JUNEAU, Alaska — Before Tina Fey and “Drill, baby, drill,” there was mud season here in the Alaskan capital. This soggy, socked-in spring has been no exception, but it sure has been different in other ways. For Gov. Sarah Palin, Republican meteor, getting back to governing has not been easy.
Gov. Sarah Palin has rejected suggestions by detractors at the Capitol that she has been distracted from state business.
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As the legislative session draws to an end this weekend, Ms. Palin is pushing no major bills, and neither are state lawmakers. Many pivotal alliances between the governor and minority Democrats are obsolete, undone by mutual bitterness from the election. The rush of oil revenues that helped Ms. Palin press for big-ticket projects in the past has been replaced by a budget deficit that will require taking at least $1 billion out of state savings.
And then there is the pervasive sense among many lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, that a new political reality has overtaken this remote government seat.
“The source of the greatest tension this year between the Legislature and the executive has been certainly the appearance that the executive is prioritizing her national image, her national brand, over the day-to-day operations of state government and the interests of the State of Alaska,” said Mike Hawker, the Republican co-chairman of the House Finance Committee.
Ms. Palin, Senator John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate last fall, remains a Republican star across the country and in Alaska. But her detractors at the Capitol complain that she has been distracted from state business both by continued efforts to position herself nationally and by the tabloid-tilted aspects of her new prominence.
Recently, she has sparred publicly with Levi Johnston, the 19-year-old father of her grandson, who broke up with Ms. Palin’s daughter Bristol. On Thursday, while lawmakers hone the state budget, the governor is to speak at an anti-abortion group’s fund-raising dinner in Indiana. The next morning, she addresses a breakfast for a nonprofit for families like her own who have a child with Down syndrome.
Ms. Palin and her aides insist she is as engaged with state businesses as ever. “We have a very good working relationship, as far as we know, with lawmakers,” Ms. Palin said last week in her office, where she met with reporters. “Our door is always open.”
Democratic lawmakers had been crucial in the past to the governor’s efforts to raise oil taxes and approve legislation promoting a natural gas pipeline, her signature achievements, yet many say Ms. Palin has abandoned those relationships, that she has become more polarizing rather than working to broaden her appeal. In turn, some Democrats have missed no opportunity to snipe back.
Twice the governor has rejected Democrats’ choice to fill a vacant State Senate seat in heavily Democratic Juneau; they have responded by rejecting the three Democrats she has nominated. This week, the state Democratic Party held a news conference to criticize Ms. Palin’s trip to Indiana, prompting a sharp retort from the governor’s office insisting that she has spent far more time in Juneau than previous governors had.
The biggest policy fight has been over how much federal stimulus money the state should accept (the governor initially held a news conference to say she would accept only 55 percent of the $930 million available; she soon signaled her willingness to accept more, though not enough for lawmakers). The State Senate, often her foil, took matters to a new level this year by stripping some of the governor’s priority projects from its proposed budget, including some in support of the natural gas pipeline. The Senate has yet to go along with a bill backed by Ms. Palin that would require parental notification and consent before young women under 17 can have abortions.
The governor recently nominated Wayne Anthony Ross, a board member of the National Rifle Association, to be Alaska’s attorney general. Mr. Ross, who is expected to be confirmed, has told lawmakers that he opposes many federal efforts in Alaska like increasing protections for polar bears and beluga whales and limiting resource development. Years ago, he described gay men and lesbians as “degenerates.”
As a private lawyer, Mr. Ross said, he lived his initials. “My license plate says, ‘WAR,’ ” Mr. Ross said in an interview after a recent confirmation hearing. “And my wife’s license plate says, ‘MRS WAR.’ ”
Yet even Mr. Ross offered a mild critique of the governor. In the hearing, he said he had urged her “to open better communication between the Legislature and her office.” He said he thought Ms. Palin risked appearing that she had been cowed by critics — “treed by Chihuahuas,” as he put it — and that “she needs to smile more.”
Meanwhile, the governor has opened a political action committee, SarahPAC, and there is no shortage of observers tracking how she navigates these first months after the McCain-Palin campaign. Will she run for re-election in 2010, for president in 2012?
“Who is coaching her through this crucial period?” asked Hollis French, a Democratic state senator from Anchorage and a former ally of the governor. “It’s like the opportunity of a lifetime, right?”
Meghan Stapleton, who worked for the governor long before the 2008 campaign and now is a spokeswoman for SarahPAC, said Mrs. Palin “doesn’t have any advisers outside of the state.” Ms. Palin had been scheduled as the keynote speaker for the Republican Party’s major Congressional fund-raiser in June, but after what Ms. Stapleton said was a misunderstanding over scheduling, that event is now to be headlined by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker.
“There are critics out there who say she’s not engaged in the national ambitions that they have for her,” Ms. Stapleton said. “The fact that she has people criticizing that she’s not doing it the way D.C. insiders would do it is a compliment to her.”
The governor plans to open a legal defense fund to help pay for more than $500,000 in legal debt, principally from what became known as Troopergate, a legislative inquiry that found she had abused her power in the pressuring a former state public safety commissioner to fire a state trooper, her former brother-in-law.
All of which has made Ms. Palin alternately warm and testy in her dealings around the Capitol. In the meeting with reporters in her office last week, she expressed little distress over lawmakers’ revisions to legislation she favored. She also said she prays for “the revelation of truth” to combat what she says are persistent lies about her and her family.
At one point, someone complimented her hand-painted clogs. “Cute shoes,” the person said. Ms. Palin responded, alluding to a recent dust-up over being seen wearing the logo of her husband’s snow machine sponsor: “I may not be able to tell you who paints them or I may be charged with an ethics violation or something.”
