Tarred by Scandal, Republicans May Be Losing Alaska

"The vast majority of Alaskans don't care what letter comes after our name," Begich declared this week at an event announcing "Republicans for Begich." This being Alaska, several of the Republicans were union leaders. something unheard of in most states.

"We're diverse up here," said John Garrett, of Sheet Metal Workers Union Local 23. Andy Holleman, the Republican vice president of the Anchorage teachers union, said many voters will not make a decision about Stevens until after his trial, set to begin Sept. 22.

"If it is going to tip them the other way, this is the time," he said. "It's not going to be like this in four years."

In the House race, Young, 75, faces a host of challenges. The federal probes that have depleted his campaign coffers touch on the oil bribery scandal that ensnared Stevens, and inquiries into the congressional earmarks have made him notorious outside the state and formidable within it. Young, for his part, sounds as though he is confident in divine intervention.

"I believe he's still going to choose me to protect this state," he said. "If he doesn't, it's another chapter."

His main primary opponent is Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, elected alongside Palin as a reformer and running to the right of an incumbent who won 70 percent of the vote against his father 28 years ago.

"Sean, congratulations," Young told the state GOP convention where Parnell announced his candidacy. "I beat your dad, and I'm going to beat you."

Early polls have given the edge to Parnell, who declares, "We're tired of being the nation's symbol of excess and greed." But his trajectory appeared less certain after a shaky performance in a televised debate and the emergence of a second GOP challenger who may split the anti-Young vote.

The Democratic challengers include Diane Benson, a Native Alaskan and mother of a seriously wounded Iraq war veteran. But polls favor Ethan Berkowitz, an Anchorage lawyer who led the legislature's Democratic minority for seven years and cleanly fielded this question from the anchorman at the debate in which Parnell faltered: "When did you last go hunting, and for what?" (Two years ago, for caribou.)

"The Republican Party here is in disarray," said Berkowitz, 46. "They're infighting. They're out of money. And they just haven't had to battle from this position before."

GOP dominance in Alaska has been a constant since the ascendance of the petroleum industry, and the state's profound reliance on it contained the seeds of the current scandal.

The vast North Slope reserves allowed the state to replace income taxes with annual dividend checks, and this month lawmakers voted to give Alaskans $1,200 to cover skyrocketing gas and heating oil costs. But industry checks to lawmakers also grew routine, and the oil services company Veco and its irascible president, Bill Allen, assumed a proprietary air eventually captured by FBI surveillance cameras.

"Maybe we can buy some gasoline. You know, he's got planes," state Sen. John Cowdery told Allen, discussing plans to buy off another legislator, according to Cowdery's July 10 indictment.

"It's a classic colonial operation," said Berkowitz, "where the colonizers co-opt the local elites and use the local elites to keep the public in check."

Palin's upset election victory showed that the Republican brand retained value. And her approval ratings remain high even after she controversially fired one public safety commissioner and saw the replacement promptly resign when a former assistant said she regarded his request for a daily hug as sexual harassment.

"But it adds to the overall picture of the complications going on in Alaska politics," said Mike Meeks, 50, a city employee in Seward. "To me, Alaska's changing. It used to be if you aren't Republican, you don't belong here. That's changing."