It’s not the elite Washington media, but the Anchorage Daily News has done a great job collecting video and audio about the facts in the Palin Troopergate case. Palin seems to be starring in an episode of “My Own Worst Enemy.”
HT to Andrew Sullivan on the video.
But the bloom is off the rose for the Alaskan governor at home and the McCain campaign seems to have taken over the executive branch in that state.Â
From the story:
In stubbornly independent Alaska, the sudden intrusion of a political campaign into so many corners of state government — not to mention Wasilla, where a dozen or more campaign researchers and lawyers have also begun overseeing the release of any information about Palin’s years as mayor — has touched a raw nerve. McCain staffers have even been assigned to answer calls for Palin’s family members, who have been instructed not to talk.
“Why did the McCain campaign take over the governor’s office?” the Anchorage Daily News demanded in an editorial Saturday. “Is it too much to ask that Alaska’s governor speak for herself, directly to Alaskans, about her actions as Alaska’s governor?”
The partisan spillover of the presidential campaign into the statehouse, political analysts here say, now threatens Palin’s most powerful political capital in Alaska: her commitment to transparency, her willingness to forge bipartisan alliances with Democrats to advance her legislative agenda, and her battle to upend the good ol’ boy network.
“Is this going to dilute her image as a maverick who will clean out the rascals from their perches of power, when she herself cannot tolerate questions into her behavior, investigations into the firing of a public safety commissioner?” said Gerald McBeath, political science professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
Palin, he said, is “still popular” in Alaska, “but she is not beloved. And there’s a difference between the two. She’s getting a lot more criticism at the state level as a result of her vice presidential candidacy.”