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

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)

In the spring of 2007, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act "was not going well. It was going to be a touchy vote," Bitney recalled. But as it turned out, Palin's timing was extraordinarily lucky. Early that May, days before the session was to end, a state representative and two former legislators were indicted on charges of extortion and bribery in a scandal involving the pipeline plan Murkowski had brokered.

"The legislature couldn't pass her bill fast enough at that point," Bitney said.

Broken Alliances

Some say Palin's focus on a narrow set of goals has excluded other problems facing Alaska, such as health care and the long-term stability of the state budget. "She can only handle a few issues directly," said Lois Epstein, director of the Alaska Transportation Priorities Project, who has attended meetings with Palin. "And she relies on a very small number of trusted advisers for those issues. . . . That means certain issues don't get any attention."

Nor do many legislators -- of either party.

Shortly after Palin took office, state senators were in an eight-hour ethics seminar when the new governor called an 11 a.m. news conference to unveil her ethics bill, borrowing from ideas Democrats had advocated for years, recalled Senate President Lyda Green (R), who represents Palin's home town and quickly became a nemesis. With the senators tied up in their training, the only people who stood with Palin before the cameras were a former Republican U.S. attorney and a former Democratic lawmaker.

The news conference foreshadowed a pattern: Time after time, Palin's pursuit of her goals would trump her allegiances.

Last month, just before a vote on a ballot initiative to strengthen environmental restrictions on the proposed Pebble Mine -- an enormous project critics say would damage salmon-rich Bristol Bay -- she broke with a long tradition in which Alaska governors have not taken public positions on such citizen initiatives and announced that she opposed it. She had not alerted Rick Halford (R), an influential former state Senate president who had helped her get elected and had been an informal adviser -- and who was a leader of the pro-initiative forces. It failed.

Palin has been equally willing to antagonize Democrats who have helped push through her bills. After her first legislative session, she stunned allies by using her line-item veto to make unprecedented cuts in capital budgets for projects in their districts -- $231 million in all -- a particular surprise in a time of large budget surpluses.

"I remember when we were crafting the budget, there were discussions: 'Where is the governor at? What does she want the total size to be?' . . . We could never get a firm answer from her," Wielechowski said. And then, he said, she "whacked . . . without warning, really."

Wielechowski had been one of two Democrats who, incurring the anger of their party caucus, had spoken out forcefully on the Senate floor to support Palin on the pipeline and on an oil tax increase she also pushed through. But the governor cut capital funds for his Anchorage district, he said, by 95 percent. He was startled to discover that, at the same time, she had approved money for a kitchen in a sports complex in Wasilla and for bleachers and stadium lights at high schools just outside her home town.

A typical dispute occurred in January when Palin asked to deliver her State of the State address on the legislative session's opening day at 6 p.m., an hour earlier than the custom, because she had to catch a flight to attend the graduation of her eldest child, Track, from boot camp. When Green, the state Senate president, said the request would conflict with the chamber's schedule, the governor's office threatened that she might deliver her speech only to the House.

In the end, the legislature and the governor agreed on a 4 p.m. start for her 25-minute remarks. Still, Palin called a local radio show to express her displeasure. The host, Bob Lester, sided with her. He twice said that Green, a survivor of breast cancer, was "a cancer" on Alaska's progress, and he called her a bitch. On an audiotape of the show, Palin is heard giggling at the expletive.

In response to complaints about her e-mails to business owners, Palin insisted that the Commerce Department records are public. "You just pick up the phone and ask," she told a news conference the day after this year's legislative session ended.

Besides, she said, sidestepping the matter of where the addresses came from, "every other governor has gone out for calls to the public to pay attention to certain bills."

A reporter shot back, "Governor Palin has said time and again she does business differently than Governor Murkowski." The governor left it to her staff to reply.

Staff writer Karl Vick and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.