Palin Attuned More to Public Will, Less to Job's Details

Reform-Minded Voters

Observers say Gov. Sarah Palin, seen in Kuwait in 2007, pays little heed to political give-and-take or policy detail. (By Sgt. Jacob A. Mcdonald -- Defense Department Via Associated Press)

Palin rose to power at a singular moment in the history of a state whose political culture and economy are unlike those anywhere else in the United States. More than four-fifths of Alaska's revenue comes from oil, and the money is so abundant that, instead of taxing its residents, the state mails every man, woman and child a dividend check each year.

But in 2006, the year the Palin ran for governor, Alaskans also regarded oil as a corrupting influence that had gained too much power. The FBI had been investigating a bribery scandal involving oil lobbyists, and Palin's predecessor, Frank H. Murkowski (R), was the least popular governor in the nation, widely regarded as imperious and secretive for buying a state jet for his use and negotiating privately with the three major oil companies on Alaska's North Slope over plans for an enormous natural gas pipeline that had been discussed for years.

As mayor for six years of her small home town, Wasilla, Palin had defined herself as a social conservative. When she challenged Murkowski in the Republican primary for governor, she campaigned as a reformer who would bring transparency back to government.

"She hears the mood of the electorate very, very well," said Stephen Haycox, a historian at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. "She realized this was a grand opportunity because the voters of the state were now ready for someone to give them an alternative to business as usual."

She vowed to stand up to Big Oil, get a better deal for the state and its people from Alaska's energy resources, and improve political ethics -- stances now cited by the McCain campaign as evidence that Palin is an independent-minded advocate of reform. Unmentioned, Alaska political insiders say, is that the year Palin ran for governor, politicians of both parties were portraying themselves as reformers, too.

"It was just this message of change. . . . Every single candidate," recalled Bill Wielechowski, an Anchorage Democrat elected to the state Senate that year. "So there was going to be change regardless of who was in office, as long as it wasn't Frank Murkowski."

Once in the governor's office, Palin swiftly established that she would be different from her predecessor. Murkowski had fired his natural resource commissioner for speaking out against his pipeline plan as too favorable to Exxon Mobil, BP and Conoco Phillips. "It truly became a huge giveaway," recalled Marty Rutherford, one of six other senior members of the department who resigned in protest. The group was nicknamed the "Magnificent Seven."

Two months after she took office, Palin hired back the commissioner and made Rutherford a key deputy. They brought with them a framework for a pipeline deal they favored: To protect the state's interest, they would specify requirements that any oil company would have to meet if it decided to build the pipeline. Palin took the idea further, Rutherford said, proposing that the state open the project to competitive bids and create financial incentives for gas exploration. She agreed to her staff's suggestion that the state offer a $500 million inducement.

The move to open competition to anyone willing to build the pipeline was popular, Haycox said. "It appeared to put the state in a position of equality with the oil industry. We don't need to go hat in hand, begging," he said. "Nobody in the state has ever said we should just forget about the oil and gas industry. . . . She found a middle ground . . . to say, we do have some leverage."

Still, Palin struck some lawmakers as curiously detached from the process. In early March 2007, she invited the state Senate's leaders to her office for a preview of the pipeline legislation. To the astonishment of the five senators and their aides, she barely said a word for the hour. As staff members explained her signature plan, the governor was preoccupied with her two BlackBerries.

"It was so bizarre. We all talked about it afterwards," said a legislative source, one of three participants in the meeting who recounted the governor's silence. "We all said, 'What was that? Was she even paying attention?' "

Haycox summed up a common criticism of Palin: "She seems as if she is incurious about the mechanism of government."