truly need to put the tax burden on the shoulders of those who have received the most from society. They should be paying for our health care, especially since we’ve paid for “their” war.
As for higher costs, in the long run, universal health care in the US will be so much cheaper, especially for businesses. New businesses will be able to start up while existing businesses can flourish. People will become more mobile; they’ll be able to leave an existing job and hunt for a better, more suitable job knowing they can’t lose their health care.
Longer waits: interviews and polls from Canada, Sweden, England, France, etc. all show that the wait times after incorporating single-payer got shorter. Why? because the average wait time in the emergency rooms just went down.
Have you ever had to go to urgent care? I took a friend in with a migraine. We waited over an hour and a half.
Yes, some systems have seen a slow down, but I happen to be a recipient of socialized health care already from the Veterans Administration, and I’ve also visited an HMO.
Since they’ve streamlined the VA, I’ve never waited more than five minutes past my appointment time to see my physician. My one trip to an HMO I waited 45 minutes past the scheduled appointment to see the doctor. So much for that myth.
Rationed Care: this was debunked on a recent Bill Moyers Journal when he interviewed two physicians. They both agreed that we have enough medical care in the country to handle everyone for a long time. They admitted that somewhere down the line, as the population grows, we might have to do something, but right now, every patient will get the care they need, and NO insurance man will stand in the way.
Substandard Care: we are told by many that when they were in the military they got substandard care. It’s funny, sitting in a temporary building in need of painting, how the care just seems substandard to having your own hospital room with cable TV and hot and cold running nurses.
I have never in my life received substandard care in a military of veteran’s hospital. In fact, I’ve received better and faster care than when I spent $300 to visit a doctor friend of mine at an HMO.
· Universal healthcare would be exactly that. If Republicans point out that any universal healthcare scheme would include heroin addicts, meth heads and others who brought their health problems on themselves through poor individual decisions, independents and moderates would reconsider supporting Obama's plan. Who likes the idea of their tax dollars being spent on the health of junkies?
Funny thing, but we already pay for junkies. We pay to have them hunted down, arrested, jailed, rehabilitated, and then the spiral starts over. We are already paying for them.
Sadly, the war on drugs is a waste of time and money. In countries where drugs have been either decriminalized or legalized, drug usage just goes down, and the costs to the taxpayers shrinks dramatically.
Every single objection to single-payer Health Care is a bogus argument FINANCED by the industries that stand to lose TRILLIONS. This is a simple fact, and sadly, everyone in Washington, including our president, has been paid off.
And the really good thing about Single-Payer Health Care is if you want to pay for your own doctor on your own time at your own convenience, you can. Nobody is stopping you.
From the Los Angeles Times
Under the plan, negotiated primarily by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), hospitals would accept $155 billion in cuts if the administration and its congressional allies succeeded in extending health insurance to tens of millions of people who are now without coverage.
And...
In June, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America announced that its members would provide $80 billion worth of discounts on medications for seniors and others who rely on government health insurance programs such as Medicare.
These negotiations are very telling. The health care industry is admitting that they have been ripping off the American public to the tune of billions.
Profit driven medicine has created the most expensive, and most dysfunctional health care system in the world. Our system is ranked 37th in the world today and yet we pay the most.
According to the Consumer's Union, "Right now, [the health care industry is] spending $1.4 million per day on lobbyists to make sure your Senators hear exactly why they need more of your health care dollars."
What to do? Grass Roots!
We make the next election a SINGLE ISSUE election. Thirty-nine million voting age adults lack health insurance. Millions more have health insurance they cannot afford. Millions more are underinsured. Millions upon millions have been turned down for procedures they need. Hundreds of thousands have died because they had health insurance but could not get the procedures they need.
The majority of Americans want single-payer Health Insurance. This is a fact. The majority of health care workers want single-payer.
The problem is money. Our representatives will not have enough money to get re-elected and represent us if they support single-payer.
The New Revolution: Get out the vote!
In just 17 short months, every seat in the House will be up for re-election. Call your representative and tell them, firmly, respectfully, that you will support ONLY a candidate that is firmly behind single-payer. It’s that simple.
Get out, talk to neighbors, make sure everyone calls their representatives and candidates and make them completely aware that this next election is a SINGLE ISSUE election: single-payer, Universal Health Care and ultimately Campaign Finance Reform.
We need to push for public campaign financing and take the money out of the system of politics. We have to level the playing field, and this one issue, health care, has made it blindingly obvious that our representatives represent those who pay for their campaigns and not their constituents.
Seventy-three percent of Americans want a public option that will create Universal Health Care. The majority of physicians and nurses want Universal Health Care. The AMA doesn’t want Universal Health Care but they’ve not polled their doctors.
Six out of ten Americans are willing to pay more in taxes for Universal Health Care. Some think we should roll back the Bush Tax Cuts, but rolling back all the way to the Reagan Tax Cuts will not only pay for health care, it will begin to pay to rebuild our infrastructure.
But the Times/CBS poll found 85 percent of respondents wanted major healthcare reforms and most would be willing to pay higher taxes to ensure everyone had health insurance. An estimated 46 million Americans currently have no coverage. [Reuters]
The Democratic Party, the one that supposedly represents the little guy (there are more little guys than big guys in the world) holds the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Yet they tell us that single-payer is off the table because it won’t get enough support.
This is a bold faced lie. The only thing between us and Single-Payer, Universal Health Care right now is us. We must demand it. We must march in the streets. We must call each individual from Congress who is up for re-election and demand they put single-payer back on the table, or say good bye to Washington.
Throw the bums out. Throw Max Baucus out. Throw Barak Obama out. Throw out all those who refuse to represent the will of the people.
If single-payer goes away, we have only ourselves to blame.
HOLD YOUR GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PEOPLE.
Take five minutes out of your life and call your senators and representatives, and leave a note for Obama too. Here are the numbers to the White House switchboard. You can reach everyone who represents you from here: 800-828-0498, 800-614-2803 and 877-851-6437.
If you don't know your Senator, you can call this number, plug in your zip code, and they will send you to one, then call back and they'll send you to the other: 1-800-944-6762
We are told Single-Payer Health Care is off the table, that it cannot possibly get enough votes. Even President Obama, who while he was Senator Obama and in favor of single-payer, has changed his mind. Even President Obama can be bought.
Ironically, many do not know what single-payer is, yet it is quite simple: There is only ONE payer: the government.
Republicans call this Socialized Medicine; the stuff we’ve been warned of since the late fifties.
My father was a physician. He told me that socialized medicine would destroy our medicine. However, this was before HMOs, insurance companies, the AMA, the FDA, and Pharmaceutical interests destroyed medicine. This was before we began paying billions to the CEOs of HMOs.
It is not socialized medicine. It is publicly funded, privately delivered health care. It is health care that is not profit based. Thank God.
Today over 15,000 physicians (many Republican physicians too) and health care workers want single-payer Health Care. A majority of nurses want single-payer.
Why?
The answer is simple: They want to practice medicine. They don’t want to sit around on the phone for hours arguing with an insurance agent about what procedures they can or cannot perform.
Consider this: the ONLY change in medical care will be who pays. Instead of the insurance company paying for your care, the government will be paying. This is the ONLY change in health care. You will get the doctor of your choice. You will get the medicine you need. And if you are on vacation, 1000 miles from home and you need a doctor, you’ll get it, and nobody will ask you if you have insurance.
This one simple change has set the US topsy-turvy. Right wing talking heads have turned up the volume; senators are pleading with us to keep the government out of health care; network television has played half hour programs decrying socialized medicine and how it will destroy us.
“Don’t let government takeover of medicine kill the best health care system in the world!”
In past issues we have debunked a lot of the crazy stuff circulating the web and the country. The massive attack on single-payer is one issue that must be debunked and debunked thoroughly.
Why?
Because there are TRILLIONS of dollars that stand to be lost.
Not millions, not billions; trillions.
Trillions of dollars stand between YOU and your RIGHT to Health Care, and you will be lied to in Technicolor over and over and over until you drink the Kool-Aid. Expect the opposition to wheel out someone who’s been screwed over by the Canadian health care system (who says we have to adopt theirs?) to prove that Universal Health Care is bad for us. Expect the battle to get dirty and every person associated with Universal Health care to be slandered. Expect the worst. That’s what greed brings out; the worst in human beings.
One has to ask himself why every Republican in Washington is against Universal Health Care.
Besides the obvious money issues and the Republican bent of supporting corporations over individuals, there is one reason that seems to fly under the radar:
In England, the party that passed Universal Health Care stayed in power for 40 years.
If the Democrats pass Universal Health Care, the Republican party will be insignificant for an entire generation.
It is hard to fathom why any Democrat would not want to push through Universal Health Care. My guess would be a lack of spine.
“I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.” Will Rogers
The following video is a segment of the movie Network. Apparently, after Barak Obama was elected, someone sat him down and gave him this same speech.
"… you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!"
And yes, health care is a right. It’s something that is given quite freely to the persons we elect to represent us. It is NOT a privilege to represent us; it is not an honor. It is a mandate, by the people, that those we’ve sent to Washington represent the will of the people. When a representative of the people gets health care, this is proof enough that health care is a right.
We are the only industrialized nation on the planet that doesn’t have Single-Payer, Universal Health Care. We are the only nation in which a person can go bankrupt (over 50% of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills) because of medical bills, even if you have insurance. In most countries with Single-Payer, it is illegal to sell the type of medical insurance offered in this country.
Your representatives and even your president have been bought and paid for on this issue of health care. Senator Max Baucus of Montana has received more money from the insurance and health care industry than any other Democrat; is there any question why Single-Payer was not on the table when his hearings began? Is there any question why nurses went to jail forcing Baucus to hear their point of view on Single-Payer?
Why aren’t single-payer advocates allowed to testify before Baucus’ committee? Follow the money. Campaign donations explain why, and demonstrate that the Senate Finance Committee should not be in charge of health care. Senator Reid should remove the health care reform bill from Baucus and start all over before the Health Committee in the Senate.
Here’s why Baucus is not doing the people's business:
According to OpenSecrets.org, over his career he has taken donations from:
The Insurance Industry: $1,170,313
Health Professionals: $1,016,276
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products Industry: $734,605
Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $541,891
Health Services/HMOs: $439,700
That is a grand total of $3,902,785. Can we trust Baucus to put aside the profits of the industries that have kept him in the Senate? Will he put the people’s necessities ahead of the profits of his contributors? Baucus has shown his bias and should be removed from leading the health care reform effort by the Democratic Party leadership.
In 2008 Baucus had virtually no challenger in Montana. A little-known Republican was on the ballot, and Baucus won with 73% of the vote. But, Baucus sought big donations from big business anyway. He used his connections to corporations with business before his committee to raise an immense campaign fund of more than $11 million. In 2008, 91% of his donations come from individuals living outside of Montana, which is why he is more the “Senator for K Street” then the Senator for Montana. Corporate health profiteers who invested in Baucus will now benefit from his stewardship over health care reform. His 2008 donations from health care profiteers included:
Insurance: $592,185
Health Professionals: $537,141
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: $524,813
Health Services/HMOs: $364,500
Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $332,826
That is $1,826,652 Baucus took from these industries, and now he can reward them by deforming health care reform.
The health care profiteers knew that Baucus would determine their fate and ponied up. Now the only thing standing between them and their payback is a single-payer national health care plan. Yet single-payer, which would end private insurance and control the cost of pharmaceutical drugs, is not being considered—not even allowed to participate in the conversation before Baucus.
It is not just the chairman of the committee who has received massive donations. The full Finance Committee is a gluttonous embarrassment of campaign pay-offs. In 2008 the committee members received a total of $13,263,986 from industries affected by health care reform. Can we trust this committee to put the interests of the people before their donors?
The donations to the Finance Committee in 2008 included:
Insurance: $5,103,900
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: $3,308,831
Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $2,809,353
Health Services/HMOs: $2,041,902
These industries expect to be rewarded with billions, even trillions, in profits and hundreds of millions in corporate welfare. Senator Baucus’s behavior shows they have made a good investment—they've bought themselves a senator who should be called Chairman Blagojevich. He is doing his best to make sure the single-payer message is not heard because he knows it is the fairest, most efficient and cost-effective way to ensure health care access for all Americans—but he can't let that be implemented because it would put some of his donors out of business and control the profits of others.
It is time to remove Baucus from the leadership of health care reform. It is time to move the critically important priority of reforming America’s health care system from the Finance Committee and put it before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. At least their mission is health care, not money.
Kevin Zeese is the executive director of the FreshAirCleanPolitics.net, which is urging a single-payer national health care system as part of its ProsperityAgenda.US project. Along with seven others, Zeese was arrested when he testified from the audience of a recent Senate Finance Committee meeting on health care. See the video on YouTube.
Antonia
We can only pray that any new health care bill will include spine transplants for Democrats.
Everyone in Washington feels that if they want to get re-elected, they’re going to need the support of, the money of, the health care industry (HMOs, insurance companies, the AMA, and the Pharmaceutical Industry).
“Members of Congress are the only people in the world expected to take large amounts of money from strangers and then act as if it has no effect on their behavior.” Bill Moyers
Yet this one issue is big enough to get anyone re-elected, including the president without any money from the health care industry. In fact, the most beloved politician in Canada is Lester B Pearson, the Prime Minister who brought Universal Health Care to Canada.
Barak Obama could go down in history as the most beloved President in our history over this one single issue. But when he tells us that if only we were starting from scratch, Single-Payer would make more sense, we know that he's thinking about the insurance industry; we can't just ruin the insurance industry no matter how many people die because they've turned them down for procedures.
“When a Democrat runs on change, the only change we'll get after the election is he becomes more like a Republican.” Anonymous
This next election, coming up in less than 17 months, should be a single issue election: health care. But there is a slight problem: to keep money out of health care, we have to keep money out of our election process.
You see, for progressive candidates to get elected (those representatives who work for the people interests), they need money. To get that money, they have to pander to special interests, and not the interests of the people. So, this next election will be a two issue election: take the money out of both the health care system and the election process. And it is going to be tough, because when money is involved, when greed is motivation, expect lies, deception, and hypocrisy to rise to the realm of sainthood.
Money Talks ― Universal Health Care Walks
To someone who has lost everything because of medical bills there is no left or right, no Liberal, no Conservative. There is only the pain of losing everything.
If health care costs continue to rise at their current rates, it will cost $24,000 a year to insure a family of four by 2016, an 84 percent increase from today. At these rates, half of American households would have to spend at least 45 percent of their income to be insured. (Congressional Hearings 2008)
A majority of health care workers, a majority of Americans, wants Single-Payer, Universal Health Care. Screw bi-partisanship. The American public has voted. Let it be known that the American public expects their representatives and their president to work for them and not for the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and the HMOs.
When the Republicans had a smaller majority than the Democrats have today, they rammed their agenda down the throats of the American people. They put Justice Roberts on the Supreme Court; a judge who in his career on the bench always ruled against any individual who was up against a corporation. They rammed false intelligence and an illegal war down our throats; tax breaks to the wealthy; extreme rendition and torture; a complete agenda that most Americans felt was un-American was rammed down our throats.
The Democrats have a majority. The people have spoken. Screw bipartisanship. It’s time to ram Single-Payer Health Care down the throats of the Republicans.
Yet many Democrats, including the President (who called for Single-Payer Health Care on the campaign trail, June 29th 2008), are backing away from Single-Payer. Obviously, something is wrong when major changes to the ridiculous Medicare Part D have yet to come about.
Within his first hundred days, President Obama could have reversed the rule that disallowed the government from negotiating with drug companies.
Apparently “Yes We Can” didn’t actually mean “Yes We Will.”
Editor's Note: Bill Maher got it right, twice in a row, in his New Rules. They are posted below in Tid Bits: New Rules.
We must let our representatives know: If a Republican wants to get re-elected, vote YES on Single-Payer Health Care. If a Democrat wants to get re-elected, vote YES on Single-Payer Health Care. If an Independent wants to get re-elected, vote YES on Single-Payer Health Care.
Health care to be true health care must be non profit. The bottom line for any profit based industry is profit. This is a simple fact. True health care must be non profit.
We can do this. We just have to get on the phones, write letters, write emails, and keep on our representatives. We can do this.
Debunk This!
· The US has the best health care system in the world.
This is pure bunk. Flag waving chauvinists constantly tell us: “We’re number one! We’re number one,” even if we’ve done nothing to prove it or earn it.
The American health care system is the most expensive system in the world, yet the World Health Organization ranks us 34th in the world.
In infant mortality, out of the 33 industrialized nations, we’re right at the bottom.
Chauvinists who proclaim that our modern medicine is why the average longevity in America grows each year are blowing smoke; in the past two years, our longevity figures have begun to shrink.
· Government takeover of health care.
The far right likes to play with words. They took the Inheritance Tax and renamed it the Death Tax. Smart move. Most Americans will never see an inheritance, but they’ll see death, and suddenly more people are worried about this tax that won’t ever affect them.
“Single-payer” has become “Government Takeover,” and that sounds really bad. The government “paying” for health care doesn’t sound that bad; but the government taking over health care; well, we all know that’s bad.
I heard a Republican ask the other day if we wanted the government bureaucracy that brought us Katrina bringing us health care.
I always smile when a Republican is stupid enough to bring up Katrina. So let’s look at the myth he’s trying to promulgate:
· Government bureaucracy is always inefficient.
The implication of this statement is that private corporations are much more efficient than government agencies. This has led to privatization. However, privatization is just another term for profitization, and there goes all the savings a private corporation could ever have over government agencies.
Yes, we all know about government bureaucracy. We’ve all stood in line at the DMV. We all know the stories of the military handing out winter clothes in the summer. But for every person who’s ever stood in line at the DMV, there are 1000 elderly getting their Social Security checks on time from a government agency, delivered to these people by another government agency, the post office. For every soldier who’s ever gotten winter clothing in the summer time, there are thousands of hungry children getting hot meals because of a government agency. Yes, bureaucracy can be inefficient, but the only thing single-payer will change, once again, is who pays. The government pays. That’s it.
Ironically, the bureaucracy and paperwork of private insurance now eats up 30% of our health care dollars.
A “streamlined” single-payer system can save more than $350 billion yearly. Take the profit out of the system, and the savings is mind boggling.
· Higher taxes, longer waits, rationed care, substandard care.
We’re going have to take these one at a time.
Higher taxes: perhaps. Taxes might go up, but insurance rates will drop. It’s a wash.
Sadly, because the previous administration took the tax burden off the wealthy and heaped it onto the backs of the middle class, it is the middle class who have been paying for the war in Iraq. England realized a very simple concept: if we can pay to kill people, we should be able to pay to heal people.
We truly need to put the tax burden on the shoulders of those who have received the most from society. They should be paying for our health care, especially since we’ve paid for “their” war.
As for higher costs, in the long run, universal health care in the US will be so much cheaper, especially for businesses. New businesses will be able to start up while existing businesses can flourish. People will become more mobile; they’ll be able to leave an existing job and hunt for a better, more suitable job knowing they can’t lose their health care.
Longer waits: interviews and polls from Canada, Sweden, England, France, etc. all show that the wait times after incorporating single-payer got shorter. Why? because the average wait time in the emergency rooms just went down.
Have you ever had to go to urgent care? I took a friend in with a migraine. We waited over an hour and a half.
Yes, some systems have seen a slow down, but I happen to be a recipient of socialized health care already from the Veterans Administration, and I’ve also visited an HMO.
Since they’ve streamlined the VA, I’ve never waited more than five minutes past my appointment time to see my physician. My one trip to an HMO I waited 45 minutes past the scheduled appointment to see the doctor. So much for that myth.
Rationed Care: this was debunked on a recent Bill Moyers Journal when he interviewed two physicians. They both agreed that we have enough medical care in the country to handle everyone for a long time. They admitted that somewhere down the line, as the population grows, we might have to do something, but right now, every patient will get the care they need, and NO insurance man will stand in the way.
Substandard Care: we are told by many that when they were in the military they got substandard care. It’s funny, sitting in a temporary building in need of painting, how the care just seems substandard to having your own hospital room with cable TV and hot and cold running nurses.
I have never in my life received substandard care in a military of veteran’s hospital. In fact, I’ve received better and faster care than when I spent $300 to visit a doctor friend of mine at an HMO.
· Universal healthcare would be exactly that. If Republicans point out that any universal healthcare scheme would include heroin addicts, meth heads and others who brought their health problems on themselves through poor individual decisions, independents and moderates would reconsider supporting Obama's plan. Who likes the idea of their tax dollars being spent on the health of junkies?
Funny thing, but we already pay for junkies. We pay to have them hunted down, arrested, jailed, rehabilitated, and then the spiral starts over. We are already paying for them.
Sadly, the war on drugs is a waste of time and money. In countries where drugs have been either decriminalized or legalized, drug usage just goes down, and the costs to the taxpayers shrinks dramatically.
Every single objection to single-payer Health Care is a bogus argument FINANCED by the industries that stand to lose TRILLIONS. This is a simple fact, and sadly, everyone in Washington, including our president, has been paid off.
And the really good thing about Single-Payer Health Care is if you want to pay for your own doctor on your own time at your own convenience, you can. Nobody is stopping you.
From the Los Angeles Times
Under the plan, negotiated primarily by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), hospitals would accept $155 billion in cuts if the administration and its congressional allies succeeded in extending health insurance to tens of millions of people who are now without coverage.
And...
In June, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America announced that its members would provide $80 billion worth of discounts on medications for seniors and others who rely on government health insurance programs such as Medicare.
These negotiations are very telling. The health care industry is admitting that they have been ripping off the American public to the tune of billions.
Profit driven medicine has created the most expensive, and most dysfunctional health care system in the world. Our system is ranked 37th in the world today and yet we pay the most.
According to the Consumer's Union, "Right now, [the health care industry is] spending $1.4 million per day on lobbyists to make sure your Senators hear exactly why they need more of your health care dollars."
What to do? Grass Roots!
We make the next election a SINGLE ISSUE election. Thirty-nine million voting age adults lack health insurance. Millions more have health insurance they cannot afford. Millions more are underinsured. Millions upon millions have been turned down for procedures they need. Hundreds of thousands have died because they had health insurance but could not get the procedures they need.
The majority of Americans want single-payer Health Insurance. This is a fact. The majority of health care workers want single-payer.
The problem is money. Our representatives will not have enough money to get re-elected and represent us if they support single-payer.
The New Revolution: Get out the vote!
In just 17 short months, every seat in the House will be up for re-election. Call your representative and tell them, firmly, respectfully, that you will support ONLY a candidate that is firmly behind single-payer. It’s that simple.
Get out, talk to neighbors, make sure everyone calls their representatives and candidates and make them completely aware that this next election is a SINGLE ISSUE election: single-payer, Universal Health Care and ultimately Campaign Finance Reform.
We need to push for public campaign financing and take the money out of the system of politics. We have to level the playing field, and this one issue, health care, has made it blindingly obvious that our representatives represent those who pay for their campaigns and not their constituents.
Seventy-three percent of Americans want a public option that will create Universal Health Care. The majority of physicians and nurses want Universal Health Care. The AMA doesn’t want Universal Health Care but they’ve not polled their doctors.
Six out of ten Americans are willing to pay more in taxes for Universal Health Care. Some think we should roll back the Bush Tax Cuts, but rolling back all the way to the Reagan Tax Cuts will not only pay for health care, it will begin to pay to rebuild our infrastructure.
But the Times/CBS poll found 85 percent of respondents wanted major healthcare reforms and most would be willing to pay higher taxes to ensure everyone had health insurance. An estimated 46 million Americans currently have no coverage. [Reuters]
The Democratic Party, the one that supposedly represents the little guy (there are more little guys than big guys in the world) holds the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Yet they tell us that single-payer is off the table because it won’t get enough support.
This is a bold faced lie. The only thing between us and Single-Payer, Universal Health Care right now is us. We must demand it. We must march in the streets. We must call each individual from Congress who is up for re-election and demand they put single-payer back on the table, or say good bye to Washington.
Throw the bums out. Throw Max Baucus out. Throw Barak Obama out. Throw out all those who refuse to represent the will of the people.
If single-payer goes away, we have only ourselves to blame.
HOLD YOUR GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PEOPLE.
Take five minutes out of your life and call your senators and representatives, and leave a note for Obama too. Here are the numbers to the White House switchboard. You can reach everyone who represents you from here: 800-828-0498, 800-614-2803 and 877-851-6437.
If you don't know your Senator, you can call this number, plug in your zip code, and they will send you to one, then call back and they'll send you to the other: 1-800-944-6762
Obama inspires, but some question toughness
Poll: Obama inspires, but some question toughness
By Paul Steinhauser CNN Deputy Political Director
Story Highlights
President Obama remains well-liked, but doubts arise about toughness, poll says
Fifty-three percent say Obama has clear plan for country
Half of responders say Democrats' control of Congress is good for country
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Obama still inspires confidence, but a new national poll indicates that the number of Americans who say he is a strong leader and tough enough to handle a crisis has dropped significantly over the past few months.
Seventy-two percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday believe Obama inspires confidence. That's down three percentage points from a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted in February.
Seven out of 10 also said the president is a strong and decisive leader. However, that figure is down 10 percentage points from the opening days of Obama's presidency. Sixty-four percent said that Obama is tough enough to handle a crisis, down nine percentage points from February.
"Although his rating as a strong leader has dropped, he still scores fairly well on that measure," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "But Obama's stand on the issues and his plans for the future appear to be his biggest weakness."
The poll suggests that 53 percent believe Obama has a clear plan for solving the country's problems, down 11 percentage points since February. Fifty-six percent said the president agrees with them on the issues they care about, down seven percentage points from February.
"The 56 percent figure is still a majority, but it contrasts poorly with the nearly eight in 10 who say they approve of Obama as a person," Holland added. "When it comes to personal characteristics, his strong suit is his ability to inspire confidence. That's not a bad thing for a president to have in tough economic times."
Half of those questioned said that the Democrats' control of Congress is good for the country. Forty-one percent believe it's a bad thing. The poll was conducted between June 26 and 28, with 1,026 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
By Paul Steinhauser CNN Deputy Political Director
Story Highlights
President Obama remains well-liked, but doubts arise about toughness, poll says
Fifty-three percent say Obama has clear plan for country
Half of responders say Democrats' control of Congress is good for country
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Obama still inspires confidence, but a new national poll indicates that the number of Americans who say he is a strong leader and tough enough to handle a crisis has dropped significantly over the past few months.
Seventy-two percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday believe Obama inspires confidence. That's down three percentage points from a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted in February.
Seven out of 10 also said the president is a strong and decisive leader. However, that figure is down 10 percentage points from the opening days of Obama's presidency. Sixty-four percent said that Obama is tough enough to handle a crisis, down nine percentage points from February.
"Although his rating as a strong leader has dropped, he still scores fairly well on that measure," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "But Obama's stand on the issues and his plans for the future appear to be his biggest weakness."
The poll suggests that 53 percent believe Obama has a clear plan for solving the country's problems, down 11 percentage points since February. Fifty-six percent said the president agrees with them on the issues they care about, down seven percentage points from February.
"The 56 percent figure is still a majority, but it contrasts poorly with the nearly eight in 10 who say they approve of Obama as a person," Holland added. "When it comes to personal characteristics, his strong suit is his ability to inspire confidence. That's not a bad thing for a president to have in tough economic times."
Half of those questioned said that the Democrats' control of Congress is good for the country. Forty-one percent believe it's a bad thing. The poll was conducted between June 26 and 28, with 1,026 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
LOAN BIZ A $102M FRAUD
LOAN BIZ A $102M FRAUD: DA
By DAREH GREGORIAN
July 9, 2009 --
A crooked mortgage brokerage house conspired with real-estate lawyers, appraisers and bank employees to scam banks out of $102 million, prosecutors said yesterday.
The alleged swindle, carried out by AFG Financial Group, is the largest such case for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office -- and DA Robert Morgenthau said the amount stolen may wind up doubling.
"We had to move now," Morgenthau said, because "we just couldn't let an enterprise like this continue."
The company and 13 people were indicted on charges including enterprise corruption, conspiracy and grand larceny. Another 12 -- including one of the crooked lawyers -- took guilty pleas, and most of those will get jail time, Morgenthau said.
The DA said the office's 10-month investigation into the Garden City, LI, company turned up a fraud lasting almost five years. He said the company was set up to be a criminal enterprise, and if it did any legitimate work, "it was by accident."
Morgenthau said the company hired people to find distressed residential properties in the metropolitan area, and "then engaged in a fraudulent scheme to steal millions of dollars from lending banks and elsewhere using sham sales of those properties."
The company hired recruiters to track down unwitting straw buyers for the properties, who were told they could make money on their investments and help distressed property owners at the same time, Morgenthau said.
AFG, meanwhile, arranged for mortgages for the buyers by turning in phony loan applications to the banks, and setting up bogus closings where everyone involved -- with the exception of the buyer -- was in on the scam, including the lawyers for the sellers and the buyers.
"Everybody was in on it," said another prosecutor, Andrew Kaufmann.
AFG would allegedly pocket the mortgage money, while the buyers would have their credit ruined when the mortgages were foreclosed by the banks.
"The sellers got bupkus [zilch]," said prosecutor Gary Fishman. "The sellers were ruined."
Most of the properties were overvalued, including one instance where an appraiser signed off on a vacant Bronx lot as being a $500,000, two-family home, Morgenthau said.
He noted that many of those involved in the scam were supposed to be "gatekeepers," and said it shows the need for massive regulatory reform.
Those indicted yesterday were charged with scamming $12 million in 19 transactions, but records seized by investigators show the company raked in well over $100 million.
AFG founders Aaron Hand, Eugene Culbreath and Eric Shields were arraigned last night. An employee of Countrywide Home Loans named Jeffrey Phelan was also indicted. Patrick Kuhl, an employee of New Century Mortgage Corp. -- which lost an estimated $32 million in the scam -- pleaded guilty to falsifying business records.
Other banks hit hard in the scam were Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo and Bank of America.
nypost.com
By DAREH GREGORIAN
July 9, 2009 --
A crooked mortgage brokerage house conspired with real-estate lawyers, appraisers and bank employees to scam banks out of $102 million, prosecutors said yesterday.
The alleged swindle, carried out by AFG Financial Group, is the largest such case for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office -- and DA Robert Morgenthau said the amount stolen may wind up doubling.
"We had to move now," Morgenthau said, because "we just couldn't let an enterprise like this continue."
The company and 13 people were indicted on charges including enterprise corruption, conspiracy and grand larceny. Another 12 -- including one of the crooked lawyers -- took guilty pleas, and most of those will get jail time, Morgenthau said.
The DA said the office's 10-month investigation into the Garden City, LI, company turned up a fraud lasting almost five years. He said the company was set up to be a criminal enterprise, and if it did any legitimate work, "it was by accident."
Morgenthau said the company hired people to find distressed residential properties in the metropolitan area, and "then engaged in a fraudulent scheme to steal millions of dollars from lending banks and elsewhere using sham sales of those properties."
The company hired recruiters to track down unwitting straw buyers for the properties, who were told they could make money on their investments and help distressed property owners at the same time, Morgenthau said.
AFG, meanwhile, arranged for mortgages for the buyers by turning in phony loan applications to the banks, and setting up bogus closings where everyone involved -- with the exception of the buyer -- was in on the scam, including the lawyers for the sellers and the buyers.
"Everybody was in on it," said another prosecutor, Andrew Kaufmann.
AFG would allegedly pocket the mortgage money, while the buyers would have their credit ruined when the mortgages were foreclosed by the banks.
"The sellers got bupkus [zilch]," said prosecutor Gary Fishman. "The sellers were ruined."
Most of the properties were overvalued, including one instance where an appraiser signed off on a vacant Bronx lot as being a $500,000, two-family home, Morgenthau said.
He noted that many of those involved in the scam were supposed to be "gatekeepers," and said it shows the need for massive regulatory reform.
Those indicted yesterday were charged with scamming $12 million in 19 transactions, but records seized by investigators show the company raked in well over $100 million.
AFG founders Aaron Hand, Eugene Culbreath and Eric Shields were arraigned last night. An employee of Countrywide Home Loans named Jeffrey Phelan was also indicted. Patrick Kuhl, an employee of New Century Mortgage Corp. -- which lost an estimated $32 million in the scam -- pleaded guilty to falsifying business records.
Other banks hit hard in the scam were Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo and Bank of America.
nypost.com
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
CIA Lied to Lawmakers
House Chairman Says CIA Lied to Lawmakers
By Tim Starks and Edward Epstein, CQ Staff
House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes has suggested Republicans would be well advised to avoid politicizing the intelligence authorizaton bill later this week in light of evidence that, he says, shows that the CIA “affirmatively lied to” the panel.
In a Tuesday letter to his committee’s top-ranking Republican, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, that was obtained by Congressional Quarterly, Reyes, D-Texas, wrote that the committee has recently received information that reveals significant problems with the intelligence agency’s reporting to the panel.
“These notifications have led me to conclude this committee has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to,” Reyes wrote.
Reyes did not describe or detail the alleged false or misleading statements to the committee.
“This agency and this director are committed to a candid dialogue with Congress,” said CIA spokesman George Little. “When Director Panetta believes something should be raised with the Hill, it gets done quickly and clearly. Our oversight committees recognize that.”
Republicans contend a provision of the fiscal 2010 bill (HR 2701) scheduled for floor action Thursday would modify congressional notification procedures to provide political cover for Speaker Nancy Pelosi . Such briefings are a sensitive political topic, because Republicans have repeatedly criticized Pelosi over what she knew and when about the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques and her assertion that the CIA “misled” Congress on that topic.
The executive branch is required by the National Security Act of 1947 to keep the House and Senate Intelligence committees “fully and currently” informed about intelligence activities.
“Like you, I was greatly concerned,” Reyes told Hoekstra, about what the committee learned on June 24 and another unspecified date from CIA Director Leon E. Panetta . “As you know, I have begun to take steps to gather information on the recent notifications,” Reyes wrote. “This may well lead to a full committee investigation. I believe that you share my concern, and I look forward to working on this issue with you.”
“We’re not going to respond to something so unprofessional as a letter that was slipped under the Republican staff director’s door after hours after everyone had gone home for the night,” said Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Hoekstra and Intelligence Committee Republicans. “It’s been two weeks since this [notification from Panetta] happened, per their letter, and they’ve not tried to have any conversations with the ranking member.”
The pending authorization bill would eliminate the executive branch’s right to decide when to brief the full Intelligence panels, as opposed to top committee and congressional leaders, on the most sensitive intelligence activities. Instead, Congress would set the ground rules for the so-called “Gang of Eight” briefings.
Democrats say the bill would tilt control over congressional oversight of intelligence from the executive branch to the legislative, but Republicans say the provision is poorly drafted and could prompt the executive branch to leave Congress in the dark.
Hoekstra said in a June 18 statement that committee Democrats were trying to assist Pelosi.
The CIA earlier gave lawmakers a document indicating that she was briefed on the use of harsh interrogation methods that she criticized the Bush administration for using. That prompted the Speaker to say the CIA “misled” Congress.
“As we go to the floor [with the authorization bill], I hope that we can focus on the merits of the legislation,” Reyes wrote. “I hope we can avoid questions of who knew what and when.
Reyes sent copies of his letter to Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner , D-Ohio
By Tim Starks and Edward Epstein, CQ Staff
House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes has suggested Republicans would be well advised to avoid politicizing the intelligence authorizaton bill later this week in light of evidence that, he says, shows that the CIA “affirmatively lied to” the panel.
In a Tuesday letter to his committee’s top-ranking Republican, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, that was obtained by Congressional Quarterly, Reyes, D-Texas, wrote that the committee has recently received information that reveals significant problems with the intelligence agency’s reporting to the panel.
“These notifications have led me to conclude this committee has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to,” Reyes wrote.
Reyes did not describe or detail the alleged false or misleading statements to the committee.
“This agency and this director are committed to a candid dialogue with Congress,” said CIA spokesman George Little. “When Director Panetta believes something should be raised with the Hill, it gets done quickly and clearly. Our oversight committees recognize that.”
Republicans contend a provision of the fiscal 2010 bill (HR 2701) scheduled for floor action Thursday would modify congressional notification procedures to provide political cover for Speaker Nancy Pelosi . Such briefings are a sensitive political topic, because Republicans have repeatedly criticized Pelosi over what she knew and when about the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques and her assertion that the CIA “misled” Congress on that topic.
The executive branch is required by the National Security Act of 1947 to keep the House and Senate Intelligence committees “fully and currently” informed about intelligence activities.
“Like you, I was greatly concerned,” Reyes told Hoekstra, about what the committee learned on June 24 and another unspecified date from CIA Director Leon E. Panetta . “As you know, I have begun to take steps to gather information on the recent notifications,” Reyes wrote. “This may well lead to a full committee investigation. I believe that you share my concern, and I look forward to working on this issue with you.”
“We’re not going to respond to something so unprofessional as a letter that was slipped under the Republican staff director’s door after hours after everyone had gone home for the night,” said Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Hoekstra and Intelligence Committee Republicans. “It’s been two weeks since this [notification from Panetta] happened, per their letter, and they’ve not tried to have any conversations with the ranking member.”
The pending authorization bill would eliminate the executive branch’s right to decide when to brief the full Intelligence panels, as opposed to top committee and congressional leaders, on the most sensitive intelligence activities. Instead, Congress would set the ground rules for the so-called “Gang of Eight” briefings.
Democrats say the bill would tilt control over congressional oversight of intelligence from the executive branch to the legislative, but Republicans say the provision is poorly drafted and could prompt the executive branch to leave Congress in the dark.
Hoekstra said in a June 18 statement that committee Democrats were trying to assist Pelosi.
The CIA earlier gave lawmakers a document indicating that she was briefed on the use of harsh interrogation methods that she criticized the Bush administration for using. That prompted the Speaker to say the CIA “misled” Congress.
“As we go to the floor [with the authorization bill], I hope that we can focus on the merits of the legislation,” Reyes wrote. “I hope we can avoid questions of who knew what and when.
Reyes sent copies of his letter to Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner , D-Ohio
Friday, July 03, 2009
MEDIA MATTERS update
Limbaugh's Off the Wall spin on Michael Jackson's death
Mama-Say-Mama-Saw-Mama-Would have to hear it to believe it. This one doesn't really need much of a setup.
While fans the world over mourn the passing of the King of Pop, the King of Talk, Rush Limbaugh, put the death of Michael Jackson this way: He "flourished under Reagan," "languished under Clinton/Bush, and died under Obama." Over on MSNBC, both David Shuster and Chuck Todd poked Limbaugh for his unsavory take on the tragedy, with Todd quipping, "It's always Reagan, right?"
Meanwhile, El Rushbo's pals over at Fox News knew exactly how to interpret the wall-to-wall coverage of Jackson's death. An actual Fox News chyron alleged a "cover-up" because the media were devoting more coverage to Jackson than cap-and-trade legislation. Lord, the fun one could have using this very rationale to pick apart the stories Fox chooses to cover. I guess when you're a hammer, everything is a ... wild conspiracy designed to frighten your audience and fan the flames of their paranoia.
Other major stories this week:
Ricci-ing for the absurd
Several weeks ago, conservatives took a first run at undermining the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. But their everything-and-the-kitchen-sink attack plan -- charging that she is an unqualified, Marxist, radical activist and a reverse racist/normal racist who is also, interestingly, far too empathetic to be on the Supreme Court -- fell flat under the weight of serious examination.
This week, however, offered another opportunity for media conservatives to revisit their central criticism: that Sotomayor's "wise Latina woman" comment was a window into the prejudicial soul of the judge who ruled against hard-working white firefighters (and a Hispanic firefighter) simply because they weren't black.
First, the facts. On Tuesday, ABC's Bob Woodruff misstated the crux of the case, reporting that Ricci v. DeStefano involved firefighters "passed over for promotion in favor of less qualified black candidates." In fact, no one was promoted over anyone else. Rather, the results of a test to determine which members of the New Haven Fire Department could receive promotions were thrown out because city officials were unhappy with a racial disparity in the results and stated they feared being sued for racial discrimination.
In the decision that Sotomayor joined denying en banc rehearing of the appeal of the district court's decision, Judge Barrington Parker -- a George W. Bush appointee -- wrote that "the City acted out of a concern that certifying the exam results would have an adverse impact on minority candidates" -- a view that fit cleanly within previous Supreme Court precedent. That decision was overturned by the 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court on Monday.
Instead of looking at the legal merits of the case, conservatives have drawn the conclusion that Sotomayor was actively seeking to promote African-American firefighters at the expense of everyone else. The Washington Times opined that the case showed how, "[i]n Judge Sotomayor's America, people are judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character." Investor's Business Daily chimed in as well: "The Supreme Court's overturning of high-court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's ruling in the New Haven firefighter case exposes what lies at the core of her misguided philosophy: stark racial favoritism."
Of course, Limbaugh, who has accused Sotomayor of racism on numerous occasions since her nomination was announced, was the most vocal: "Sonia Sotomayor was following her basic instinct: She is racist."
Most judges nominated by Democrats are accused by the right of being radicals, and Sotomayor is no different -- numerous efforts were made this week to portray the court's reversal of Ricci as proof of Sotomayor's inherent radicalism. But the fact of the matter is, four Supreme Court justices, including Justice David Souter, whom Sotomayor was nominated to replace, agreed with her -- a fact that conservatives have done their best to cover up.
A number of media conservatives subsequently claimed that the court had unanimously rejected Sotomayor's reasoning. Ed Whelan (who can't use The Google) and Kathryn Lopez of National Review Online started the trend ("9-0 Against Sotomayor"), followed quickly by Fox News' Laura Ingraham and Rush. Ingraham's Fox News colleague Sean Hannity wasn't far behind. In fact, while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent that "[o]rdinarily, a remand for fresh consideration would be in order" and that "I would not oppose a remand for further proceedings fair to both sides," she concluded, consistent with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which Sotomayor joined: "[W]hat this case does not present is race-based discrimination in violation of Title VII."
Furthermore, an article in Politico promoted the myth that a Supreme Court reversal is unusual, even though the court has reversed more than 60 percent of the federal appeals court cases it considered each year since 2004. In doing so, Politico was following The Washington Times, which had already argued that such an outcome would be an "extraordinary rebuke" of Sotomayor. It should come as no surprise, then, that Fox's Alexis Glick impartially described the ruling as "a major slap" to Sotomayor. And for MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, the whole episode showed that it isn't just Sotomayor who is out of touch: nearly half of the Supreme Court is, too.
When the AP and The New York Times failed to note false statements by Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, they revealed just how far-reaching the problematic reporting on Sotomayor has become. It's clear that plenty of work needs to be done to ensure that she will have a fair hearing when she finally comes before the Senate. At least Jonathan Capehart is bringing some rationality to the discussion.
Franken victory sparks conservative media panic-fest
This week, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Al Franken be officially certified as the winner of last fall's U.S. Senate election in the state. Shortly after the decision came down, former Sen. Norm Coleman conceded defeat, making it clear he wouldn't launch additional legal efforts to stop Franken from being seated.
Conservatives in the media were beside themselves. Franken, after all, made a handsome living sparring with the likes of Fox News, Limbaugh, and, perhaps most notably, Bill O'Reilly (still must see TV after all these years.)
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade -- or "brown-haired guy who isn't Steve Doocy," as Stephen Colbert would say -- epitomized the conservative media's response to the official Franken victory. First, he was "in denial," describing Franken as someone who "is barely sane." Then he confessed that "it hurt" to call Franken "a senator from Minnesota" and wondered about "who's safe now." He wasn't done quite yet -- he would go on to call Franken an "embarrassment," "hateful," "maniacal," "angry, evil," and a "bitter partisan."
Kilmeade was hardly alone at Fox. It seems the entire network was "in denial." Saying a lot more about himself than Franken, Glenn Beck said, "This is like having me in the Senate. ... [I]t shows that we've lost our minds."
Limbaugh wasn't too happy with Franken's win, either. He compared the Iranian recount to the Minnesota Senate recount and called Franken a "genuine lunatic" to boot. Clear Channel's Jim Quinn shared Rush's assessment, saying Franken had "stolen" the election while pegging ACORN as a likely culprit. Is there anything media conservatives won't blame on ACORN?
Proving once again that the real joke during this hyper-extended campaign was not the fact that a former comedian might win, but the way the media covered the long legal battle, Politico's Mike Allen claimed Franken prevailed because "[h]e shut his mouth, and when you are Al Franken, that's not easy to do," while MSNBC's Mike Barnicle said that it was "kind of a surprise" that Franken "behaved like a responsible adult."
The global warming whistleblower who wasn't
It's hard to believe, but some conservatives aren't convinced that global warming is real. In fact, some of them think it's a left-wing, anti-American conspiracy, nothing more than propaganda pushed by the liberal media and traitorous members of Congress, all in the hope of turning you into eco-slaves. Scared yet? So is Fox News' Dick Morris, who, when it comes to this issue, is apparently one-third sane.
It's no wonder, then, that the conservative media sighs with relief when somebody wakes up and tells the truth! Someone honest and courageous. Someone like Alan Carlin, a "legendary" EPA official and co-author of an internal document disproving global warming -- a document that the agency then "suppressed," presumably stomping on it with a Birkenstock.
According to the EPA's own records, Carlin is an economist, not a climate scientist -- something Fox's Steve Doocy and Gretchen Carlson ignored when they hosted him on Wednesday to discuss his work. Furthermore, the report he authored made a false and deceptive claim: that global temperatures "have declined for 11 years," a reality he said the EPA ignored. Fox News duly reported it as gospel, as did CBSNews.com, without context or correction.
In fact, the EPA did review Carlin's work and decided it was flawed. No wonder, as Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, described it as possessing "a number of basic flaws" and demonstrating a "complete lack of appreciation of the importance of natural variability on short time scales."
But who is a scientist like Schmidt to criticize someone who ... isn't a scientist? I mean, how about a little respect? Heck, even a reputable publication like The Washington Times says the earth is getting cooler. Let's not lose our heads here.
Mama-Say-Mama-Saw-Mama-Would have to hear it to believe it. This one doesn't really need much of a setup.
While fans the world over mourn the passing of the King of Pop, the King of Talk, Rush Limbaugh, put the death of Michael Jackson this way: He "flourished under Reagan," "languished under Clinton/Bush, and died under Obama." Over on MSNBC, both David Shuster and Chuck Todd poked Limbaugh for his unsavory take on the tragedy, with Todd quipping, "It's always Reagan, right?"
Meanwhile, El Rushbo's pals over at Fox News knew exactly how to interpret the wall-to-wall coverage of Jackson's death. An actual Fox News chyron alleged a "cover-up" because the media were devoting more coverage to Jackson than cap-and-trade legislation. Lord, the fun one could have using this very rationale to pick apart the stories Fox chooses to cover. I guess when you're a hammer, everything is a ... wild conspiracy designed to frighten your audience and fan the flames of their paranoia.
Other major stories this week:
Ricci-ing for the absurd
Several weeks ago, conservatives took a first run at undermining the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. But their everything-and-the-kitchen-sink attack plan -- charging that she is an unqualified, Marxist, radical activist and a reverse racist/normal racist who is also, interestingly, far too empathetic to be on the Supreme Court -- fell flat under the weight of serious examination.
This week, however, offered another opportunity for media conservatives to revisit their central criticism: that Sotomayor's "wise Latina woman" comment was a window into the prejudicial soul of the judge who ruled against hard-working white firefighters (and a Hispanic firefighter) simply because they weren't black.
First, the facts. On Tuesday, ABC's Bob Woodruff misstated the crux of the case, reporting that Ricci v. DeStefano involved firefighters "passed over for promotion in favor of less qualified black candidates." In fact, no one was promoted over anyone else. Rather, the results of a test to determine which members of the New Haven Fire Department could receive promotions were thrown out because city officials were unhappy with a racial disparity in the results and stated they feared being sued for racial discrimination.
In the decision that Sotomayor joined denying en banc rehearing of the appeal of the district court's decision, Judge Barrington Parker -- a George W. Bush appointee -- wrote that "the City acted out of a concern that certifying the exam results would have an adverse impact on minority candidates" -- a view that fit cleanly within previous Supreme Court precedent. That decision was overturned by the 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court on Monday.
Instead of looking at the legal merits of the case, conservatives have drawn the conclusion that Sotomayor was actively seeking to promote African-American firefighters at the expense of everyone else. The Washington Times opined that the case showed how, "[i]n Judge Sotomayor's America, people are judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character." Investor's Business Daily chimed in as well: "The Supreme Court's overturning of high-court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's ruling in the New Haven firefighter case exposes what lies at the core of her misguided philosophy: stark racial favoritism."
Of course, Limbaugh, who has accused Sotomayor of racism on numerous occasions since her nomination was announced, was the most vocal: "Sonia Sotomayor was following her basic instinct: She is racist."
Most judges nominated by Democrats are accused by the right of being radicals, and Sotomayor is no different -- numerous efforts were made this week to portray the court's reversal of Ricci as proof of Sotomayor's inherent radicalism. But the fact of the matter is, four Supreme Court justices, including Justice David Souter, whom Sotomayor was nominated to replace, agreed with her -- a fact that conservatives have done their best to cover up.
A number of media conservatives subsequently claimed that the court had unanimously rejected Sotomayor's reasoning. Ed Whelan (who can't use The Google) and Kathryn Lopez of National Review Online started the trend ("9-0 Against Sotomayor"), followed quickly by Fox News' Laura Ingraham and Rush. Ingraham's Fox News colleague Sean Hannity wasn't far behind. In fact, while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent that "[o]rdinarily, a remand for fresh consideration would be in order" and that "I would not oppose a remand for further proceedings fair to both sides," she concluded, consistent with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which Sotomayor joined: "[W]hat this case does not present is race-based discrimination in violation of Title VII."
Furthermore, an article in Politico promoted the myth that a Supreme Court reversal is unusual, even though the court has reversed more than 60 percent of the federal appeals court cases it considered each year since 2004. In doing so, Politico was following The Washington Times, which had already argued that such an outcome would be an "extraordinary rebuke" of Sotomayor. It should come as no surprise, then, that Fox's Alexis Glick impartially described the ruling as "a major slap" to Sotomayor. And for MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, the whole episode showed that it isn't just Sotomayor who is out of touch: nearly half of the Supreme Court is, too.
When the AP and The New York Times failed to note false statements by Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, they revealed just how far-reaching the problematic reporting on Sotomayor has become. It's clear that plenty of work needs to be done to ensure that she will have a fair hearing when she finally comes before the Senate. At least Jonathan Capehart is bringing some rationality to the discussion.
Franken victory sparks conservative media panic-fest
This week, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Al Franken be officially certified as the winner of last fall's U.S. Senate election in the state. Shortly after the decision came down, former Sen. Norm Coleman conceded defeat, making it clear he wouldn't launch additional legal efforts to stop Franken from being seated.
Conservatives in the media were beside themselves. Franken, after all, made a handsome living sparring with the likes of Fox News, Limbaugh, and, perhaps most notably, Bill O'Reilly (still must see TV after all these years.)
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade -- or "brown-haired guy who isn't Steve Doocy," as Stephen Colbert would say -- epitomized the conservative media's response to the official Franken victory. First, he was "in denial," describing Franken as someone who "is barely sane." Then he confessed that "it hurt" to call Franken "a senator from Minnesota" and wondered about "who's safe now." He wasn't done quite yet -- he would go on to call Franken an "embarrassment," "hateful," "maniacal," "angry, evil," and a "bitter partisan."
Kilmeade was hardly alone at Fox. It seems the entire network was "in denial." Saying a lot more about himself than Franken, Glenn Beck said, "This is like having me in the Senate. ... [I]t shows that we've lost our minds."
Limbaugh wasn't too happy with Franken's win, either. He compared the Iranian recount to the Minnesota Senate recount and called Franken a "genuine lunatic" to boot. Clear Channel's Jim Quinn shared Rush's assessment, saying Franken had "stolen" the election while pegging ACORN as a likely culprit. Is there anything media conservatives won't blame on ACORN?
Proving once again that the real joke during this hyper-extended campaign was not the fact that a former comedian might win, but the way the media covered the long legal battle, Politico's Mike Allen claimed Franken prevailed because "[h]e shut his mouth, and when you are Al Franken, that's not easy to do," while MSNBC's Mike Barnicle said that it was "kind of a surprise" that Franken "behaved like a responsible adult."
The global warming whistleblower who wasn't
It's hard to believe, but some conservatives aren't convinced that global warming is real. In fact, some of them think it's a left-wing, anti-American conspiracy, nothing more than propaganda pushed by the liberal media and traitorous members of Congress, all in the hope of turning you into eco-slaves. Scared yet? So is Fox News' Dick Morris, who, when it comes to this issue, is apparently one-third sane.
It's no wonder, then, that the conservative media sighs with relief when somebody wakes up and tells the truth! Someone honest and courageous. Someone like Alan Carlin, a "legendary" EPA official and co-author of an internal document disproving global warming -- a document that the agency then "suppressed," presumably stomping on it with a Birkenstock.
According to the EPA's own records, Carlin is an economist, not a climate scientist -- something Fox's Steve Doocy and Gretchen Carlson ignored when they hosted him on Wednesday to discuss his work. Furthermore, the report he authored made a false and deceptive claim: that global temperatures "have declined for 11 years," a reality he said the EPA ignored. Fox News duly reported it as gospel, as did CBSNews.com, without context or correction.
In fact, the EPA did review Carlin's work and decided it was flawed. No wonder, as Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, described it as possessing "a number of basic flaws" and demonstrating a "complete lack of appreciation of the importance of natural variability on short time scales."
But who is a scientist like Schmidt to criticize someone who ... isn't a scientist? I mean, how about a little respect? Heck, even a reputable publication like The Washington Times says the earth is getting cooler. Let's not lose our heads here.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Just Do It
There is much in the House cap-and-trade energy bill that just passed that I absolutely hate. It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic that we couldn’t do better. It is appalling that so much had to be given away to polluters. It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it.
Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.
Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.
More important, my gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.
Ditto if this bill passes. Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable. That ain’t beanbag.
Now that the bill is heading for the Senate, though, we must, ideally, try to improve it, but, at a minimum, guard against diluting it any further. To do that we need the help of the three parties most responsible for how weak the bill already is: the Republican Party, President Barack Obama and We the People.
This bill is not weak because its framers, Representatives Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, wanted it this way. “They had to make the compromises they did,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, “because almost every House Republican voted against the bill and did nothing to try to improve it. So to get it passed, they needed every coal-state Democrat, and that meant they had to water it down to bring them on board.”
What are Republicans thinking? It is not as if they put forward a different strategy, like a carbon tax. Does the G.O.P. want to be the party of sex scandals and polluters or does it want to be a partner in helping America dominate the next great global industry: E.T. — energy technology? How could Republicans become so anti-environment, just when the country is going green?
Historically speaking, “Republicans can claim as much credit for America’s environmental leadership as Democrats,” noted Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. “The two greatest environmental presidents in American history were Teddy Roosevelt, who created our national park system, and Richard Nixon, whose administration gave us the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.” George Bush Sr. signed the 1993 Rio Treaty, to preserve biodiversity.
Yes, this bill’s goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change. But it also contains significant provisions to prevent new buildings from becoming energy hogs, to make our appliances the most energy efficient in the world and to help preserve forests in places like the Amazon.
We need Republicans who believe in fiscal conservatism and conservation joining this legislation in the Senate. We want a bill that transforms the whole country not one that just threads a political needle. I hope they start listening to green Republicans like Dick Lugar, George Shultz and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I also hope we will hear more from President Obama. Something feels very calculating in how he has approached this bill, as if he doesn’t quite want to get his hands dirty, as if he is ready to twist arms in private, but not so much that if the bill goes down he will get tarnished. That is no way to fight this war. He is going to have to mobilize the whole country to pressure the Senate — by educating Americans, with speech after speech, about the opportunities and necessities of a serious climate/energy bill. If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.
And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.
Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.
Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.
More important, my gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.
Ditto if this bill passes. Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable. That ain’t beanbag.
Now that the bill is heading for the Senate, though, we must, ideally, try to improve it, but, at a minimum, guard against diluting it any further. To do that we need the help of the three parties most responsible for how weak the bill already is: the Republican Party, President Barack Obama and We the People.
This bill is not weak because its framers, Representatives Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, wanted it this way. “They had to make the compromises they did,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, “because almost every House Republican voted against the bill and did nothing to try to improve it. So to get it passed, they needed every coal-state Democrat, and that meant they had to water it down to bring them on board.”
What are Republicans thinking? It is not as if they put forward a different strategy, like a carbon tax. Does the G.O.P. want to be the party of sex scandals and polluters or does it want to be a partner in helping America dominate the next great global industry: E.T. — energy technology? How could Republicans become so anti-environment, just when the country is going green?
Historically speaking, “Republicans can claim as much credit for America’s environmental leadership as Democrats,” noted Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. “The two greatest environmental presidents in American history were Teddy Roosevelt, who created our national park system, and Richard Nixon, whose administration gave us the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.” George Bush Sr. signed the 1993 Rio Treaty, to preserve biodiversity.
Yes, this bill’s goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change. But it also contains significant provisions to prevent new buildings from becoming energy hogs, to make our appliances the most energy efficient in the world and to help preserve forests in places like the Amazon.
We need Republicans who believe in fiscal conservatism and conservation joining this legislation in the Senate. We want a bill that transforms the whole country not one that just threads a political needle. I hope they start listening to green Republicans like Dick Lugar, George Shultz and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I also hope we will hear more from President Obama. Something feels very calculating in how he has approached this bill, as if he doesn’t quite want to get his hands dirty, as if he is ready to twist arms in private, but not so much that if the bill goes down he will get tarnished. That is no way to fight this war. He is going to have to mobilize the whole country to pressure the Senate — by educating Americans, with speech after speech, about the opportunities and necessities of a serious climate/energy bill. If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.
And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
PALIN: It Came from Wasilla
Todd S. Purdum
Despite her disastrous performance in the 2008 election, Sarah Palin is still the sexiest brand in Republican politics, with a lucrative book contract for her story. But what Alaska’s charismatic governor wants the public to know about herself doesn’t always jibe with reality. As John McCain’s top campaign officials talk more candidly than ever before about the meltdown of his vice-presidential pick, the author tracks the signs—political and personal—that Palin was big trouble, and checks the forecast for her future.
The pattern is inescapable: she takes disagreements personally, and swiftly deals vengeance on enemies, real or perceived.
The crowds begin streaming into the Evansville Auditorium and Convention Centre a couple of hours before the arrival of the “special guest speaker” at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner on a soft Indiana spring evening—nearly 2,200 people in the banquet hall, 800 more in an adjacent auditorium watching the proceedings on a live video feed. The menu is thick slices of roast pork and red velvet cake, washed down with pitchers of iced tea, and when Sarah Palin finally enters, escorted by a phalanx of sheriff’s deputies and local police, she is mobbed. The organizers of the dinner, billed as “the largest pro-life banquet in the world,” have courted Palin for weeks with care packages of locally made chocolates, doughnuts, barbecue, and pastries, and she has requited by choosing Evansville, a conservative stronghold in southern Indiana, as the site of her first public speech outside Alaska in 2009. Like Richard M. Nixon, who chose the coalfield town of Hyden, Kentucky, for his first post-resignation public appearance, Palin has come to a place where she is guaranteed a hero’s reception. She is not only a staunch foe of abortion but also the mother of a boy, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome just a few months before John McCain chose Palin as his running mate. The souvenir program for this evening’s dinner is full of displays for local politicians and businesses, attesting to their pro-life bona fides. An ad for Hahn Realty Corporation reads, “If you need commercial real estate, call Joe Kiefer! Joe is pro-life and a proud supporter of the Vanderburgh County Right to Life.”
As Palin makes her way slowly across the crowded ballroom—dressed all in black; no red Naughty Monkey Double Dare pumps tonight—she is stopped every few inches by adoring fans. She passes the press pen, where at least eight television cameras and a passel of reporters and photographers are corralled, and spots a reporter for a local community newspaper getting ready to take a happy snap with his pocket camera. For a split second she stops, pauses, turns her head and shoulders just so, and smiles. She holds the pose until she’s sure the man has his shot and then moves on. A few minutes later, the evening’s nominal keynote speaker, the Republican Party’s national chairman, Michael Steele, who has been reduced to a footnote in the proceedings, introduces the special guest speaker as “the storm that is the honorable governor of the great state of Alaska, Sarah Palin!”
Poll: Who is the most powerful woman in the G.O.P.?
Just where that storm may be heading is one of the most intriguing issues in American politics today. Palin is at once the sexiest and the riskiest brand in the Republican Party. Her appeal to people in the party (and in the country) who share her convictions and resentments is profound. The fascination is viral, and global. Bill McAllister, until recently Palin’s statehouse spokesman, says that he has fielded (and declined) interview requests from France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Germany, Bulgaria, “and probably other countries I’ve forgotten about.” (Palin, keeping her distance from most domestic media as well, also declined to talk to V.F.). Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?
In the aftermath of the November election, the conventional wisdom among Palin’s supporters in the Republican establishment was that she should go home, keep her head down, show that she could govern effectively, and quietly educate herself about foreign and domestic policy with the help of a cadre of experienced advisers. She has done none of this. Rather, she has pursued an erratic course that, for her, may actually represent the closest thing there is to True North. Her first trip to Washington since the election was to attend the dinner of the Alfalfa Club, an elite group of politicians and businesspeople whose sole function is an annual evening in honor of a plant that would “do anything for a drink.” Some of her handlers first said she had accepted—though she then went on to decline—an invitation to speak at the annual June fund-raiser for the congressional Republicans. She created a political-action committee—Sarahpac—with the help of John Coale, a prominent Democratic trial lawyer. But just months into its existence the pac’s chief fund-raiser, Becki Donatelli, a veteran of Republican campaigns, suddenly quit. One person familiar with the situation told me that Donatelli could not stand dealing with Palin’s political spokeswoman in Alaska, Meghan Stapleton, who has drawn withering fire from Palin friends and critics alike for being an ineffective adviser. Also with Coale’s help, Palin formed the grandiosely named Alaska Fund Trust, to defray a reported half million dollars in legal expenses arising from a slew of formal ethics complaints against her in her home state—prompting yet another formal complaint, that the fund itself constitutes an ethical breach. Onetime supporters have become harsh critics. Walter Hickel, 89, a former two-term governor and interior secretary, and the grand old man of Alaska politics, who was co-chair of Palin’s winning gubernatorial campaign, in 2006, now washes his hands of her. He told me simply, “I don’t give a damn what she does.”
Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life—neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.
Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen.
Soon Palin will take a crack at her own story: she has signed a book contract for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum, and has chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir, which is to be published next year not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house, that may include supplemental material on faith. During the presidential campaign, Palin’s deep ignorance about most aspects of foreign and domestic policy provided her with a powerful political reason not to submit to interviews. The forthcoming book adds a powerful commercial reason.
Palin is a cipher by choice. When she chooses to reveal herself, what she reveals is not always the same thing as the truth. Her singular refusal to have in-depth conversations with the national media—even Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney, among the most saturnine political figures in modern American history, each submitted to countless detailed interviews over the years—has compounded the challenge of understanding who she really is. There has been Hollywood talk that Palin could star in a reality-TV show about running Alaska, but nothing has come of it yet. Recently, Palin did star in a week-long seriocomic feud with David Letterman over some of his borderline jokes. Meanwhile, she has begun sharing insights several times a day on Twitter, with chipper reports on her own doings and those of her husband, Todd, and the rest of what she calls the “first family.” “Look forward to today’s staff discussion re: my 3rd justice appt to highest court in 3 yrs. Supreme Court truly effects AK’s future,” reads one. And another: “Picking up my handsome little man to rtrn to Juneau, Trig got 1st haircut so my little hippie baby’s ready for AK sunshine on his shoulders.”
Little Shop of Horrors
The caricature of Sarah Palin that emerged in the presidential campaign, for good and ill, is now ineradicable. The swift journey from her knockout convention speech to Tina Fey’s dead-eyed incarnation of her as Dan Quayle with an updo played out in real time, no less for the bewildered McCain campaign than for the public at large. It is an ironclad axiom of politics that if a campaign looks troubled from the outside the inside reality is far worse, and the McCain-Palin fiasco was no exception. As in any sudden marriage of convenience in which neither partner really knows the other, there were bound to be bumps. Palin had been on the national Republican radar for barely a year, after a cruise ship of conservative columnists, including The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, had stopped in Juneau in 2007 and had succumbed to her charms when she invited them to the governor’s house for a luncheon of halibut cheeks. McCain had spent only a couple of hours in Palin’s presence before choosing her, and she had pointedly failed to endorse him after he clinched the nomination in March. The difficulties began immediately, with the McCain team’s delivery of the bad news that the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter Bristol, which was already common knowledge in Alaska and had been revealed to the McCain team at the last minute, could not be kept secret until after the Republican convention.
By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.” Many of the details that led to such assessments have remained obscure. But in a recent series of conversations, a range of people from the McCain-Palin campaign, including members of the high command, agreed to elaborate on how a match they thought so right ended up going so wrong.
The consensus is that Palin’s rollout, and even her first television interview, with ABC’s Charles Gibson, conducted after an awkward two-week press blackout to allow for intensive cramming at her home in Wasilla, went more or less fine, though it had its embarrassing moments (“You can’t blink,” Palin said, when Gibson asked if she’d hesitated to accept McCain’s offer) and was much parodied. At least one savvy politician—Barack Obama—believed Palin would never have time to get up to speed. He told his aides that it had taken him four months to learn how to be a national candidate, and added, “I don’t care how talented she is, this is really a leap.” The paramount strategic goal in picking Palin was that the choice of a running mate had to ensure a successful convention and a competitive race right after; in that limited sense, the choice worked. But no serious vetting had been done before the selection (by either the McCain or the Obama team), and there was trouble in nailing down basic facts about Palin’s life. After she was picked, the campaign belatedly sent a dozen lawyers and researchers, led by a veteran Bush aide, Taylor Griffin, to Alaska, in a desperate race against the national reporters descending on the state. At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small. By late September, when the time came to coach Palin for her second major interview, this time with Katie Couric, there were severe tensions between Palin and the campaign.
By all accounts, Palin was either unwilling, or simply unable, to prepare. In the run-up to the Couric interview, Palin had become preoccupied with a far more parochial concern: answering a humdrum written questionnaire from her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman. McCain aides saw it as easy stuff, the usual boilerplate, the work of 20 minutes or so, but Palin worried intently. At the same time, she grew concerned that her approval ratings back home in Alaska were sagging as she embraced the role of McCain’s bad cop. To keep her happy, the chief McCain strategist, Steve Schmidt, agreed to conduct a onetime poll of 300 Alaska voters. It would prove to Palin, Schmidt thought, that everything was all right.
Then came the near-total meltdown of the financial system and McCain’s much-derided decision to briefly “suspend” his campaign. Under the circumstances, and with severely limited resources, Schmidt and the McCain-campaign chairman, Rick Davis, scrapped the Alaska poll and urgently set out to survey voters’ views of the economy (and of McCain’s response to it) in competitive states. Palin was furious. She was convinced that Schmidt had lied to her, a belief she conveyed to anyone who would listen.
The next big milestone for Palin was the debate with Joe Biden, on October 2. An early rehearsal effort in Philadelphia found 20 people sitting in a stifling room with hundreds of sample questions on note cards. Palin just stared down, disengaged, non-participatory. A disaster loomed, so Schmidt made the difficult decision to leave campaign headquarters, in Virginia, and fly to McCain’s vacation retreat in Sedona, Arizona, where it was thought that Palin might be able to relax and recharge, and accept the assistance of a voice coach and a television coach. For three full days—at the height of the campaign—Schmidt dropped virtually all other business to help Palin prepare.
He also enlisted some extra help. By this point, Palin’s relations with Nicolle Wallace—a veteran of the Bush White House and a former CBS News analyst who had tried to help Palin get ready for the Couric interview, and whom Palin blamed for the result—were so strained that campaign aides cast about for someone who could serve as a calming presence: Palin’s horse whisperer. They settled on Mark McKinnon, a smart, funny, soft-spoken former Democrat from Texas. McKinnon had long admired McCain, and had begun the Republican primary season helping him out—though warning that he would never work against Obama in the general election. But now McKinnon, whose role in helping prepare Palin has not been previously reported, and who declined to elaborate on it to V.F., changed his mind and quietly signed on. Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide, says that McKinnon was picked because “he’s got a lovely manner You sort of want a guy who’s very easygoing, gives good advice, and doesn’t add to the natural nervousness.”
Palin worked hard, and the results were adequate. Palin’s winking “Can I call you Joe?” performance against Biden was nothing like a disaster. In fact, it seems to have emboldened her enough that the next day she openly voiced disagreement with the McCain team’s decision to pull out of active competition in Michigan. When orders or advice from McCain headquarters began to conflict with her own impulses, aides told me, she simply did what she wanted to do. “The problem was she came down from Alaska with basically Todd as a sort of trusted bellwether adviser,” one McCain friend says. “She was given this staff of 20. It was probably too big a staff. To be real honest with you, I don’t think she could figure out who to trust.” All the while, Palin was coping not only with the crazed life of any national candidate on the road but also with the young children traveling with her. Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.) Palin maintained only the barest level of civil discourse with Tucker Eskew, the veteran G.O.P. operative who had been made her chief minder. A third party had to shuttle between them to convey even the most rudimentary messages. “She started to hedge her bets,” the same McCain friend says. “Frequently, she would be concerned about how something would play in Alaska. What? You’re worried about your backside in Alaska when there are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent?” One longtime McCain friend and frequent companion on the trail was heard to refer to Palin as “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Election Night brought what McCain aides saw as the final indignity. Palin decided she would make her own speech at the ticket’s farewell to the faithful, at the Arizona Biltmore, in Phoenix. When aides went to load McCain’s concession speech into the teleprompter, they found a concession speech for Palin—written by Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, who had also been the principal drafter of her convention speech—already on the system. Schmidt and Salter told Palin that there was no tradition of Election Night speeches by running mates, and that she wouldn’t be giving one. Palin was insistent. “Are those John’s wishes?” she asked. They were, she was told. But Palin took the issue to McCain himself, raising it on the walk from his suite to the outdoor rally. Again the answer was no.
Polar Disorder
There is virtually nothing about Palin’s performance in the fall campaign that should have come as a surprise to John McCain. Had he really attempted to learn something about her before the fateful day of August 29, 2008, when he announced that she was his choice for running mate, he would easily have discerned all the traits that he belatedly came to know.
The narrative that the McCain campaign employed to explain Palin’s selection and to promote her qualifications—that she was a fresh-faced reformer who had taken on Alaska’s big oil companies and the corrupt Republican establishment, governing with bipartisan support—was never more than superficially true. In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”
The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.
So, of all the puzzling things that Sarah Palin told the American public last fall, perhaps the most puzzling was this: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”
Believe me, it is not.
But Sarah Palin herself is a microcosm of Alaska, or at least of the fastest-growing and politically crucial part of it, which stretches up the broad Matanuska-Susitna Valley, north of Anchorage, where she came of age and cut her political teeth in her now famous hometown, Wasilla. In the same way that Lyndon Johnson could only have come from Texas, or Bill Clinton from Arkansas, Palin and all that she is could only have come from Wasilla. It is a place of breathtaking scenery and virtually no zoning. The view along Wasilla’s main drag is of Chili’s, ihop, Home Depot, Target, and Arby’s, and yet the view from the Palins’ front yard, on Lake Lucille, recalls the Alpine splendor visible from Captain Von Trapp’s terrace in The Sound of Music. It is culturally conservative: the local newspaper recently published an article that asked, “Will the Antichrist be a Homosexual?” It is in this Alaska—where it is possible to be both a conservative Republican and a pothead, or a foursquare Democrat and a gun nut—that Sarah Palin learned everything she knows about politics, and about life. It was in this environment that her ambition first found an outlet in public office, and where she first tasted the 151-proof Everclear that is power.
The second thing McCain could have discovered about Palin is that no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is “conservative,” whatever that means, but she can be all over the lot in the articulation of her platform. In a June interview with Sean Hannity, she sounded like a New Dealer when she proudly proclaimed that “a share of our oil-resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources—imagine that.” In the next breath, sounding like a “starve the beast” conservative, she said she hoped the price of oil, the principal variable of state revenue, would not rise too much. “The fewer dollars that the state of Alaska government has, the fewer dollars we spend, and that’s good for our families and the private sector.” Palin has always been a party of one. She gained the mayoralty of Wasilla in 1996 by turning against the incumbent, John Stein, who had been one of her mentors when she was on the city council, and injecting sharply partisan issues such as gun rights and abortion into what had previously been a low-key local contest. She fired the police chief, eased out the museum director and the city planner, and fired and then rehired the librarian (who had opposed book censorship). Palin was entitled to make the dismissals, and she variously justified them on the grounds of budget difficulties or the need for a team that she could be sure would support her efforts. But the Frontiersman accused Palin of confusing her election with a “coronation.”
Even in broad outline the story of how a small-town mayor became the youngest governor in Alaska history seems improbable. There was her long-shot campaign for lieutenant governor, in 2002, in which she came in second against a veteran state senator in a five-way race; her appointment as chair (and ethics supervisor) of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees drilling and production; and her resignation from that post, charging that a fellow commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, the chair of the Alaska Republican Party, was conducting political business on state time. In a climate where the sitting Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, had become the most unpopular figure in the state, and where the F.B.I. was swarming over Alaska, pursuing the corruption probe that later ensnared the state’s senior U.S. senator, Ted Stevens, Palin seemed like a breath of fresh air.
Yet Palin herself cut corners. Ruedrich, Palin’s target on the Conservation Commission, was forced to resign, but in 2006, as Palin was beginning her campaign for governor, a conservative columnist dug up e-mail messages showing that she too had conducted campaign business from her mayoral office. Confronted by the columnist, Palin acknowledged that she had erred. Then she turned around and issued a press release, demanding to know why the columnist was publishing smears.
Palin won the crucial support of Walter Hickel in her campaign for governor in part by supporting one of his longtime hobbyhorses, an “all-Alaska” natural-gas pipeline that would pump gas to the port of Valdez for export worldwide. As the campaign wore on, Palin backed away from that idea. “I helped her out, she got elected,” Hickel says now. “She never called me once in her life after that.”
Palin’s 2006 campaign for governor relied at first almost wholly on a ragtag band of true believers. “She had this little grassroots group that was going around the state on a wing and a prayer, talking up her platitudes,” says John Bitney, an old friend of Palin’s from junior-high band in Wasilla, where he played the trombone and she played the flute. Bitney at the time was a lobbyist and veteran legislative aide in Juneau, and he began passing political intelligence and advice to Palin. When Palin routed Murkowski in the Republican primary, she still had no real professional campaign staff. Bitney signed on, forming a triumvirate with Curtis Smith, a veteran Anchorage media consultant, and Kris Perry, another old friend of Palin’s from Wasilla, who functioned as her personal assistant and also held the title of campaign manager. Palin began preparing for a general-election campaign against Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, a former Republican legislator who was running as an independent.
She apparently didn’t like preparing for debates back then either. “In the campaign for governor, they’re prepping her for debate,” Curtis Smith’s former business partner, Jim Lottsfeldt, told me recently in Anchorage, “and Curtis says, ‘The debate prep’s going horribly. Every time we try to help her with an answer, she just gets mad.’” (Smith himself says, “Unfortunately, I don’t recall having that exact conversation with Mr. Lottsfeldt, nor do I recall my experience, including debate prep, with Governor Palin in the light he portrayed.”) But Palin’s lack of knowledge turned out not to hurt her. Andrew Halcro later remembered that he and Palin once compared notes about their many encounters, and she said, “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”
Palin’s victory that November was one of the flukiest successes in modern American politics. Rebecca Braun, the publisher of the Alaska Budget Report, a respected nonpartisan newsletter, describes the result as something “far beyond anything you could explain in terms of intellect or training.” But Palin had promised three big things, and with the help of Bitney, who became her liaison with the legislature, and Mike Tibbles, her chief of staff, she achieved them. She increased oil taxes; she won the legislative framework for a gas pipeline, though not the one Hickel wanted; and she signed significant ethics reforms. In all three efforts she won strong cooperation from Democrats. “She had an easy go of it,” says Larry Persily, a former editorial-page editor of the Anchorage Daily News, who went to work in Palin’s Washington office but is now a critic of the governor’s. “The Democrats were in love with her. She slew the oil-company Gorgon, and came in on the magic carpet of oil-tax reform and ethics. The Democrats were intoxicated because she wasn’t Frank Murkowski.” Rising oil prices provided an added lift. Palin was able to increase the annual distribution from the state’s Permanent Fund to about $3,000 per resident, almost double the amount received the previous year. She could be a fiscal conservative and a big spender all at the same time.
But there were ominous signs—indications of an erratic nature. This is the third thing McCain could have discovered about Palin—a woman, after all, who kept a pregnancy secret for seven months, flew all the way home from Texas to Alaska with a near-full-term baby while leaking amniotic fluid, and then finally drove the 45 minutes from Anchorage to a hospital in Wasilla, all so that the child could be born in the 49th state. Palin was for the infamous Gravina Island “bridge to nowhere” before she was against it, and reversed herself only when such pork-barrel projects prompted a nationwide backlash. As governor, she hired several old high-school, hometown, or political friends with minimal qualifications for important state jobs. One friend, a former mid-level manager for Alaska Airlines, headed the department that reviewed candidates for state boards and commissions; another became director of the state Division of Agriculture, citing a childhood love of cows as one qualification. Palin communicated with legislators and her staff mainly by BlackBerry, sometimes using a personal e-mail account to avoid having to disclose documents under the state public-records laws. (The one time Meg Stapleton, who handles Palin’s personal and political public relations, ever answered multiple e-mails was when I wrote her and Palin’s gubernatorial office at the same time, and she replied: “Thank you for emailing. I will email you separately so as to remove us from the state account.”) Palin’s anti-politician stance had worked so well in her campaign that she carried it over into her dealings with actual politicians in Juneau, who didn’t take kindly to the practice. After one meeting between the governor and legislators in 2007, Lyda Green, then the president of the state senate, returned to her office to catch up on some paperwork. She caught Palin on the news. “And she comes on TV and says, ‘I want to once again confirm that neither I nor my staff ever holds closed-door meetings.’ Well, we had just been in a closed-door meeting for an hour and a half!” Representative Les Gara, an Anchorage Democrat who often worked with Palin, told me that he had at first thought that some of Green’s sharp criticism of Palin amounted to Republican infighting, or maybe just sour grapes that Wasilla had produced a new political figure whose star far outshone Green’s. But he came to realize, he said, that Green had a better handle on Palin than he did. “She didn’t work very hard. You would speak to her on particular issues, and it was like she didn’t know anything about them and she never seemed very engaged.” That said, “if your priorities happened to be her priorities, you could build a coalition.”
On the other hand, if your priorities happened to differ from hers, you could pay a terrible price. Only weeks after Palin praised John Bitney for doing so much to make her first legislative session a success, she summarily fired him—because, he says, he had had the bad luck to fall in love with the wife of one of the Palins’ best friends (a woman he has since married). At the time, Palin’s office cited what it called “personal” reasons for an “amicable” departure. But when The Wall Street Journal called Palin’s office during last fall’s presidential campaign to ask about the case, a spokeswoman for Palin said that Bitney had been “dismissed because of his poor job performance,” and refused to elaborate.
Not quite a year after Bitney’s departure, Mike Tibbles abruptly resigned as chief of staff, for reasons that neither he nor Palin has ever explained. Jim Lottsfeldt, a friend of Tibbles’s, says that the chief of staff was worn down “by the steady drumbeat of her not consulting with him.” She replaced Tibbles with Mike Nizich, a part-time taxidermist, who over 30 years had served seven governors of both parties, most of that time as director of the state Division of Administration—a man who made the trains run on time in the governor’s office but had nothing to do with policy issues. Palin’s effectiveness was never again the same. The brutal reality is that many people who have worked closely with Palin have found themselves disillusioned.
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
Perhaps no episode of Palin’s governorship has drawn more attention than the one that came to be known as Troopergate. For more than a year of her tenure as governor, Palin and her husband and aides repeatedly and aggressively complained to Walt Monegan, the former Anchorage police chief whom Palin had named to head the state’s Department of Public Safety, about Mike Wooten, a state trooper who had been involved in a messy divorce from Palin’s sister Molly. Wooten was no angel. Before Palin ever took office, he had been disciplined after drinking beer in his patrol car, Tasering his stepson, illegally shooting a moose, and making threatening remarks about Palin’s father. But Wooten had already been disciplined, and Monegan believed that further action was unjustified if not impossible. The final straw may have been Monegan’s June 30, 2008, e-mail warning to Palin that an unnamed state legislator had complained that she’d been seen driving with her newborn son, and that the infant had not been strapped into an approved car seat. “I have never driven Trig anywhere without a new, approved car seat,” Palin fired back. “I want to know who said otherwise—pls. provide me that info now.” Twelve days later, Nizich fired Monegan on Palin’s orders. Forty-nine days after that, John McCain announced that Palin would join him on the ticket.
Arrows in the Back
In Alaska, there has never been a gubernatorial tradition of pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving, but Palin decided to stage such a ceremony last November all the same, at the Triple D Farm & Hatchery, outside Wasilla. After granting the lucky bird its reprieve, she stopped to talk to a local television reporter about what she had learned in the campaign just concluded. “I don’t think it’s changed me at all,” she insisted, clutching a cup of coffee as her breath steamed into the frosty air. “You know, it’s pretty brutal, the time consumption there, and the energy that has to be spent in order to get out and about with the message on a national level, a great appreciation for other candidates who have gone through this, but also just a great appreciation for this great country. There are so many good Americans who are just desiring of their government to kind of get out of the way and allow them to grow and progress, and allow our businesses to grow and progress. So, great appreciation for those who share that value.”
As Palin spoke, a grisly scene unfolded behind her. A worker hefted one squirming white turkey after another into a metal funnel, slit its throat, and bled it out in full view of the camera. The clip was replayed tens of thousands of times on YouTube and seemed an all too apt metaphor for how Palin’s political fortunes had changed in the wake of her great national adventure, even if her personality had not. A career that thrived for years on extraordinarily good luck seems to have known nothing but trouble since November 4. In December, Bristol Palin gave birth to Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, her son with her boyfriend, Levi Johnston, and for a time there was talk of a wedding. But by early spring the couple had split up, and their families fell to trading charges on talk shows and in the tabloids. After Levi told Tyra Banks that he had often spent the night in the Palin home, in the same room as Bristol, and assumed that the governor knew they were having sex, Palin, through her spokeswoman, released a blistering statement expressing disappointment “that Levi and his family, in a quest for fame, attention, and fortune, are engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion of their relationship.” On the CBS Early Show, days later, Johnston seemed resigned. “They said I didn’t live there. I ‘stayed there,”’ he said. “I was like, O.K., well, whatever you want to call it. I had my stuff there.” Although Bristol initially told Greta Van Susteren that teen abstinence is “not realistic at all,” by springtime she had signed up as an ambassador for the Candie’s Foundation to promote abstinence as the way to avoid teen pregnancy.
Meantime, Levi’s mother, Sherry, agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of possessing OxyContin with intent to sell it, in exchange for the state’s agreement to drop five other drug-related charges against her. Her lawyer has conceded that she will draw an automatic jail sentence, but hopes to minimize the time she spends behind bars, because she suffers from chronic pain. In April, Todd Palin’s half-sister Diana was arrested on charges of twice breaking into a house in Wasilla to steal money from a bedroom cabinet, under circumstances that remain unexplained.
Because Palin had taken particular umbrage in the fall campaign at any effort to criticize her children or invade their privacy, her willingness to mix it up in public with an 18-year-old, who is after all the father of her only grandchild, struck many in Alaska as odd. So did Palin’s suggestion, at a time when declining oil prices have thrown the state budget into the red, that she did not want to accept about a third of the $930 million in federal stimulus money available to Alaska, because it would come with too many big-government strings attached. The move seemed calculated to burnish her national conservative credentials. In the face of bipartisan outcry, Palin’s aides insisted she had never meant to say she wouldn’t take the money, only that she wanted to review the matter carefully. That was news to former aide Larry Persily. After the first meeting on the stimulus money, Persily told me, “Everyone in the room left thinking she’d said no. Then her staff said, ‘She didn’t say no. She just didn’t say yes.”’ Palin wound up taking all but about 3 percent of the $900 million available to Alaska. The consensus even among the Republicans I spoke to was that she rejected the last $28 million—for energy assistance—mostly to save face.
The ever shifting sands of Palin’s sensibility were also on display after former senator Ted Stevens’s conviction on corruption charges was set aside, in April. Palin’s old nemesis, the Alaska Republican Party chair Randy Ruedrich, called on Stevens’s Democratic successor, Mark Begich, who had defeated Stevens just days after the original conviction last fall, to step down and allow a new election. Palin told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in an e-mail, “I absolutely agree.” Days later, at a news conference, Palin insisted she had never called on Begich to step down.
Perhaps nothing has caused a bigger stir than Palin’s nomination of Wayne Anthony Ross to be Alaska’s attorney general. Ross is a two-time gubernatorial candidate and a board member of the National Rifle Association. He had sown controversy over the years by referring to gays and lesbians as “degenerates” (he later sought to downplay the remark, saying his aversion to homosexuals was no different from his aversion to lima beans) and for staunchly opposing subsistence-hunting preferences for native Alaskans. A flamboyant divorce lawyer who drives a big red Hummer with the vanity license plate war, Ross is a good old boy of pithy expression and considerable charm. (“In Alaska,” Ross told me, “a liberal is someone who carries a .357 or smaller.”) The final vote against Ross—with the Republican leaders of both chambers joining to defeat him—came just as Palin was speaking in Evansville. It was the first time in Alaska history that a cabinet nominee was rejected. “If I wince a little, it’s from the arrows in my back,” Ross told me a few weeks later. “I think there were a number of people who were trying to show her who the boss was.”
A year ago, 80 percent of Alaskans viewed Palin very favorably or somewhat favorably; by this spring, just 55 percent had a positive opinion. All this has given rise to speculation in Alaska that Palin may not run for re-election next year. She does not have to declare her candidacy until June 2010. Most politicians of both parties in Alaska with whom I spoke assume she could win, though not as persuasively as she did in 2006, which would hardly help her standing in a 2012 presidential campaign. Though Palin’s spokeswoman has said she does not intend to challenge Senator Lisa Murkowski, the former governor’s daughter, who is also up for re-election next year, Palin has changed her mind without warning in the past, and becoming a senator would keep her in the national spotlight. Surveying the landscape of political and policy troubles in Alaska, Gregg Erickson, an independent economic consultant in Juneau, concludes, “Everything she’s doing seems to be saying that there’ll be a problem in the future owing to her inattention, but she won’t be here to deal with it.”
“Just Make It All Go Away”
As Palin has piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. “You nailed it.” Another key McCain aide summed up his attitude this way: “I guess it’s sort of shifted,” he said. “I always wanted to tell myself the best-case story about her.” Even now, he said, “I don’t want to get too negative.” Then he added, “I think, as I’ve evaluated it, I think some of my worst fears … the after-election events have confirmed that her more negative aspects may have been there … ” His voice trailed off. “I saw her as a raw talent. Raw, but a talent. I hoped she could become better.”
None of McCain’s still-loyal soldiers will say negative things about Palin on the record. Even thinking such thoughts privately is painful for them, because there is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired—and as reflecting, too, an unsettling willingness on their own part to aid and abet him. They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job. To ask why none of them dared to just walk away is to ask why Colin Powell did not resign in protest over the Bush administration’s foreign policy, or why none of Bill Clinton’s disillusioned aides resigned after he lied to them about Monica Lewinsky. The question cannot comprehend the intense bonds that the blood sport of modern politics produces. To leave a campaign—especially a struggling, losing campaign—is akin to desertion in wartime, and even as they began to understand her limitations, plenty of McCain aides still saw Palin as the campaign’s best hope. Some still believe that, simply in terms of the electoral math, she helped at least as much as she hurt, and maybe helped more.
McCain has delivered his own postmortem on Palin with the patented brand of winking-and-nodding ironic detachment that he usually reserves for painful political questions, an approach that simultaneously seeks to confess his sin and presume absolution for it. In November, he told Jay Leno he was proud of Palin and did not blame her for his defeat, but by April, when Leno asked him about who was running the Republican Party, McCain declined to mention Palin: “We have, I’m happy to say, a lot of choices out there: Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, Huntsman, Romney, Charlie Crist—there’s a lot of governors out there who are young and dynamic.” McCain went on, “There’s a lot of good people out there, and I’ve left out somebody’s name and I’m going to hear about it.” When I ask Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter and co-author, about that comment, he says simply, “McCain always talks unscripted,” and adds that he has heard “not one word of regret” about Palin ever pass McCain’s lips. McCain’s daughter Meghan, who has continued the blog she began on the campaign last year, has said that Palin is the one topic on which she will have no public comment.
Palin herself has alternately shied away from the spotlight and injected herself into public debate on questions dear to conservatives, as she did when she issued a statement defending the former Miss California, Carrie Prejean, for opposing gay marriage despite “the liberal onslaught of malicious attacks.” Palin’s speech in Evansville was her first major post-election foray into the national media, and she followed it up in June with a trip to New York State, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Alaska’s entry into the union, visiting Auburn, the hometown of William H. Seward, who bought the Alaska territory from Russia, and making appearances at events supporting families with autism and developmental disabilities. But the biggest headlines the trip produced were those about Palin’s feud with David Letterman, who joked that Palin had gone to Bloomingdale’s to update her “slutty flight-attendant look” and made a tasteless sexual jibe about one of the Palin daughters. Letterman eventually apologized, though Palin fanned the flames in ways that were not necessarily to her advantage.
In Evansville, though, Palin concentrated on the task at hand: an emphatic defense of the anti-abortion cause. But in doing so she made a startling confession about what she thought when she learned she was pregnant at 43 with her youngest child, Trig, who arrived in April 2008, as the world now knows, with Down syndrome. “I had found out that I was pregnant while out of state first,” Palin told the crowd. “While out of state, there just for a fleeting moment, I thought, Nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, Wow, it is easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances and no one would know—no one would ever know. Then when my amniocentesis results came back, showing what they called abnormalities—oh, dear God—I knew, I had instantly an understanding, for that fleeting moment, why someone would believe it could seem possible to change those circumstances, just make it all go away, get some normalcy back in life.” It is almost impossible not to be touched by the rawness of her confession, even if it is precisely this choice that Palin believes no other woman should ever have, not even in the case of rape or incest.
Sarah Palin is a star in Evansville and all the many Evansvilles of America, but there is a big part of the Republican Party—the Wall Street wing, the national-security wing—in which she cuts no ice. At the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, Palin essentially came in tied for second with Governor Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana, and Representative Ron Paul, of Texas, with 13 percent support in a straw poll of potential 2012 presidential candidates; former governor Mitt Romney, of Massachusetts, got 20 percent. A more recent survey has Palin in a three-way tie with Romney and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. She could do well in the Iowa caucuses or South Carolina primary, but it is much harder to imagine her making headway in New Hampshire, where independent voters were turned off by her last fall. It is also difficult to see just how she would expand her appeal beyond the base that already loves her.
In Alaska, almost everyone I met wondered who was advising her in Washington—and in Washington, everyone wonders the same thing. There are one or two clues. On the eve of the Alfalfa dinner, in January, Palin was a guest in the home of Fred Malek, a veteran Republican fund-raiser and government official dating back to the days of the Nixon administration. Malek raised money for McCain’s campaign last year, and also agreed to play host to a fund-raising dinner for Republican governors in early May. (Palin was to have been an honored guest, but canceled owing to spring flooding in Alaska.) As noted, Palin has established a political-action committee with the legal advice of John Coale, who met Palin when his wife, Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News host, went to interview her during the campaign. Coale, a former Hillary Clinton supporter, told me he felt Palin had gotten a bum rap from liberals and conservatives alike, and he advised her that a pac was a logical and legal way to pay for out-of-state political travel. “We raised a good bit of money without even asking,” Coale says. “Just set up a Web site and, I think in the first month, $400,000 came in.” Coale says he still exchanges e-mails with Palin from time to time, but doesn’t consider himself a political adviser; he also says that Van Susteren has “put up a Chinese wall about all of this,” and has obtained her interviews with the Palins independently. Since the campaign ended, Van Susteren has interviewed Palin twice more, but she says she has never had a conversation with Palin off-camera, except for when Palin called to rescind her acceptance of Van Susteren’s invitation to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in May, because of the Alaska flooding. Todd Palin came solo as Van Susteren’s guest, and when a reporter for Politico sought to interview him at a pre-dinner brunch attended by hundreds of journalists, Van Susteren interposed herself, as in the manner of a staffer, to say it was a social event. Van Susteren told me she was just trying to exercise good manners.
Palin’s closest adviser remains her husband—the “first gentleman” or “first dude,” as she calls him. Testimony in the Troopergate investigation suggested that Todd was physically in the governor’s office for about 50 percent of the time, often sitting in on meetings or phone calls in which he had no obvious official function. By the end of last fall’s campaign, McCain’s friends had picked up word that Todd was calling around to Republicans in South Carolina, urging them to keep his wife in mind for 2012—the implication being that the Palins believed McCain was about to lose. This spring, he stood in for Palin at an event in Manhattan—at Alaska House in SoHo, the cultural antipode of Wasilla—promoting the Alaska commercial-fishing industry’s contributions to world food aid. In a brief prepared speech, he extolled Alaska salmon as “some of the world’s healthiest protein, rich in vitamins and minerals, and a source of omega-3 fats.”
“She doesn’t at all have anyone who’s willing to give it to her straight,” one person who occasionally advises Palin told me. Todd may be the one exception. “I saw nobody else like that, nobody who would sit her down and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’” He added, of the poor communications operation run by Stapleton, “I don’t know what part Sarah Palin plays in the lack of communications, but I don’t think she’s aware of how big a problem it is.”
And her national ambitions? “What it looks like to me she’s trying to do is try the same formula that got her the governorship,” John Bitney says. “You sort of start off with a conservative base. The right-wing base is obviously out on the far end of the spectrum, but it’s a very motivated base. They show up, they’re committed. It gets you that political beachhead. She did not get started with the blessing of the Republican Party. She started with a dedicated corps of sort of right-wing true believers who killed themselves for her, and got her going. And then she began to build on that, and after she crossed the primary hurdle, she moderated her message on some points.”
When I ask Bitney what he makes of the whole Palin phenomenon, he sighs. “What do I take away from this?” he asks. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s just a lot of emotions and stuff. I find it’s frustrating dealing with Sarah, because it seems we’re always dealing with emotional crap and we never seem to be able to focus on the business at hand that needs to be done. I don’t know whether to blame her or pity her for all this emotional upheaval that we’re always going through with her. Now we all get to listen to Levi and Bristol. Check my feet for horseshoes if I have to sit there and listen to another talk show. I got involved in helping her become governor because we needed to change some policy directions. Teen abstinence is not why I waved signs for her.”
Palin herself often sounds tired and resentful these days, as if wondering whether she should have blinked and just said no to John McCain. In a rambling, 17-minute speech introducing Michael Reagan, the former president’s son and a conservative radio host at an event in Alaska in June—a speech that borrowed heavily, without clear attribution, from a four-year-old article by Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Craig Shirley—Palin seemed resigned to the fact that her reputation would never again be as fresh and glowing as it once was. She complained about “national figures and some in the press who, who want to put not just me, but anybody who dares speak up, it seems nowadays, right back down in their place.” She bemoaned her changing fortunes in Alaska. “I think things here that have so drastically changed these past months … Some want to forbid others from speaking up, and it’s been through lawsuits, been ethics-violation charges, media distortions And those are the folks who want to tell me, they want to tell you to sit down and shut up. We will not do so. I just can’t because I love my state, I love my country, and I need you, we need Michael Reagan to keep on fighting for our freedoms, for our country, and what we’re being fed today, it seems, is a steady diet of selected misrepresented news So I join you in speaking up and asking the questions and taking action, and here at home in my beloved Alaska, I just say, politically speaking, if I die, I die.”
Poll: Who is the most powerful woman in the G.O.P.?
Palin has disappointed many of those who once had the highest hopes for her. She has stumbled over innumerable details. But as she said to Andrew Halcro years ago, “Does any of this really matter?” Palin has shown herself to have remarkable gut instincts about raw politics, and she has seen openings where others did not. And she has the good fortune to have traction within a political party that is bereft of strong leadership, and whose rank and file often demands qualities other than knowledge, experience, and an understanding that facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things. It is, at the moment, a party in which the loudest and most singular voices, not burdened by responsibility, wield disproportionate power. She may decide that she does not need office in order to have great influence—any more than Rush Limbaugh does.
On a rare fine day in Juneau, not long ago, Palin was seen sitting in the sunshine in the broad plaza near the state capitol, alone with her thoughts and some reading material for more than an hour and a half. Down the hillside below her, the big cruise liners that ply Alaska’s Inside Passage in the summer months were beginning to call in the port. Only two years have elapsed since William Kristol and his colleagues disembarked from one of them and hearkened to her siren call. Sarah Palin might well have been wondering whether her own ship is going out, or just coming in.
Despite her disastrous performance in the 2008 election, Sarah Palin is still the sexiest brand in Republican politics, with a lucrative book contract for her story. But what Alaska’s charismatic governor wants the public to know about herself doesn’t always jibe with reality. As John McCain’s top campaign officials talk more candidly than ever before about the meltdown of his vice-presidential pick, the author tracks the signs—political and personal—that Palin was big trouble, and checks the forecast for her future.
The pattern is inescapable: she takes disagreements personally, and swiftly deals vengeance on enemies, real or perceived.
The crowds begin streaming into the Evansville Auditorium and Convention Centre a couple of hours before the arrival of the “special guest speaker” at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner on a soft Indiana spring evening—nearly 2,200 people in the banquet hall, 800 more in an adjacent auditorium watching the proceedings on a live video feed. The menu is thick slices of roast pork and red velvet cake, washed down with pitchers of iced tea, and when Sarah Palin finally enters, escorted by a phalanx of sheriff’s deputies and local police, she is mobbed. The organizers of the dinner, billed as “the largest pro-life banquet in the world,” have courted Palin for weeks with care packages of locally made chocolates, doughnuts, barbecue, and pastries, and she has requited by choosing Evansville, a conservative stronghold in southern Indiana, as the site of her first public speech outside Alaska in 2009. Like Richard M. Nixon, who chose the coalfield town of Hyden, Kentucky, for his first post-resignation public appearance, Palin has come to a place where she is guaranteed a hero’s reception. She is not only a staunch foe of abortion but also the mother of a boy, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome just a few months before John McCain chose Palin as his running mate. The souvenir program for this evening’s dinner is full of displays for local politicians and businesses, attesting to their pro-life bona fides. An ad for Hahn Realty Corporation reads, “If you need commercial real estate, call Joe Kiefer! Joe is pro-life and a proud supporter of the Vanderburgh County Right to Life.”
As Palin makes her way slowly across the crowded ballroom—dressed all in black; no red Naughty Monkey Double Dare pumps tonight—she is stopped every few inches by adoring fans. She passes the press pen, where at least eight television cameras and a passel of reporters and photographers are corralled, and spots a reporter for a local community newspaper getting ready to take a happy snap with his pocket camera. For a split second she stops, pauses, turns her head and shoulders just so, and smiles. She holds the pose until she’s sure the man has his shot and then moves on. A few minutes later, the evening’s nominal keynote speaker, the Republican Party’s national chairman, Michael Steele, who has been reduced to a footnote in the proceedings, introduces the special guest speaker as “the storm that is the honorable governor of the great state of Alaska, Sarah Palin!”
Poll: Who is the most powerful woman in the G.O.P.?
Just where that storm may be heading is one of the most intriguing issues in American politics today. Palin is at once the sexiest and the riskiest brand in the Republican Party. Her appeal to people in the party (and in the country) who share her convictions and resentments is profound. The fascination is viral, and global. Bill McAllister, until recently Palin’s statehouse spokesman, says that he has fielded (and declined) interview requests from France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Germany, Bulgaria, “and probably other countries I’ve forgotten about.” (Palin, keeping her distance from most domestic media as well, also declined to talk to V.F.). Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?
In the aftermath of the November election, the conventional wisdom among Palin’s supporters in the Republican establishment was that she should go home, keep her head down, show that she could govern effectively, and quietly educate herself about foreign and domestic policy with the help of a cadre of experienced advisers. She has done none of this. Rather, she has pursued an erratic course that, for her, may actually represent the closest thing there is to True North. Her first trip to Washington since the election was to attend the dinner of the Alfalfa Club, an elite group of politicians and businesspeople whose sole function is an annual evening in honor of a plant that would “do anything for a drink.” Some of her handlers first said she had accepted—though she then went on to decline—an invitation to speak at the annual June fund-raiser for the congressional Republicans. She created a political-action committee—Sarahpac—with the help of John Coale, a prominent Democratic trial lawyer. But just months into its existence the pac’s chief fund-raiser, Becki Donatelli, a veteran of Republican campaigns, suddenly quit. One person familiar with the situation told me that Donatelli could not stand dealing with Palin’s political spokeswoman in Alaska, Meghan Stapleton, who has drawn withering fire from Palin friends and critics alike for being an ineffective adviser. Also with Coale’s help, Palin formed the grandiosely named Alaska Fund Trust, to defray a reported half million dollars in legal expenses arising from a slew of formal ethics complaints against her in her home state—prompting yet another formal complaint, that the fund itself constitutes an ethical breach. Onetime supporters have become harsh critics. Walter Hickel, 89, a former two-term governor and interior secretary, and the grand old man of Alaska politics, who was co-chair of Palin’s winning gubernatorial campaign, in 2006, now washes his hands of her. He told me simply, “I don’t give a damn what she does.”
Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life—neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.
Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen.
Soon Palin will take a crack at her own story: she has signed a book contract for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum, and has chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir, which is to be published next year not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house, that may include supplemental material on faith. During the presidential campaign, Palin’s deep ignorance about most aspects of foreign and domestic policy provided her with a powerful political reason not to submit to interviews. The forthcoming book adds a powerful commercial reason.
Palin is a cipher by choice. When she chooses to reveal herself, what she reveals is not always the same thing as the truth. Her singular refusal to have in-depth conversations with the national media—even Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney, among the most saturnine political figures in modern American history, each submitted to countless detailed interviews over the years—has compounded the challenge of understanding who she really is. There has been Hollywood talk that Palin could star in a reality-TV show about running Alaska, but nothing has come of it yet. Recently, Palin did star in a week-long seriocomic feud with David Letterman over some of his borderline jokes. Meanwhile, she has begun sharing insights several times a day on Twitter, with chipper reports on her own doings and those of her husband, Todd, and the rest of what she calls the “first family.” “Look forward to today’s staff discussion re: my 3rd justice appt to highest court in 3 yrs. Supreme Court truly effects AK’s future,” reads one. And another: “Picking up my handsome little man to rtrn to Juneau, Trig got 1st haircut so my little hippie baby’s ready for AK sunshine on his shoulders.”
Little Shop of Horrors
The caricature of Sarah Palin that emerged in the presidential campaign, for good and ill, is now ineradicable. The swift journey from her knockout convention speech to Tina Fey’s dead-eyed incarnation of her as Dan Quayle with an updo played out in real time, no less for the bewildered McCain campaign than for the public at large. It is an ironclad axiom of politics that if a campaign looks troubled from the outside the inside reality is far worse, and the McCain-Palin fiasco was no exception. As in any sudden marriage of convenience in which neither partner really knows the other, there were bound to be bumps. Palin had been on the national Republican radar for barely a year, after a cruise ship of conservative columnists, including The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, had stopped in Juneau in 2007 and had succumbed to her charms when she invited them to the governor’s house for a luncheon of halibut cheeks. McCain had spent only a couple of hours in Palin’s presence before choosing her, and she had pointedly failed to endorse him after he clinched the nomination in March. The difficulties began immediately, with the McCain team’s delivery of the bad news that the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter Bristol, which was already common knowledge in Alaska and had been revealed to the McCain team at the last minute, could not be kept secret until after the Republican convention.
By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.” Many of the details that led to such assessments have remained obscure. But in a recent series of conversations, a range of people from the McCain-Palin campaign, including members of the high command, agreed to elaborate on how a match they thought so right ended up going so wrong.
The consensus is that Palin’s rollout, and even her first television interview, with ABC’s Charles Gibson, conducted after an awkward two-week press blackout to allow for intensive cramming at her home in Wasilla, went more or less fine, though it had its embarrassing moments (“You can’t blink,” Palin said, when Gibson asked if she’d hesitated to accept McCain’s offer) and was much parodied. At least one savvy politician—Barack Obama—believed Palin would never have time to get up to speed. He told his aides that it had taken him four months to learn how to be a national candidate, and added, “I don’t care how talented she is, this is really a leap.” The paramount strategic goal in picking Palin was that the choice of a running mate had to ensure a successful convention and a competitive race right after; in that limited sense, the choice worked. But no serious vetting had been done before the selection (by either the McCain or the Obama team), and there was trouble in nailing down basic facts about Palin’s life. After she was picked, the campaign belatedly sent a dozen lawyers and researchers, led by a veteran Bush aide, Taylor Griffin, to Alaska, in a desperate race against the national reporters descending on the state. At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small. By late September, when the time came to coach Palin for her second major interview, this time with Katie Couric, there were severe tensions between Palin and the campaign.
By all accounts, Palin was either unwilling, or simply unable, to prepare. In the run-up to the Couric interview, Palin had become preoccupied with a far more parochial concern: answering a humdrum written questionnaire from her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman. McCain aides saw it as easy stuff, the usual boilerplate, the work of 20 minutes or so, but Palin worried intently. At the same time, she grew concerned that her approval ratings back home in Alaska were sagging as she embraced the role of McCain’s bad cop. To keep her happy, the chief McCain strategist, Steve Schmidt, agreed to conduct a onetime poll of 300 Alaska voters. It would prove to Palin, Schmidt thought, that everything was all right.
Then came the near-total meltdown of the financial system and McCain’s much-derided decision to briefly “suspend” his campaign. Under the circumstances, and with severely limited resources, Schmidt and the McCain-campaign chairman, Rick Davis, scrapped the Alaska poll and urgently set out to survey voters’ views of the economy (and of McCain’s response to it) in competitive states. Palin was furious. She was convinced that Schmidt had lied to her, a belief she conveyed to anyone who would listen.
The next big milestone for Palin was the debate with Joe Biden, on October 2. An early rehearsal effort in Philadelphia found 20 people sitting in a stifling room with hundreds of sample questions on note cards. Palin just stared down, disengaged, non-participatory. A disaster loomed, so Schmidt made the difficult decision to leave campaign headquarters, in Virginia, and fly to McCain’s vacation retreat in Sedona, Arizona, where it was thought that Palin might be able to relax and recharge, and accept the assistance of a voice coach and a television coach. For three full days—at the height of the campaign—Schmidt dropped virtually all other business to help Palin prepare.
He also enlisted some extra help. By this point, Palin’s relations with Nicolle Wallace—a veteran of the Bush White House and a former CBS News analyst who had tried to help Palin get ready for the Couric interview, and whom Palin blamed for the result—were so strained that campaign aides cast about for someone who could serve as a calming presence: Palin’s horse whisperer. They settled on Mark McKinnon, a smart, funny, soft-spoken former Democrat from Texas. McKinnon had long admired McCain, and had begun the Republican primary season helping him out—though warning that he would never work against Obama in the general election. But now McKinnon, whose role in helping prepare Palin has not been previously reported, and who declined to elaborate on it to V.F., changed his mind and quietly signed on. Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide, says that McKinnon was picked because “he’s got a lovely manner You sort of want a guy who’s very easygoing, gives good advice, and doesn’t add to the natural nervousness.”
Palin worked hard, and the results were adequate. Palin’s winking “Can I call you Joe?” performance against Biden was nothing like a disaster. In fact, it seems to have emboldened her enough that the next day she openly voiced disagreement with the McCain team’s decision to pull out of active competition in Michigan. When orders or advice from McCain headquarters began to conflict with her own impulses, aides told me, she simply did what she wanted to do. “The problem was she came down from Alaska with basically Todd as a sort of trusted bellwether adviser,” one McCain friend says. “She was given this staff of 20. It was probably too big a staff. To be real honest with you, I don’t think she could figure out who to trust.” All the while, Palin was coping not only with the crazed life of any national candidate on the road but also with the young children traveling with her. Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.) Palin maintained only the barest level of civil discourse with Tucker Eskew, the veteran G.O.P. operative who had been made her chief minder. A third party had to shuttle between them to convey even the most rudimentary messages. “She started to hedge her bets,” the same McCain friend says. “Frequently, she would be concerned about how something would play in Alaska. What? You’re worried about your backside in Alaska when there are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent?” One longtime McCain friend and frequent companion on the trail was heard to refer to Palin as “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Election Night brought what McCain aides saw as the final indignity. Palin decided she would make her own speech at the ticket’s farewell to the faithful, at the Arizona Biltmore, in Phoenix. When aides went to load McCain’s concession speech into the teleprompter, they found a concession speech for Palin—written by Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, who had also been the principal drafter of her convention speech—already on the system. Schmidt and Salter told Palin that there was no tradition of Election Night speeches by running mates, and that she wouldn’t be giving one. Palin was insistent. “Are those John’s wishes?” she asked. They were, she was told. But Palin took the issue to McCain himself, raising it on the walk from his suite to the outdoor rally. Again the answer was no.
Polar Disorder
There is virtually nothing about Palin’s performance in the fall campaign that should have come as a surprise to John McCain. Had he really attempted to learn something about her before the fateful day of August 29, 2008, when he announced that she was his choice for running mate, he would easily have discerned all the traits that he belatedly came to know.
The narrative that the McCain campaign employed to explain Palin’s selection and to promote her qualifications—that she was a fresh-faced reformer who had taken on Alaska’s big oil companies and the corrupt Republican establishment, governing with bipartisan support—was never more than superficially true. In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”
The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.
So, of all the puzzling things that Sarah Palin told the American public last fall, perhaps the most puzzling was this: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”
Believe me, it is not.
But Sarah Palin herself is a microcosm of Alaska, or at least of the fastest-growing and politically crucial part of it, which stretches up the broad Matanuska-Susitna Valley, north of Anchorage, where she came of age and cut her political teeth in her now famous hometown, Wasilla. In the same way that Lyndon Johnson could only have come from Texas, or Bill Clinton from Arkansas, Palin and all that she is could only have come from Wasilla. It is a place of breathtaking scenery and virtually no zoning. The view along Wasilla’s main drag is of Chili’s, ihop, Home Depot, Target, and Arby’s, and yet the view from the Palins’ front yard, on Lake Lucille, recalls the Alpine splendor visible from Captain Von Trapp’s terrace in The Sound of Music. It is culturally conservative: the local newspaper recently published an article that asked, “Will the Antichrist be a Homosexual?” It is in this Alaska—where it is possible to be both a conservative Republican and a pothead, or a foursquare Democrat and a gun nut—that Sarah Palin learned everything she knows about politics, and about life. It was in this environment that her ambition first found an outlet in public office, and where she first tasted the 151-proof Everclear that is power.
The second thing McCain could have discovered about Palin is that no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is “conservative,” whatever that means, but she can be all over the lot in the articulation of her platform. In a June interview with Sean Hannity, she sounded like a New Dealer when she proudly proclaimed that “a share of our oil-resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources—imagine that.” In the next breath, sounding like a “starve the beast” conservative, she said she hoped the price of oil, the principal variable of state revenue, would not rise too much. “The fewer dollars that the state of Alaska government has, the fewer dollars we spend, and that’s good for our families and the private sector.” Palin has always been a party of one. She gained the mayoralty of Wasilla in 1996 by turning against the incumbent, John Stein, who had been one of her mentors when she was on the city council, and injecting sharply partisan issues such as gun rights and abortion into what had previously been a low-key local contest. She fired the police chief, eased out the museum director and the city planner, and fired and then rehired the librarian (who had opposed book censorship). Palin was entitled to make the dismissals, and she variously justified them on the grounds of budget difficulties or the need for a team that she could be sure would support her efforts. But the Frontiersman accused Palin of confusing her election with a “coronation.”
Even in broad outline the story of how a small-town mayor became the youngest governor in Alaska history seems improbable. There was her long-shot campaign for lieutenant governor, in 2002, in which she came in second against a veteran state senator in a five-way race; her appointment as chair (and ethics supervisor) of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees drilling and production; and her resignation from that post, charging that a fellow commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, the chair of the Alaska Republican Party, was conducting political business on state time. In a climate where the sitting Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, had become the most unpopular figure in the state, and where the F.B.I. was swarming over Alaska, pursuing the corruption probe that later ensnared the state’s senior U.S. senator, Ted Stevens, Palin seemed like a breath of fresh air.
Yet Palin herself cut corners. Ruedrich, Palin’s target on the Conservation Commission, was forced to resign, but in 2006, as Palin was beginning her campaign for governor, a conservative columnist dug up e-mail messages showing that she too had conducted campaign business from her mayoral office. Confronted by the columnist, Palin acknowledged that she had erred. Then she turned around and issued a press release, demanding to know why the columnist was publishing smears.
Palin won the crucial support of Walter Hickel in her campaign for governor in part by supporting one of his longtime hobbyhorses, an “all-Alaska” natural-gas pipeline that would pump gas to the port of Valdez for export worldwide. As the campaign wore on, Palin backed away from that idea. “I helped her out, she got elected,” Hickel says now. “She never called me once in her life after that.”
Palin’s 2006 campaign for governor relied at first almost wholly on a ragtag band of true believers. “She had this little grassroots group that was going around the state on a wing and a prayer, talking up her platitudes,” says John Bitney, an old friend of Palin’s from junior-high band in Wasilla, where he played the trombone and she played the flute. Bitney at the time was a lobbyist and veteran legislative aide in Juneau, and he began passing political intelligence and advice to Palin. When Palin routed Murkowski in the Republican primary, she still had no real professional campaign staff. Bitney signed on, forming a triumvirate with Curtis Smith, a veteran Anchorage media consultant, and Kris Perry, another old friend of Palin’s from Wasilla, who functioned as her personal assistant and also held the title of campaign manager. Palin began preparing for a general-election campaign against Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, a former Republican legislator who was running as an independent.
She apparently didn’t like preparing for debates back then either. “In the campaign for governor, they’re prepping her for debate,” Curtis Smith’s former business partner, Jim Lottsfeldt, told me recently in Anchorage, “and Curtis says, ‘The debate prep’s going horribly. Every time we try to help her with an answer, she just gets mad.’” (Smith himself says, “Unfortunately, I don’t recall having that exact conversation with Mr. Lottsfeldt, nor do I recall my experience, including debate prep, with Governor Palin in the light he portrayed.”) But Palin’s lack of knowledge turned out not to hurt her. Andrew Halcro later remembered that he and Palin once compared notes about their many encounters, and she said, “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”
Palin’s victory that November was one of the flukiest successes in modern American politics. Rebecca Braun, the publisher of the Alaska Budget Report, a respected nonpartisan newsletter, describes the result as something “far beyond anything you could explain in terms of intellect or training.” But Palin had promised three big things, and with the help of Bitney, who became her liaison with the legislature, and Mike Tibbles, her chief of staff, she achieved them. She increased oil taxes; she won the legislative framework for a gas pipeline, though not the one Hickel wanted; and she signed significant ethics reforms. In all three efforts she won strong cooperation from Democrats. “She had an easy go of it,” says Larry Persily, a former editorial-page editor of the Anchorage Daily News, who went to work in Palin’s Washington office but is now a critic of the governor’s. “The Democrats were in love with her. She slew the oil-company Gorgon, and came in on the magic carpet of oil-tax reform and ethics. The Democrats were intoxicated because she wasn’t Frank Murkowski.” Rising oil prices provided an added lift. Palin was able to increase the annual distribution from the state’s Permanent Fund to about $3,000 per resident, almost double the amount received the previous year. She could be a fiscal conservative and a big spender all at the same time.
But there were ominous signs—indications of an erratic nature. This is the third thing McCain could have discovered about Palin—a woman, after all, who kept a pregnancy secret for seven months, flew all the way home from Texas to Alaska with a near-full-term baby while leaking amniotic fluid, and then finally drove the 45 minutes from Anchorage to a hospital in Wasilla, all so that the child could be born in the 49th state. Palin was for the infamous Gravina Island “bridge to nowhere” before she was against it, and reversed herself only when such pork-barrel projects prompted a nationwide backlash. As governor, she hired several old high-school, hometown, or political friends with minimal qualifications for important state jobs. One friend, a former mid-level manager for Alaska Airlines, headed the department that reviewed candidates for state boards and commissions; another became director of the state Division of Agriculture, citing a childhood love of cows as one qualification. Palin communicated with legislators and her staff mainly by BlackBerry, sometimes using a personal e-mail account to avoid having to disclose documents under the state public-records laws. (The one time Meg Stapleton, who handles Palin’s personal and political public relations, ever answered multiple e-mails was when I wrote her and Palin’s gubernatorial office at the same time, and she replied: “Thank you for emailing. I will email you separately so as to remove us from the state account.”) Palin’s anti-politician stance had worked so well in her campaign that she carried it over into her dealings with actual politicians in Juneau, who didn’t take kindly to the practice. After one meeting between the governor and legislators in 2007, Lyda Green, then the president of the state senate, returned to her office to catch up on some paperwork. She caught Palin on the news. “And she comes on TV and says, ‘I want to once again confirm that neither I nor my staff ever holds closed-door meetings.’ Well, we had just been in a closed-door meeting for an hour and a half!” Representative Les Gara, an Anchorage Democrat who often worked with Palin, told me that he had at first thought that some of Green’s sharp criticism of Palin amounted to Republican infighting, or maybe just sour grapes that Wasilla had produced a new political figure whose star far outshone Green’s. But he came to realize, he said, that Green had a better handle on Palin than he did. “She didn’t work very hard. You would speak to her on particular issues, and it was like she didn’t know anything about them and she never seemed very engaged.” That said, “if your priorities happened to be her priorities, you could build a coalition.”
On the other hand, if your priorities happened to differ from hers, you could pay a terrible price. Only weeks after Palin praised John Bitney for doing so much to make her first legislative session a success, she summarily fired him—because, he says, he had had the bad luck to fall in love with the wife of one of the Palins’ best friends (a woman he has since married). At the time, Palin’s office cited what it called “personal” reasons for an “amicable” departure. But when The Wall Street Journal called Palin’s office during last fall’s presidential campaign to ask about the case, a spokeswoman for Palin said that Bitney had been “dismissed because of his poor job performance,” and refused to elaborate.
Not quite a year after Bitney’s departure, Mike Tibbles abruptly resigned as chief of staff, for reasons that neither he nor Palin has ever explained. Jim Lottsfeldt, a friend of Tibbles’s, says that the chief of staff was worn down “by the steady drumbeat of her not consulting with him.” She replaced Tibbles with Mike Nizich, a part-time taxidermist, who over 30 years had served seven governors of both parties, most of that time as director of the state Division of Administration—a man who made the trains run on time in the governor’s office but had nothing to do with policy issues. Palin’s effectiveness was never again the same. The brutal reality is that many people who have worked closely with Palin have found themselves disillusioned.
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
Perhaps no episode of Palin’s governorship has drawn more attention than the one that came to be known as Troopergate. For more than a year of her tenure as governor, Palin and her husband and aides repeatedly and aggressively complained to Walt Monegan, the former Anchorage police chief whom Palin had named to head the state’s Department of Public Safety, about Mike Wooten, a state trooper who had been involved in a messy divorce from Palin’s sister Molly. Wooten was no angel. Before Palin ever took office, he had been disciplined after drinking beer in his patrol car, Tasering his stepson, illegally shooting a moose, and making threatening remarks about Palin’s father. But Wooten had already been disciplined, and Monegan believed that further action was unjustified if not impossible. The final straw may have been Monegan’s June 30, 2008, e-mail warning to Palin that an unnamed state legislator had complained that she’d been seen driving with her newborn son, and that the infant had not been strapped into an approved car seat. “I have never driven Trig anywhere without a new, approved car seat,” Palin fired back. “I want to know who said otherwise—pls. provide me that info now.” Twelve days later, Nizich fired Monegan on Palin’s orders. Forty-nine days after that, John McCain announced that Palin would join him on the ticket.
Arrows in the Back
In Alaska, there has never been a gubernatorial tradition of pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving, but Palin decided to stage such a ceremony last November all the same, at the Triple D Farm & Hatchery, outside Wasilla. After granting the lucky bird its reprieve, she stopped to talk to a local television reporter about what she had learned in the campaign just concluded. “I don’t think it’s changed me at all,” she insisted, clutching a cup of coffee as her breath steamed into the frosty air. “You know, it’s pretty brutal, the time consumption there, and the energy that has to be spent in order to get out and about with the message on a national level, a great appreciation for other candidates who have gone through this, but also just a great appreciation for this great country. There are so many good Americans who are just desiring of their government to kind of get out of the way and allow them to grow and progress, and allow our businesses to grow and progress. So, great appreciation for those who share that value.”
As Palin spoke, a grisly scene unfolded behind her. A worker hefted one squirming white turkey after another into a metal funnel, slit its throat, and bled it out in full view of the camera. The clip was replayed tens of thousands of times on YouTube and seemed an all too apt metaphor for how Palin’s political fortunes had changed in the wake of her great national adventure, even if her personality had not. A career that thrived for years on extraordinarily good luck seems to have known nothing but trouble since November 4. In December, Bristol Palin gave birth to Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, her son with her boyfriend, Levi Johnston, and for a time there was talk of a wedding. But by early spring the couple had split up, and their families fell to trading charges on talk shows and in the tabloids. After Levi told Tyra Banks that he had often spent the night in the Palin home, in the same room as Bristol, and assumed that the governor knew they were having sex, Palin, through her spokeswoman, released a blistering statement expressing disappointment “that Levi and his family, in a quest for fame, attention, and fortune, are engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion of their relationship.” On the CBS Early Show, days later, Johnston seemed resigned. “They said I didn’t live there. I ‘stayed there,”’ he said. “I was like, O.K., well, whatever you want to call it. I had my stuff there.” Although Bristol initially told Greta Van Susteren that teen abstinence is “not realistic at all,” by springtime she had signed up as an ambassador for the Candie’s Foundation to promote abstinence as the way to avoid teen pregnancy.
Meantime, Levi’s mother, Sherry, agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of possessing OxyContin with intent to sell it, in exchange for the state’s agreement to drop five other drug-related charges against her. Her lawyer has conceded that she will draw an automatic jail sentence, but hopes to minimize the time she spends behind bars, because she suffers from chronic pain. In April, Todd Palin’s half-sister Diana was arrested on charges of twice breaking into a house in Wasilla to steal money from a bedroom cabinet, under circumstances that remain unexplained.
Because Palin had taken particular umbrage in the fall campaign at any effort to criticize her children or invade their privacy, her willingness to mix it up in public with an 18-year-old, who is after all the father of her only grandchild, struck many in Alaska as odd. So did Palin’s suggestion, at a time when declining oil prices have thrown the state budget into the red, that she did not want to accept about a third of the $930 million in federal stimulus money available to Alaska, because it would come with too many big-government strings attached. The move seemed calculated to burnish her national conservative credentials. In the face of bipartisan outcry, Palin’s aides insisted she had never meant to say she wouldn’t take the money, only that she wanted to review the matter carefully. That was news to former aide Larry Persily. After the first meeting on the stimulus money, Persily told me, “Everyone in the room left thinking she’d said no. Then her staff said, ‘She didn’t say no. She just didn’t say yes.”’ Palin wound up taking all but about 3 percent of the $900 million available to Alaska. The consensus even among the Republicans I spoke to was that she rejected the last $28 million—for energy assistance—mostly to save face.
The ever shifting sands of Palin’s sensibility were also on display after former senator Ted Stevens’s conviction on corruption charges was set aside, in April. Palin’s old nemesis, the Alaska Republican Party chair Randy Ruedrich, called on Stevens’s Democratic successor, Mark Begich, who had defeated Stevens just days after the original conviction last fall, to step down and allow a new election. Palin told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in an e-mail, “I absolutely agree.” Days later, at a news conference, Palin insisted she had never called on Begich to step down.
Perhaps nothing has caused a bigger stir than Palin’s nomination of Wayne Anthony Ross to be Alaska’s attorney general. Ross is a two-time gubernatorial candidate and a board member of the National Rifle Association. He had sown controversy over the years by referring to gays and lesbians as “degenerates” (he later sought to downplay the remark, saying his aversion to homosexuals was no different from his aversion to lima beans) and for staunchly opposing subsistence-hunting preferences for native Alaskans. A flamboyant divorce lawyer who drives a big red Hummer with the vanity license plate war, Ross is a good old boy of pithy expression and considerable charm. (“In Alaska,” Ross told me, “a liberal is someone who carries a .357 or smaller.”) The final vote against Ross—with the Republican leaders of both chambers joining to defeat him—came just as Palin was speaking in Evansville. It was the first time in Alaska history that a cabinet nominee was rejected. “If I wince a little, it’s from the arrows in my back,” Ross told me a few weeks later. “I think there were a number of people who were trying to show her who the boss was.”
A year ago, 80 percent of Alaskans viewed Palin very favorably or somewhat favorably; by this spring, just 55 percent had a positive opinion. All this has given rise to speculation in Alaska that Palin may not run for re-election next year. She does not have to declare her candidacy until June 2010. Most politicians of both parties in Alaska with whom I spoke assume she could win, though not as persuasively as she did in 2006, which would hardly help her standing in a 2012 presidential campaign. Though Palin’s spokeswoman has said she does not intend to challenge Senator Lisa Murkowski, the former governor’s daughter, who is also up for re-election next year, Palin has changed her mind without warning in the past, and becoming a senator would keep her in the national spotlight. Surveying the landscape of political and policy troubles in Alaska, Gregg Erickson, an independent economic consultant in Juneau, concludes, “Everything she’s doing seems to be saying that there’ll be a problem in the future owing to her inattention, but she won’t be here to deal with it.”
“Just Make It All Go Away”
As Palin has piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. “You nailed it.” Another key McCain aide summed up his attitude this way: “I guess it’s sort of shifted,” he said. “I always wanted to tell myself the best-case story about her.” Even now, he said, “I don’t want to get too negative.” Then he added, “I think, as I’ve evaluated it, I think some of my worst fears … the after-election events have confirmed that her more negative aspects may have been there … ” His voice trailed off. “I saw her as a raw talent. Raw, but a talent. I hoped she could become better.”
None of McCain’s still-loyal soldiers will say negative things about Palin on the record. Even thinking such thoughts privately is painful for them, because there is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired—and as reflecting, too, an unsettling willingness on their own part to aid and abet him. They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job. To ask why none of them dared to just walk away is to ask why Colin Powell did not resign in protest over the Bush administration’s foreign policy, or why none of Bill Clinton’s disillusioned aides resigned after he lied to them about Monica Lewinsky. The question cannot comprehend the intense bonds that the blood sport of modern politics produces. To leave a campaign—especially a struggling, losing campaign—is akin to desertion in wartime, and even as they began to understand her limitations, plenty of McCain aides still saw Palin as the campaign’s best hope. Some still believe that, simply in terms of the electoral math, she helped at least as much as she hurt, and maybe helped more.
McCain has delivered his own postmortem on Palin with the patented brand of winking-and-nodding ironic detachment that he usually reserves for painful political questions, an approach that simultaneously seeks to confess his sin and presume absolution for it. In November, he told Jay Leno he was proud of Palin and did not blame her for his defeat, but by April, when Leno asked him about who was running the Republican Party, McCain declined to mention Palin: “We have, I’m happy to say, a lot of choices out there: Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, Huntsman, Romney, Charlie Crist—there’s a lot of governors out there who are young and dynamic.” McCain went on, “There’s a lot of good people out there, and I’ve left out somebody’s name and I’m going to hear about it.” When I ask Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter and co-author, about that comment, he says simply, “McCain always talks unscripted,” and adds that he has heard “not one word of regret” about Palin ever pass McCain’s lips. McCain’s daughter Meghan, who has continued the blog she began on the campaign last year, has said that Palin is the one topic on which she will have no public comment.
Palin herself has alternately shied away from the spotlight and injected herself into public debate on questions dear to conservatives, as she did when she issued a statement defending the former Miss California, Carrie Prejean, for opposing gay marriage despite “the liberal onslaught of malicious attacks.” Palin’s speech in Evansville was her first major post-election foray into the national media, and she followed it up in June with a trip to New York State, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Alaska’s entry into the union, visiting Auburn, the hometown of William H. Seward, who bought the Alaska territory from Russia, and making appearances at events supporting families with autism and developmental disabilities. But the biggest headlines the trip produced were those about Palin’s feud with David Letterman, who joked that Palin had gone to Bloomingdale’s to update her “slutty flight-attendant look” and made a tasteless sexual jibe about one of the Palin daughters. Letterman eventually apologized, though Palin fanned the flames in ways that were not necessarily to her advantage.
In Evansville, though, Palin concentrated on the task at hand: an emphatic defense of the anti-abortion cause. But in doing so she made a startling confession about what she thought when she learned she was pregnant at 43 with her youngest child, Trig, who arrived in April 2008, as the world now knows, with Down syndrome. “I had found out that I was pregnant while out of state first,” Palin told the crowd. “While out of state, there just for a fleeting moment, I thought, Nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, Wow, it is easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances and no one would know—no one would ever know. Then when my amniocentesis results came back, showing what they called abnormalities—oh, dear God—I knew, I had instantly an understanding, for that fleeting moment, why someone would believe it could seem possible to change those circumstances, just make it all go away, get some normalcy back in life.” It is almost impossible not to be touched by the rawness of her confession, even if it is precisely this choice that Palin believes no other woman should ever have, not even in the case of rape or incest.
Sarah Palin is a star in Evansville and all the many Evansvilles of America, but there is a big part of the Republican Party—the Wall Street wing, the national-security wing—in which she cuts no ice. At the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, Palin essentially came in tied for second with Governor Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana, and Representative Ron Paul, of Texas, with 13 percent support in a straw poll of potential 2012 presidential candidates; former governor Mitt Romney, of Massachusetts, got 20 percent. A more recent survey has Palin in a three-way tie with Romney and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. She could do well in the Iowa caucuses or South Carolina primary, but it is much harder to imagine her making headway in New Hampshire, where independent voters were turned off by her last fall. It is also difficult to see just how she would expand her appeal beyond the base that already loves her.
In Alaska, almost everyone I met wondered who was advising her in Washington—and in Washington, everyone wonders the same thing. There are one or two clues. On the eve of the Alfalfa dinner, in January, Palin was a guest in the home of Fred Malek, a veteran Republican fund-raiser and government official dating back to the days of the Nixon administration. Malek raised money for McCain’s campaign last year, and also agreed to play host to a fund-raising dinner for Republican governors in early May. (Palin was to have been an honored guest, but canceled owing to spring flooding in Alaska.) As noted, Palin has established a political-action committee with the legal advice of John Coale, who met Palin when his wife, Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News host, went to interview her during the campaign. Coale, a former Hillary Clinton supporter, told me he felt Palin had gotten a bum rap from liberals and conservatives alike, and he advised her that a pac was a logical and legal way to pay for out-of-state political travel. “We raised a good bit of money without even asking,” Coale says. “Just set up a Web site and, I think in the first month, $400,000 came in.” Coale says he still exchanges e-mails with Palin from time to time, but doesn’t consider himself a political adviser; he also says that Van Susteren has “put up a Chinese wall about all of this,” and has obtained her interviews with the Palins independently. Since the campaign ended, Van Susteren has interviewed Palin twice more, but she says she has never had a conversation with Palin off-camera, except for when Palin called to rescind her acceptance of Van Susteren’s invitation to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in May, because of the Alaska flooding. Todd Palin came solo as Van Susteren’s guest, and when a reporter for Politico sought to interview him at a pre-dinner brunch attended by hundreds of journalists, Van Susteren interposed herself, as in the manner of a staffer, to say it was a social event. Van Susteren told me she was just trying to exercise good manners.
Palin’s closest adviser remains her husband—the “first gentleman” or “first dude,” as she calls him. Testimony in the Troopergate investigation suggested that Todd was physically in the governor’s office for about 50 percent of the time, often sitting in on meetings or phone calls in which he had no obvious official function. By the end of last fall’s campaign, McCain’s friends had picked up word that Todd was calling around to Republicans in South Carolina, urging them to keep his wife in mind for 2012—the implication being that the Palins believed McCain was about to lose. This spring, he stood in for Palin at an event in Manhattan—at Alaska House in SoHo, the cultural antipode of Wasilla—promoting the Alaska commercial-fishing industry’s contributions to world food aid. In a brief prepared speech, he extolled Alaska salmon as “some of the world’s healthiest protein, rich in vitamins and minerals, and a source of omega-3 fats.”
“She doesn’t at all have anyone who’s willing to give it to her straight,” one person who occasionally advises Palin told me. Todd may be the one exception. “I saw nobody else like that, nobody who would sit her down and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’” He added, of the poor communications operation run by Stapleton, “I don’t know what part Sarah Palin plays in the lack of communications, but I don’t think she’s aware of how big a problem it is.”
And her national ambitions? “What it looks like to me she’s trying to do is try the same formula that got her the governorship,” John Bitney says. “You sort of start off with a conservative base. The right-wing base is obviously out on the far end of the spectrum, but it’s a very motivated base. They show up, they’re committed. It gets you that political beachhead. She did not get started with the blessing of the Republican Party. She started with a dedicated corps of sort of right-wing true believers who killed themselves for her, and got her going. And then she began to build on that, and after she crossed the primary hurdle, she moderated her message on some points.”
When I ask Bitney what he makes of the whole Palin phenomenon, he sighs. “What do I take away from this?” he asks. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s just a lot of emotions and stuff. I find it’s frustrating dealing with Sarah, because it seems we’re always dealing with emotional crap and we never seem to be able to focus on the business at hand that needs to be done. I don’t know whether to blame her or pity her for all this emotional upheaval that we’re always going through with her. Now we all get to listen to Levi and Bristol. Check my feet for horseshoes if I have to sit there and listen to another talk show. I got involved in helping her become governor because we needed to change some policy directions. Teen abstinence is not why I waved signs for her.”
Palin herself often sounds tired and resentful these days, as if wondering whether she should have blinked and just said no to John McCain. In a rambling, 17-minute speech introducing Michael Reagan, the former president’s son and a conservative radio host at an event in Alaska in June—a speech that borrowed heavily, without clear attribution, from a four-year-old article by Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Craig Shirley—Palin seemed resigned to the fact that her reputation would never again be as fresh and glowing as it once was. She complained about “national figures and some in the press who, who want to put not just me, but anybody who dares speak up, it seems nowadays, right back down in their place.” She bemoaned her changing fortunes in Alaska. “I think things here that have so drastically changed these past months … Some want to forbid others from speaking up, and it’s been through lawsuits, been ethics-violation charges, media distortions And those are the folks who want to tell me, they want to tell you to sit down and shut up. We will not do so. I just can’t because I love my state, I love my country, and I need you, we need Michael Reagan to keep on fighting for our freedoms, for our country, and what we’re being fed today, it seems, is a steady diet of selected misrepresented news So I join you in speaking up and asking the questions and taking action, and here at home in my beloved Alaska, I just say, politically speaking, if I die, I die.”
Poll: Who is the most powerful woman in the G.O.P.?
Palin has disappointed many of those who once had the highest hopes for her. She has stumbled over innumerable details. But as she said to Andrew Halcro years ago, “Does any of this really matter?” Palin has shown herself to have remarkable gut instincts about raw politics, and she has seen openings where others did not. And she has the good fortune to have traction within a political party that is bereft of strong leadership, and whose rank and file often demands qualities other than knowledge, experience, and an understanding that facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things. It is, at the moment, a party in which the loudest and most singular voices, not burdened by responsibility, wield disproportionate power. She may decide that she does not need office in order to have great influence—any more than Rush Limbaugh does.
On a rare fine day in Juneau, not long ago, Palin was seen sitting in the sunshine in the broad plaza near the state capitol, alone with her thoughts and some reading material for more than an hour and a half. Down the hillside below her, the big cruise liners that ply Alaska’s Inside Passage in the summer months were beginning to call in the port. Only two years have elapsed since William Kristol and his colleagues disembarked from one of them and hearkened to her siren call. Sarah Palin might well have been wondering whether her own ship is going out, or just coming in.
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