Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin Read Online Free Page A

oil and gas company executives, to the detriment of Alaskan citizens. My own Republican Party, including Frank Murkowski, had sold us out for political gain.
    When then senator Frank Murkowski (a man we came to call “Murky”) ran for and won election as the state’s tenth governor in 2002, he couldn’t wait to pounce onto a pile of political scat. The seventy-year-old lifetime politician had, as governor, the privilege of appointing his own successor in the U.S. Senate. After interviewing several candidates for show (including Sarah), he appointed his daughter Lisa to the powerful position. In a backroom deal, the senate seat went from father to daughter as if it were a family-owned asset. The governor’s subsequent self-serving actions galled Sarah and thousands like me.
    Much later, in reference to Governor Murkowski’s shocking appointment, Sarah wrote to me,
“I despise dynastic succession.”
As far as Sarah and many of us on the sidelines were concerned, differences with the Alaska GOP political machine were irreconcilable. Somebody needed to address this egregiousness. I for one knew in my heart that this upstart beauty was the only person willing and able to take on that challenge. While Murky had the GOP machine and big donors, I believed that Sarah Palin had God’s blessing and people’s love and faith. Check and mate.
    As a distant observer, I perceived a principled, clean-house Republican, unafraid of the entrenched good ol’ boys. Possessing RonaldReagan’s conservatism and principles, she was David to Murkowski’s Goliath. And many of us suspected this was only the beginning. Sarah held similarly larger ambitions. During her 1996 run for mayor of Wasilla, her campaign manager, Laura Chase, once said to her, “You know, Sarah, within ten years you could be governor.”
    â€œGovernor?” Sarah answered. “I want to be president.”
    As if hand delivered by fate, Sarah found a way to establish her anticorruption chops. Shortly after the outrage over dynastic succession—and maybe in an attempt to placate a potential foe—Governor Murkowski appointed the increasingly vocal Sarah Palin to a prestigious and well-paid post on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC), an agency that helps determine how best to safely bring Alaska’s North Slope oil and gas to market. Within the first year of a six-year term, Sarah called out a fellow commissioner for ethical lapses and later resigned when told she was under a gag order and could not publicize her complaints. The commissioner in question happened to be the Republican Party chair, Randy Ruedrich. He eventually paid a hefty fine for passing along confidential committee documents to oil interests. Equally troubling to many was that as GOP Party chair, Ruedrich’s job was to solicit oil money from the industry’s top executives for political candidates. That he was simultaneously on the AOGCC was another example of grimy politics. What’s more, Sarah also exposed him for running Republican Party business from his AOGCC office, a violation of using state resources for political activity.
    When later running for the GOP nomination for governor, Team Palin summarized this saga in an email written to counteract an editorial in the conservative
Anchorage Times
suggesting that she was a political lightweight:
    Ruedrich was fined the largest ethics violation amount in state history. . . . I was the chairman of AOGCC, and was Ruedrich’s ethics supervisor. I was not going to let the integrity of this quasi-judicial agency go down the toilet by allowing the many questionable actions of a political appointment (who also happened to be the GOP boss) go unchecked. . . .
    As Ruedrich was investigated by the Dept. Of Law, Murkowskipromised to set the record straight . . . so the integrity of AOGCC, which regulates 20% of the U.S. domestic supply of energy, would be restored.