A Medley of the Personal and Political Palin Administration
By: By Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman and Michael Powell

Source: International Herald Tribune

Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of Alaska's Division of Agriculture, Palin appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as one of her qualifications for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Havemeister was one of at least five high school classmates Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding what they had made in the private sector.

When Palin had to cut the 2007 Alaska state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.

Last May, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor's career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to find an assistant to the governor on the line. "You should be ashamed!" Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. "Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now."

Palin now walks the national stage of the United States as a small-town foe of "good old boys" politics and a champion for ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never ran anything.

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then as governor of Alaska finds that Palin's visceral style and penchant for attacking critics - she sometimes calls local opponents "haters" - contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

Still, Palin has many supporters. As mayor she paved roads and built an ice rink, and as governor she pushed through higher taxes on the oil companies that dominate one-third of Alaska's economy. She stirs deep emotions. In Wasilla, many residents display unflagging affection, cheering "our Sarah" and hissing at her critics.

"She is bright and has unfailing political instincts," said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. "She taps very directly into anxieties about the economic future."

"But," he added, "her governing style raises a lot of hard questions."

Palin declined to grant an interview for this article and she did not respond to written questions. The McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and on that of her husband, while referring other questions to the governor's spokesmen, who did not respond.

Interviews show that Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e- mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she sued the U.S. government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Steiner that it would cost $468,784 to process his request.

When Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages - through a federal records request - he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in trouble, records show.

"Their secrecy is off the charts," Steiner said.

Legislators in Alaska are currently investigating accusations that Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with Palin's sister, which she denies. But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.

Last summer, Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, picked up his phone and heard the voice of Todd Palin. The governor's husband sounded edgy. Todd Palin wanted to know why Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for the governor. But she fired Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.

"I understood from the call that Todd wasn't happy with me hiring John and he'd like to see him not there," Harris said. "The Palin family gets upset at personal issues," he added. "And at our level, they want to strike back."

Palin grew up in Wasilla, an old fur trader's outpost and now a fast-growing exurb of Anchorage, the biggest city in Alaska. The town sits in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, edged by jagged mountains and birch forests. The administration of Franklin Roosevelt took farmers from the Dust Bowl - prairie areas hit by severe dust storms in the 1930s that caused major ecological and agricultural damage - and resettled them here; their Democratic allegiances defined the valley for half a century.

Over the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They have filled evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party in the state.

Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to abortion and the ouster of the "complacent" old guard.

As mayor, Palin presided over a city that was rapidly outgrowing itself. She passed a road and sewer bond, cut property taxes but raised the sales tax, and loosened the reins on enforcing zoning laws. And, Palin's supporters say, she cleaned out the municipal closet, firing veteran officials to make way for her own team. "She had an agenda for change and for doing things differently," said Judy Patrick, a City Council member.

But there was a human cost. The mayor quickly fired the museum director of the town, John Cooper, saying that she was eliminating that job. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to tell the three employees there that "they only wanted two," recalled Esther West, one of the three employees. "We had to pick who was going to be laid off," West said. The three women quit as one.

Days later, Cooper recalled, a vocal conservative, Steven Stoll, sidled up to him. Stoll had supported Palin and had a long-running feud with Cooper. "He said: 'Gotcha, Cooper. And it only cost me a campaign contribution.'"

Stoll said that he did not recall that conversation, although he did say that he contributed to Palin's campaign and that he was pleased that she fired Cooper.

In 1997, Palin fired the longtime city attorney of Wasilla, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of Palin's campaign supporters.

Your attorney, Showers told Palin, is costing me lots of money. "She told me she'd like to see him fired," Showers recalled. "But she couldn't do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney." Palin told him to write to the council members to complain.

Meanwhile, Palin pushed the issue from the inside. "She started the ball rolling," said Patrick, the city council member, who also favored the firing. Deuser was soon replaced by Kenneth Jacobus, general counsel of the state Republican Party. "Professionals were either forced out or fired," Deuser said.

Palin, meanwhile, imposed a gag order on city employees, demanding that they not talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for her use, a vehicle employees sarcastically called the mayor-mobile.

The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board and she began to closely study the contents of the local library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books that they considered immoral.

"People would bring books back censored," recalled John Stein, the three-term mayor of Wasilla that Palin defeated. "Pages would get marked up or torn out."

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts state that Palin asked the local librarian to take certain books off the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says that Palin never advocated censorship.

Restless ambition defined Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican; finished second in the 2002 Republican primary for lieutenant governor; and applied to fill the seat of Senator Frank Murkowski, also a Republican, when he ran for governor.

Instead, Murkowski appointed his own daughter, Lisa Murkowski, but as a consolation prize he gave Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees drilling for oil and natural gas.

Palin discovered that Randy Ruedrich, the Alaska Republican Party leader and a board member, was conducting party business on state time and was giving preferential treatment to regulated companies. When Murkowski failed to act on Palin's complaints, she quit and went public with them.

The Republican establishment shunned Palin. But her break with the gentleman's club of oil producers and political power catapulted her into the public eye.

"She was honest and forthright," said Jay Kerttula, a former state Senator from Palmer, Alaska, and a Democrat.

Palin entered the 2006 gubernatorial primary as a formidable candidate. In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Palin had conducted campaign business from her mayoral office. Palin handled the crisis like a street fighter.

"I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did," the columnist recalled. "And she said 'Yeah, what I did was wrong.'"

Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after. A reporter from Fairbanks, Alaska, reading from a Palin press release, wanted to know why Jenkins was "smearing" Palin.

"Now I look at her and think: 'Man, you're slick,'" he said.

Half a century after Alaska became a state, Palin was inaugurated in Fairbanks and took up the reformer's sword. As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, a new pattern became clear: She surrounded herself with figures drawn from her personal life: former high school classmates, people she had known since grade school and fellow churchgoers.

Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell praised the appointments Palin made. "The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people," he said.

She tapped a local borough assemblyman, Talis Colberg, as her attorney general, provoking from Alaska's legal world a bewildered "Who?" Colberg moved from a one-room building in the Matanuska Valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising 600 people.

"I called him and asked, 'Do you know how to supervise people?'" said a family friend, Kathy Wells. "He said, 'No, but I think I'll get some help.'"

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Palin appointed Bitney, her former junior high school bandmate, as her legislative director and tapped another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the office of economic development for $82,908 per year. Previously he established an Alaska franchise area for Mailboxes Etc., a company that provides retail postal and business services.

To her supporters - and with an 80 percent approval rating, the governor has plenty - Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering lobbyists, and she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of sale proceeds from oil and natural gas.

"Does anybody doubt that she's a tough negotiator?" said Carl Gatto, a Republican state legislator from Palmer.

Yet scandals have eroded the governor's credentials as a reformer. In addition to the investigation of the firing of the state trooper, lawmakers from both parties in April accused Palin of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.

While Palin came into office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep secret certain information. The governor's inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e- mail addresses. An assistant told the governor that e-mails sent to a private address on a "personal device," like a Blackberry, "would be confidential and not subject to subpoena."

Palin and her aides use their own private e-mail addresses for state business. On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Palin at her official state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide responded: "Frank, this is not the governor's personal account."

Bailey sheepishly responded: "Whoops!"

Bailey, formerly a midlevel manager at Alaska Airlines who worked on the Palin campaign, was placed on paid leave; he has emerged as a crucial figure in the trooper investigation.

Many lawmakers contend that Palin is overly reliant on a tiny inner circle that leaves her isolated. She is often described by Democrats and Republicans alike as a leader missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, state records show, Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles, or 960 kilometers, to the north of the governor's mansion in Juneau.

Many politicians say they most often learn of her initiatives - and vetoes - from press releases, including her decision to veto $237 million in programs from last year's budget.

Mayors, from the state's larger cities to tiny municipalities along the southeastern fjords, are even more frustrated. Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and interviews show.

Last summer, Mark Begich, the Democratic mayor of Anchorage, pressed Palin to meet with him because Anchorage was running short of state funds to operate its traffic lights. At one point, records show, state officials told him the city should just turn off a dozen traffic lights.

Palin agreed to meet Begich when he threatened to go public with his anger, sources with direct knowledge said.

At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau, mayors across the political spectrum were asked: How many of you have tried to meet with Palin? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines borough. And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Palin soon walked in, delivered a few remarks, and departed for an antiabortion rally.

The administration's e-mail correspondence reveals a siegelike atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.

Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a "hater."

It is part of a pattern, Fagan said, in which the governor characterizes critics as "bad people who are anti-Alaska." Since then he has been inundated with critical calls.

As Palin's star ascends, the McCain campaign staff, as often happens, has moved to control the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and campaign aides attend interviews with Palin's old friends.

Last Tuesday, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce stood up and asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor's office. Councilwoman Diane Woodruff sat in the audience and shook her head.

"I was thinking, I don't remember giving up my First Amendment rights," said Woodruff, who has been critical of Palin's record as mayor.

"Just because you're not going gaga over Sarah doesn't mean you can't speak your mind."

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

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