Don Mitchell Revises the 'Palin-as-Public-Ethics-Champ' Story

With years as a politically active Alaskan and a week's worth of perspective on Palin's decision to resign, Don Mitchell offers a very plausible explanation the Governor's decision over at Alaska Dispatch.

There's a lot of interesting new story and interpretation here. Did you know that Palin was "reportedly livid" when Gov. Murkowski didn't appoint her to fill his vacant US Semate seat?

In December 2002 when Frank was sworn into office, Alaska's election law allowed Governor Murkowski to appoint Senator Murkowski's replacement. Sarah had enough juice to get on the long list of Republicans Frank interviewed. During her interview she came off as vapid and uninformed. But that's not how Sarah saw it. Several weeks later Frank astounded Alaskans by giving his Senate seat to his daughter, Lisa, who had never been publicly mentioned as a candidate for the seat and who had not been interviewed. Sarah, a 38-year-old former small town mayor who had never won a statewide election, reportedly was livid and reportedly never fully forgave Frank, because in her self-absorption she was certain that she should have been the obvious choice.

But most interesting to me was his rewriting of the story of Sarah Palin, ethicist for the people.

Mitchell talks about how she was appointed as the public member of the Oil and Gas Commission, even though she had no experience at all in oil and gas. He also points out how the position didn't require such expertise at the time, though that has since been changed.

Within weeks of her arrival at the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Sarah knew she was drowning. That she had no understanding of, and no interest in, the Commission's highly technical work. And not only that, but, like every state employee, she was expected to be at work five mornings a week. To get to the Commission's office in Anchorage required an hour commute from Wasilla that during the winter she had to make by driving in the pitch dark down an icy, moose-strewn highway. [Moose-strewn? A little color for the Outside readers?]

So according to people who knew her at the time, soon after she arrived at the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Sarah began searching for a face-saving excuse to quit a job she never should have been given.

She picked up on an issue raised by Ethan Burkowitz during the confirmation hearing of another Oil and Gas Commission member - Republican Party Chair Rudy Ruedrich. Berkowitz had asked how a party chair could ethically regulate people he would, as party chair, be asking money from?

For several months thereafter Oil and Gas Conservation Commissioner Palin, who also served as the Commission's ethics officer, had no ethical problem with Randy Ruedrich serving as a Commissioner. But then she suddenly had a huge, and very public, problem when the news leaked that during his workday Ruedrich had been using his office computer to conduct Alaska Republican Party business.

The year previous when she had been a candidate in the Republican primary election for the party's nomination for Lieutenant Governor, Sarah not only had used her computer in the Wasilla mayor's office for campaign purposes, she had used it to communicate about the progress of her campaign with Randy Ruedrich. But now she not only expressed outrage about Ruedrich's ethical lapse, she had the brazen temerity to file an ethics complaint against him. And then in a public fit of professed pique, in January 2004 she quit the Commission because, since the Attorney General's investigation of Ruedrich's violation of the Alaska Ethics Act was ongoing, she was precluded from publicly discussing what she knew about it. As Sarah went out of her way to tell the Anchorage Daily News, the state's largest newspaper: "I'm forced to withhold information from Alaskans, and that goes against what I believe in as a public servant."

There's a lot more in Mitchell's post. I can neither confirm nor dispute Mitchell's factual characterizations. But I think they add a lot more information to the public discussion of who Sarah Palin is. Eventually, with enough accounts, we will be able to sort through them, find which facts seem to stick and which seem to lack substance. Eventually we'll get a clearer picture of the phenomenon of Sarah Palin.

Mitchell's track record as, among other things, the most comprehensive chronicler of the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (and volume 2) gives him more credibility than most.