Sen. Murkowski's Big Problem: Dad, the Governor

Murkowski visits an Eskimo village north of the Arctic Circle. Voters there -- and elsewhere in Alaska -- do not like the way she got her Senate seat. (Blaine Harden -- The Washington Post)

Knowles also has a shadow looming over his candidacy. It comes from Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).

Asked in an interview whether he would like the Democratic presidential nominee to come to Alaska to give his Senate race national exposure, Knowles paused for a long moment. "No," he said. "I have to win this race on my own accord. There are no coattails I am looking to."

About eight hours later, after a campaign rally in the suburbs of Anchorage, Knowles revised his remarks on Kerry. "It would be an honor to have him up here," he said. "But I don't think he would help my campaign much."

Alaska, a state that is extraordinarily dependent on oil from the North Slope and government funds from the nation's capital, has two inviolable political commandments that all statewide candidates must obey, political analysts say.

First, candidates must support resource extraction, particularly oil drilling in Alaska's 19.6 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They must also applaud the Bush administration's recent rescission of the "roadless rule," a Clinton-era regulation that limited logging in Alaska's 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest.

In the view of most Alaskan voters, President Bush is on the right side of these issues, while Kerry is not, pollsters say. Kerry's election, almost certainly, would keep the refuge locked up and re-impose restrictions on logging in the Tongass. Not coincidentally, polls show, Bush will shellac Kerry in Alaska come November.

All this puts Knowles, a former mayor of Anchorage and former two-term governor with liberal positions on many social issues, in a dicey spot, especially as his election could, depending on results elsewhere, tip majority control of the Senate to the Democrats. The GOP controls 51 of the Senate's 100 seats. The races for six seats held by Democrats and three seats held by Republicans (in Colorado, Oklahoma and Alaska) are considered "tossups" by political experts.

A shift in power, in turn, would put at risk the second commandment of Alaskan politics: Bring home as much federal money as possible.

If Democrats were to take back the Senate, Ted Stevens, 80, Alaska's senior Republican senator, would lose his chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which essayist Russell Baker described as "a job that allows its holders to pillage the federal treasury for the benefits of the good, needy folks back home."

Stevens, known here as "Uncle Ted," has excelled at his job and -- with the help of Frank Murkowski -- propelled Alaska to the very pinnacle of pork. The state ranks first in per capita federal spending, with $11,745 for each of its 648,818 residents, according to the U.S. Census.

As Knowles walks through this political minefield, he makes two arguments.

First, as a Democrat, he says he would be more effective than Lisa Murkowski in persuading leaders of his party of the wisdom of "responsible" drilling in the Arctic refuge and logging in the Tongass.

"I will put Alaska first over partisan and special-interest powers that determine what comes out of Washington," Knowles said in the interview.

Second, Knowles is effusive in his praise of Stevens, despite the senior senator's effusive endorsement of Lisa Murkowski. (Stevens called her "a hell of a lot better senator than her dad ever was.")

"Ted is a personal friend," Knowles said. "I always worked well with him when I was governor, and I think we could work together in Washington as a team, on both sides of the aisles."

Murkowski, too, said that a principal reason why Alaskans should return her to Washington is her relationship with Stevens. "He and I get along very well, which is certainly to my advantage," she said.

On almost every resource-and-pork issue that is critical to Alaskan voters, there appears to be little or no difference between Knowles and Murkowski.

Murkowski, though, touts a distinction that Knowles is hard-pressed to dispute. She is 47, and her Dec. 20, 2002, appointment links her seniority in the Senate to the Class of 2000. Knowles, 61, would come to the Senate with no seniority.

In Alaska, perhaps more than any other state, politicians with seniority or influence in Washington pack a powerful punch. Murkowski's brief tenure in Congress could outweigh Knowles's charisma as a campaigner, his depth of expertise on issues and the loyalty he garnered as a relatively popular governor, according to Jerry A. McBeath, a professor of political science at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

"She is younger, and she could stay in office forever," McBeath said. "Alaskans tend to focus on long-term seniority and how it will help the state develop economically."