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The John and Sarah courtship
by Jane Mayer
“Here’s a little news flash,” Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced in September, during her début at the Party’s Convention, in St. Paul. “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly these past few days that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington élite then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.” But, she added, “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion.”
In subsequent speeches, Palin has cast herself as an antidote to the élitist culture inside the Beltway. “I’m certainly a Washington outsider, and I’m proud of that, because I think that that is what we need,” she recently told Fox News. During her first interview as John McCain’s running mate, with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, Palin was asked about her lack of experience in foreign policy. She replied, “We’ve got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual, and somebody’s big fat résumé, maybe, that shows decades and decades in the Washington establishment . . . Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing, and kind of that closed-door, good-ol’-boy network that has been the Washington élite.”
Palin’s sudden rise to prominence, however, owes more to members of the Washington élite than her rhetoric has suggested. Paulette Simpson, the head of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women, who has known Palin since 2002, said, “From the beginning, she’s been underestimated. She’s very smart. She’s ambitious.” John Bitney, a top policy adviser on Palin’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, said, “Sarah’s very conscientious about crafting the story of Sarah. She’s all about the hockey mom and Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington—the anti-politician politician.” Bitney is from Wasilla, Palin’s home town, and has known her since junior high school, where they both played in the band. He considers Palin a friend, even though after becoming governor, in December, 2006, she dismissed him. He is now the chief of staff to the speaker of the Alaska House.
Upon being elected governor, Palin began developing relationships with Washington insiders, who later championed the idea of putting her on the 2008 ticket. “There’s some political opportunism on her part,” Bitney said. For years, “she’s had D.C. in mind.” He added, “She’s not interested in being on the junior-varsity team.”
During her gubernatorial campaign, Bitney said, he began predicting to Palin that she would make the short list of Republican Vice-Presidential prospects. “She had the biography, I told her, to be a contender,” he recalled. At first, Palin only laughed. But within a few months of being sworn in she and others in her circle noticed that a blogger named Adam Brickley had started a movement to draft her as Vice-President. Palin also learned that a number of prominent conservative pundits would soon be passing through Juneau, on cruises sponsored by right-leaning political magazines. She invited these insiders to the governor’s mansion, and even led some of them on a helicopter tour.
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Throughout the campaign, Palin has mocked what she calls “the mainstream media.” Yet her administration made a concerted effort to attract the attention of East Coast publications. In late 2007, the state hired a public-relations firm with strong East Coast connections, which began promoting Palin and a natural-gas pipeline that she was backing in Alaska. The contract was for thirty-seven thousand dollars. The publicist on the project, Marcia Brier, the head of MCB Communications, in Needham, Massachusetts, was asked to approach media outlets in Washington and New York, according to the Washington Post. “I believe Alaska has a very small press organization,” Brier told me. “They hired an outside consultant in order to get that East Coast press.” Brier crafted a campaign depicting Palin as bravely taking on powerful oil interests by choosing a Canadian firm, TransCanada, rather than an American conglomerate such as ExxonMobil, to build the pipeline. (“Big Oil Under Siege” was the title of a typical press release.) Brier pitched Palin to publications such as the Times, the Washington Post, and Fortune.
From the start of her political career, Palin has positioned herself as an insurgent intent on dislodging entrenched interests. In 1996, a campaign pamphlet for her first mayoral run—recently obtained by The New Republic—strikes the same note of populist resentment that Palin did at the Convention: “I’m tired of ‘business as usual’ in this town, and of the ‘Good Ol’ Boys’ network that runs the show here.” Yet Palin has routinely turned to members of Washington’s Old Guard for help. After she became the mayor of Wasilla, Palin oversaw the hiring of a law firm to represent the town’s interests in Washington, D.C. The Wasilla account was handled by Steven Silver, a Washington-area lobbyist who had been the chief of staff to Alaska’s long-serving Republican senator Ted Stevens, who was indicted in July on charges of accepting illegal gifts and is now standing trial. (Silver declined to discuss his ties to Palin.) As the Washington Post reported, Silver’s efforts in the capital helped Wasilla, a town of sixty-seven hundred residents, secure twenty-seven million dollars in federal earmarks. During this election season, however, Palin has presented herself as more abstemious, saying, “I’ve championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress.”
In February, 2007, Adam Brickley gave himself a mission: he began searching for a running mate for McCain who could halt the momentum of the Democrats. Brickley, a self-described “obsessive” political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by “randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women.” Though he generally opposes affirmative action, gender drove his choice. “People were talking about Hillary at the time,” he recalled. Brickley said that he “puzzled over every Republican female politician I knew.” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, “waffled on social issues”; Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, was too moderate. He was running out of options, he recalled, when he said to himself, “What about that lady who just got elected in Alaska?” Online research revealed that she had a strong grassroots following; as Brickley put it, “I hate to use the words ‘cult of personality,’ but she reminded me of Obama.”
Brickley registered a Web site—palinforvp.blogspot.com—which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”
Brickley’s family, once evangelical Christians, now practice what he calls “Messianic Judaism.” They believe that Jesus is the Messiah, but they also observe the Jewish holidays and attend synagogue; as Brickley puts it, “Jesus was Jewish, so to be like Him you need to be Jewish, too.” Brickley said that “the hand of God” played a role in choosing Palin: “The longer I worked on it the less I felt I was driving it. Something else was at work.”
Brickley is an authentic heartland voice, but he is also the product of an effort by wealthy conservative organizations in Washington to train activists. He has attended several workshops sponsored by the Leadership Institute, a group based in the Washington area and founded in 1979 by the Christian conservative activist Morton Blackwell. “I’m building a movement,” Blackwell told me. Brickley also participated in a leadership summit held by Young America’s Foundation (motto: “The Conservative Movement Starts Here”) and was an intern at the Heritage Foundation. He currently lives in a dormitory, on Capitol Hill, run by the Heritage Foundation, and is an intern with townhall.com, a top conservative Web site.
While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.
On June 18, 2007, the first group disembarked in Juneau from the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam, and went to the governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns, for lunch. The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.
By all accounts, the luncheon was a high-spirited, informal occasion. Kristol brought his wife and daughter; Gerson brought his wife and two children. Barnes, who brought his sister and his wife, sat on one side of Governor Palin, who presided at the head of the long table in the mansion’s formal dining room; the Kristols sat on the other. Gerson was at the opposite end, as was Palin’s chief of staff at the time, Mike Tibbles, who is now working for Senator Stevens’s reëlection campaign. The menu featured halibut cheeks—the choicest part of the fish. Before the meal, Palin delivered a lengthy grace. Simpson, who was at the luncheon, said, “I told a girlfriend afterwards, ‘That was some grace!’ It really set the tone.” Joe Balash, Palin’s assistant, who was also present, said, “There are not many politicians who will say grace with the conviction of faith she has. It’s a daily part of her life.”
Palin was joined by her lieutenant governor and by Alaska’s attorney general. Also present was a local woman involved in upholding the Juneau school system’s right to suspend a student who had displayed a satirical banner—“Bong Hits 4 Jesus”—across the street from his school. The student had sued the school district, on First Amendment grounds, and, at the time of the lunch, the case was before the Supreme Court. (The school district won.)
During the lunch, everyone was charmed when the Governor’s small daughter Piper popped in to inquire about dessert. Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”
According to a former Alaska official who attended the lunch, the visitors wanted to do something “touristy,” so a “flight-seeing” trip was arranged. Their destination was a gold mine in Berners Bay, some forty-five miles north of Juneau. For Palin and several staff members, the state leased two helicopters from a private company, Coastal, for two and a half hours, at a cost of four thousand dollars. (The pundits paid for their own aircraft.) Palin explained that environmentalists had invoked the Clean Water Act to oppose a plan by a mining company, Coeur Alaska, to dump waste from the extraction of gold into a pristine lake in the Tongass National Forest. Palin rejected the environmentalists’ claims. (The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Coeur Alaska, and the dispute is now before the Supreme Court.) Barnes was dazzled by Palin’s handling of the hundred or so mineworkers who gathered to meet the group. “She clearly was not intimidated by crowds—or men!” he said. “She’s got real star quality.”
By the time the Weekly Standard pundits returned to the cruise ship, Paulette Simpson said, “they were very enamored of her.” In July, 2007, Barnes wrote the first major national article spotlighting Palin, titled “The Most Popular Governor,” for The Weekly Standard. Simpson said, “That first article was the result of having lunch.” Bitney agreed: “I don’t think she realized the significance until after it was all over. It got the ball rolling.”
The other journalists who met Palin offered similarly effusive praise: Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”
The next day, however, Kristol was still talking about Palin on Fox. “She could be both an effective Vice-Presidential candidate and an effective President,” he said. “She’s young, energetic.” On a subsequent “Fox News Sunday,” Kristol again pushed Palin when asked whom McCain should pick: “Sarah Palin, whom I’ve only met once but I was awfully impressed by—a genuine reformer, defeated the establishment up there. It would be pretty wild to pick a young female Alaska governor, and I think, you know, McCain might as well go for it.” On July 22nd, again on Fox, Kristol referred to Palin as “my heartthrob.” He declared, “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket.” Reached last week, Kristol pointed out that just before McCain picked Palin he had ratcheted back his campaign a little; though he continued to tout her, he also wrote a Times column promoting Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut.
On October 6th, in another Times column, Kristol cryptically acknowledged having been entertained by the Governor. He mentioned meeting Palin “in far more relaxed circumstances, in Alaska over a year ago.” The column featured one of the few interviews that Palin has granted to the national media since becoming McCain’s running mate. Kristol quoted Palin saying that the debate had been a “liberating” experience, then wrote, “Shouldn’t the public get the benefit of another Biden-Palin debate, or even two? If there’s difficulty finding a moderator, I’ll be glad to volunteer.”
On August 1, 2007, a few weeks after the Weekly Standard cruise departed from Juneau, Palin hosted a second boatload of pundits, this time from a cruise featuring associates of National Review. Her guests, arriving on the M.S. Noordam, included Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor and a syndicated columnist; Robert Bork, the conservative legal scholar and former federal judge; John Bolton, who served as the Bush Administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2004 to 2006; Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative historian who is reportedly a favorite of Vice-President Dick Cheney; and Dick Morris, the ideologically ambidextrous political consultant, who writes a column for The Hill and appears regularly on Fox News.
As Jack Fowler, National Review’s publisher, recalled it, when the guest speakers were invited to come to a special reception at the governor’s mansion, “We said, ‘Sure!’ There’s only so much you can do in Juneau.” The mansion itself, he said, was modest—“not exactly Newport.” But the food was great, and included an impressive spread of salmon. Palin, who circulated nimbly through the room, and spoke admiringly of National Review, made a good impression. Fowler said, “This lady is something special. She connects. She’s genuine. She doesn’t look like what you’d expect. My thought was, Too bad she’s way up there in Alaska, because she has potential, but to make things happen you have to know people.”
Hanson, the historian, recalled Palin in high heels, “walking around this big Victorian house with rough Alaska floors, saying, ‘Hi, I’m Sarah.’ ” She was “striking,” he said. “She has that aura that Clinton, Reagan, and Jack Kennedy had—magnetism that comes through much more strongly when you’re in the same room.” He was delighted that Palin described herself as a fan of history, and as a reader of National Review’s Web site, for which he writes regularly. She spoke about the need to drill for oil in Alaska’s protected wilderness areas, arguing that her husband had worked in nearby oil fields and knew firsthand that it wasn’t environmentally hazardous. Hanson, a farm owner, found it appealing that she was married to an oil worker, rather than to an executive. Bolton, for his part, was pleased that Palin, a hunting enthusiast, was familiar with his efforts to stave off international controls on the global flow of small weapons. She spoke knowledgeably about missile defense, too, he said, and discussed his role, in 2001, in guiding the Bush Administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at National Review, had a more elemental response. In an online column, he described Palin as “a former beauty-pageant contestant, and a real honey, too. Am I allowed to say that? Probably not, but too bad.”
According to several accounts, however, no connection made that day was more meaningful than the one struck between Palin and Dick Morris. “He had this very long conversation with her,” Fowler recalled. Lowry laughed in remembering it: “The joke going around was that he was going to take credit for making her.” (Nordlinger’s column went on to say, “Her political career will probably take her beyond Alaska. Dick Morris is only one who thinks so.”)
In fact, in an admiring column published in the Washington Post two days after Palin was chosen, Morris wrote, “I will always remember taking her aside and telling her that she might one day be tapped to be Vice-President, given her record and the shortage of female political talent in the Republican Party. She will make one hell of a candidate, and hats off to McCain for picking her.”
Morris offered Palin some advice during their encounter in Juneau, several of those present recollected, which he shared with the rest of the gathering in a short speech. As Lowry recalled it, Morris had warned her that a reformer, in order to be successful, needed to maintain her “outsider cred.” In a similar vein, Simpson recalled that Morris “gave a little speech” in which he warned that “what happens to most people is that they campaign as outsiders, but when they get into power they turn into insiders. If you want to be successful, you have to stay an outsider.”
Clearly, Palin has taken this advice to heart. Still, when the moment came for Morris and other guests to depart, Palin was sad to see the Washington insiders go. Hanson recalled, “She said, ‘Hey—does anyone want to stay for dinner? We’re going to eat right now.’ She also invited everyone to come back the next day. ‘If any of you are in the area, all you have to do is knock. Yell upstairs, I’ll be right down.’ ”
By the end of February, 2008, the chorus of conservative pundits for Palin was loud enough for the mainstream media to take note. Chris Cillizza, reporting for the Web site of the Washington Post, interviewed Palin and asked her if she’d accept an offer to be McCain’s running mate. Though she dismissed the notion as a virtual “impossibility this go-round,” Palin, who had been in office for only fourteen months, said, “Is it generally something that I would want to consider? Yes.”
By the spring, the McCain campaign had reportedly sent scouts to Alaska to start vetting Palin as a possible running mate. A week or so before McCain named her, however, sources close to the campaign say, McCain was intent on naming his fellow-senator Joe Lieberman, an independent, who left the Democratic Party in 2006. David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who is close to a number of McCain’s top aides, told me that “McCain and Lindsey Graham”—the South Carolina senator, who has been McCain’s closest campaign companion—“really wanted Joe.” But Keene believed that “McCain was scared off” in the final days, after warnings from his advisers that choosing Lieberman would ignite a contentious floor fight at the Convention, as social conservatives revolted against Lieberman for being, among other things, pro-choice.
“They took it away from him,” a longtime friend of McCain—who asked not to be identified, since the campaign has declined to discuss its selection process—said of the advisers. “He was furious. He was pissed. It wasn’t what he wanted.” Another friend disputed this, characterizing McCain’s mood as one of “understanding resignation.”
With just days to go before the Convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the pairing. “I told Romney not to wait by the phone, because ‘he doesn’t like you,’ ” Keene, who favored the choice, said. “With John McCain, all politics is personal.” Other possible choices—such as former Representative Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Governor Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota—seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain’s core message that he was a “maverick.” Finally, McCain’s top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin. Ed Rogers, the chairman of B.G.R., a well-connected, largely Republican lobbying firm, said, “Her criteria kept popping out. She was a governor—that’s good. The shorter the Washington résumé the better. A female is better still. And then there was her story.” He admitted, “There was concern that she was a novice.” In addition to Schmidt and Davis, Charles R. Black, Jr., the lobbyist and political operative who is McCain’s chief campaign adviser, reportedly favored Palin. Keene said, “I’m told that Charlie Black told McCain, ‘If you pick anyone else, you’re going to lose. But if you pick Palin you may win.’ ” (Black did not return calls for comment.) Meanwhile, McCain’s longtime friend said, “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms.”
McCain had met Palin once, but their conversation—at a reception during a meeting of the National Governors Association, six months earlier—had lasted only fifteen minutes. “It wasn’t a real conversation,” said the longtime friend, who called the choice of Palin “the fucking most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Aides arranged a phone call between McCain and Palin, and scrutinized her answers to some seventy items on a questionnaire that she had filled out. But McCain didn’t talk with Palin in person again until the morning of Thursday, August 28th. Palin was flown down to his retreat in Sedona, Arizona, and they spoke for an hour or two. By the time he announced her as his choice, the next day, he had spent less than three hours in her company.
“It certainly was a risk—a risk a lot of people wouldn’t take,” Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator and now a volunteer with the McCain campaign, said. “But that’s what I like about John. There’s a boldness there.”
The thoroughness of the campaign’s vetting process, overseen by the Washington lawyer and former White House counsel Arthur B. Culvahouse, Jr., remains in dispute. The campaign insists that Palin’s record and personal history were carefully examined. (Culvahouse declined to comment for this story.) The Los Angeles Times, however, reported that the campaign never contacted several obvious sources of information on Palin, including Lyda Green—a Republican state senator in Alaska, and a former ally turned opponent. Also in dispute is whether Palin disclosed to the campaign, as she and officials have said, that her unwed teen-age daughter was pregnant. “I am a hundred per cent sure they didn’t know,” McCain’s longtime friend said. Another campaign source, however, insisted that McCain’s team knew about the pregnancy.
The selection of Palin thrilled the Republican base, and the pundits who met with her in Juneau have remained unflagging in their support. But a surprising number of conservative thinkers have declared her unfit for the Vice-Presidency. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, recently wrote, “The Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain.” David Brooks, the Times columnist, has called Palin “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” Christopher Buckley, the son of National Review’s late founder, defected to the Obama camp two weeks ago, in part because of his dismay over Palin. Matthew Dowd, the former Bush campaign strategist turned critic of the President, said recently that McCain “knows in his gut” that Palin isn’t qualified for the job, “and when this race is over, that is something he will have to live with. . . . He put the country at risk.”
Palin initially provided the McCain campaign with a boost, but polls now suggest that she has become a liability. A top Republican close to the campaign said that McCain’s aides have largely kept faith with Palin. They have been impressed by her work ethic, and by what a quick study she is. According to the Republican close to the campaign, she has sometimes discomfited advisers by travelling with a big family entourage. “It kind of changes the dynamic of a meeting to have them all in the room,” he told me. John McCain’s comfort level with Palin is harder to gauge. In the view of the longtime McCain friend, “John’s personal comfort level is low with everyone right now. He’s angry. But it was his choice.” ♦
Original article posted here.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Fighting fraud
By James Rowley
Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama and John McCain have a litigation game plan to accompany their election strategy.
Both candidates have armies of volunteers to ring doorbells and get voters to the polls. They are also forming squadrons of lawyers who are filing challenges and preparing in case Election Day doesn't settle the contest for the White House.
Legal battles unfolding in Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin provide fresh evidence of the potential fights to come over ballot access in an election marked by unprecedented spending to increase the number of voters in strategically important states.
The millions of dollars that have been poured into registration drives have yielded millions of new voters across the country. Those same efforts have now generated heated battles in both parties with cries of voter fraud and intimidation that may threaten the integrity of the election.
Election officials, meanwhile, are braced for huge turnout and the problems that could create with long lines, malfunctioning machines and challenges to voters.
Already, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed Ohio Democrats a victory, dissolving a court order obtained by Republicans to force state officials to release the list of 200,000 new voters whose names or addresses don't match government databases.
Democrats' Accusations
Democrats accused Republicans of trying to improperly disqualify voters.
In Florida, Democratic lawyer Charles H. Lichtman has assembled almost 5,000 lawyers to monitor precincts, assist voters turned away at the polls and litigate any disputes that can't be resolved out of court.
``On Election Day, I will be managing the largest law firm in the country, albeit for one day,'' said Lichtman, 53, a Fort Lauderdale corporate lawyer and veteran of the five-week recount after the 2000 election when Florida eventually delivered the presidency to George W. Bush.
Obama's lawyers also have pressed allegations that Michigan Republicans planned to use mortgage-foreclosure lists to challenge voters. Indiana labor unions allied with Democratic presidential nominee Obama, an Illinois senator, are battling a Republican chairman over early voting in the state's second- largest county.
2002 Law
Much of the partisan disagreement is over enforcing a 2002 law enacted by Congress to help states prevent a Florida-type recount by requiring election officials to set up database checks to purge voters.
Ohio's Republican Party obtained a court order directing Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's secretary of state, to give county election officials the lists of new voters whose names didn't match drivers' licenses or Social Security records.
In her successful Supreme Court petition, Brunner called the order a recipe for ``disruption'' and ``chaos'' as the state prepares for a presidential vote that polls of Ohio voters predict will produce another razor-thin margin. Database checks are not ``a litmus test'' for the right to vote, she said in a statement announcing the appeal.
Republicans contend the federal law requires record checks to counter fraudulent voter registration, which they say has been perpetrated by a nationwide network of community activists known as ACORN. The party's presidential nominee, Arizona Senator McCain, has cried foul over the drive by ACORN -- an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- to register 1.3 million voters this year.
`Deceased Individuals'
``They're registering the same person at different addresses,'' said Sean Cairncross, the Republican National Committee's chief counsel. ``They're registering people at vacant lots'' as well as ``deceased individuals.''
ACORN says bogus applications are only a tiny percentage of the new voters it registered, and it flags suspicious cases to election officials.
On Oct. 2, Ohio Republicans won a separate court fight with Brunner over absentee ballots cast by McCain supporters. The state's Supreme Court countermanded Brunner's order that local election boards reject the ballots if the applicant hadn't checked a box that indicating they were a ``qualified voter'' when submitting the absentee ballot.
Democrats and voter-rights lawyers, meanwhile, accuse Republicans of twisting the Help America Vote Act to use identity-card or database checks as a method to prevent legitimate voters from casting ballots.
`No Basis'
``That is one of the oldest dumbest lines the Democratic Party uses,'' said John McClelland, spokesman for the Ohio Republicans in Columbus. ``There is no basis for it.''
Ohio doesn't require first-time voters to register party affiliation, though the Obama campaign said Democrats have a significant edge among the 660,000 new Ohio voters.
Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said there is scant evidence of large numbers of people fraudulently casting ballots. ```We all know the stories of dead people voting in Chicago,'' he said. ``We don't have zombies showing up at polling places and casting ballots.''
Without ``any data,'' the argument over whether there is vote fraud or ballot suppression is ``the political equivalent of a religious debate,'' said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a Washington-based unit of the Pew Charitable Trust that studies election law.
`Tenets of Faith'
``Both sides have deeply held tenets of faith, but no way to prove'' that ``they are right or the other side is wrong.''
Still, vote fraud has become an attack line for McCain, 72.
In an Oct. 15 debate, McCain said Obama, 47, was in league with ACORN and accused the group of ``perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history.''
Obama denied any connection with ACORN, and said the group was defrauded by people who filled out registration cards with fake names just to get paid.
Bob Bauer, the general counsel of Obama's campaign, charged that Republican efforts like the Ohio party's lawsuit, are ``grounded simply in an effort to intimidate voters and suppress the vote.''
In a conference call with reporters, Bauer vowed to mount ``ferocious response'' to any effort to purge voter rolls, such as the lawsuit by Wisconsin's Republican attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen.
Van Hollen, who co-chairs McCain's presidential campaign in Wisconsin, sued to force the state agency overseeing elections to perform database searches to check the validity of all voters registered since Jan. 1, 2006. A decision is expected next week.
Labor Unions
In Indiana, Republicans and Democratic-allied labor unions are battling over early voting in Lake County, an historically Democratic stronghold that includes Hammond, East Chicago and Gary near Chicago. John Curley, the county Republican chairman, argues that the election board lacked authority to open more than one site because state law requires a unanimous vote of the vote of the board.
The McCain campaign wouldn't say how many lawyers it has deployed or how it is preparing for possible court fights.
``We are not jumping to conclusions that litigation efforts are going to be widespread,'' said Ben Porritt, a McCain spokesman.
Hayden Dempsey, a Tallahassee lawyer who chairs Lawyers for McCain in Florida, said his party isn't ``trying to lawyer up nearly so much as the Democrats.'' Republicans are trying to mobilize voters while Florida Democrats appear to be trying to ``win this through having the greatest number of lawyers.''
To contact the reporter on this story: James Rowley at jarowley@bloomberg.net
Saturday, October 18, 2008
This should be your front page news
Obama Rally Draws 100,000 in Missouri
Amy Chozick reports on the presidential race from St. Louis.
Barack Obama attracted 100,000 people at a Saturday rally here, his biggest crowd ever at a U.S. event.
The crowd assembled under the Gateway Arch on a sunny Saturday afternoon to hear Obama speak about taxes and slam the Republicans on economic issues.
Lt. Samuel Dotson of the St. Louis Police Department confirmed the number of attendees piled into the grassy lawn by the Mississippi River.
To be sure, big crowds don’t always signal a big turnout on Election Day. But Obama’s ability to draw his largest audience yet in a typically red state that just weeks ago looked out of reach, could signal a changing electoral map.
For months Missouri polls put Obama as much as ten percentage points behind Republican John McCain. It was widely believed that McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate would have won over the state’s conservatives and boosted his chances there. So far, that hasn’t happened.
A Rasmussen poll released on Friday shows Obama leading in Missouri 52% to 46% for McCain.
Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill had harsh words for Palin when she introduced Obama on Saturday. Referring to comments Palin made earlier this week in North Carolina about “pro-America” states, McCaskill said “We have reached a new low in America politics when a candidate dares to say that one part of America is pro-America and another part is anti-America.”
She also took a dig at McCain for selecting a vice presidential nominee with limited experience. “One [candidate] picked one of the strongest candidates for vice president he could’ve picked in the United States and well, the other didn’t.”
Recognizing that big rallies don’t always result in cast ballots, the Obama campaign has dispatched thousands of field organizers and volunteers to Missouri to knock on doors in a statewide get out the vote effort.Original article posted here.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Justin Raimondo gets it right on Obama
by Justin Raimondo
I have to admit once being not enamored of, but hopeful about the candidacy of Barack Obama. In "The Year of the Insurgents," I underlined why I thought the conventional wisdom about this election year was dead wrong, and I was right about that. But what I wasn't right about was the extent to which Obama would be willing to deviate from the foreign policy elite's party line when it comes to the pressing issues of the day. We all know where Obama is right – or, as we used to say in the Sixties, "right on." The importance of negotiations, the profound strategic and moral wrongness of the Iraq war, the sheer craziness of a neocon-run foreign policy – these are the basics that have brought many millions to rally 'round Obama's banner. They were also the reasons for my initial enthusiasm for the previously unknown senator from Illinois, aside, that is, from his apparent thoughtfulness and his seemingly inherent presidential mien.
As the campaign progressed, however, it soon became all too obvious that a candidate raised up by the "antiwar" wing of the Democratic Party was and is a committed interventionist Рand, not only that, but one who is still maintaining some of the hoariest old clich̩s of interventionist dogma, such as the apparently intrinsic aggressiveness that animates the Russian elite, the supposed centrality of Israel's security to our policy in the Middle East, and the moral imperative of "humanitarian" interventionism, starting in Darfur and ending God knows where.
His speech to the AIPAC conference was, perhaps, the low point of his campaign: the pandering, once started, didn't stop. Of course, we had been warned when, early on, he declared an attack on Iran wasn't "off the table," and his reiteration of this stance in front of Israel's amen corner – he would, he averred, do "everything, and I mean everything" to stop Iran from going nuclear – was hardly composed to offer us any solace.
Everything? Really? What about dropping nukes on Tehran or other major population centers? I don't want to exaggerate the degree of Obama's slide into a moral abyss, but the man is known to measure his words, yet that time he clearly abandoned his customary caution, and, as they say, let it all hang out. The mask slipped, if only for a moment – and it wasn't pretty, was it?
On another vitally important issue, the renewal of the Cold War with Russia – a project dear to the hearts of neocons everywhere – Obama is hardly distinguishable from John McCain. Indeed, as I pointed out in my analysis of the last debate, the two of them seemed to be competing to see who could be more warlike and provocative when it came to the issue of the Caucasus. Particularly disturbing is Obama's complete denial of what happened in Tskhinvali, the Ossetian capital city, when the Georgians went in and slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians. The candidate echoed the War Party's bizarre inversion of the established facts, insisting that Russia had invaded Georgia, instead of Georgia invading Ossetia and Abkhazia.
This is no small point: Obama deliberately overlooked the very real human cost of President Mikheil Saakashvili's Napoleonic ambitions in the region, because there can be no doubt he knows better. As McCain gleefully pointed out during the first debate, the Obama campaign initially took a very different position, decrying violence on both sides and calling for a cease-fire. In McCain's view, giving the thousands of Ossetians slaughtered by Saakashvili any acknowledgment at all is inexcusable. Outside of that, however, McCain is right: Obama did indeed change his position, perhaps after due consultation with his advisers. This is strong circumstantial evidence that he did have at least some idea of what really went on in Ossetia, and subsequently chose to ignore it.
This is not just an obscure foreign policy point with major moral implications – it is a huge issue, having to do not only with the regional secessionist movements that beleaguer Russia's "near abroad," but also with the much larger question of whether we are going to face off with the Kremlin in a replay of the Cold War years.
Absent the existence of international communism as an organized movement centrally directed from Moscow, a new Cold War would seem an impossibility – but don't worry, the War Party is quite capable of pulling it off, as we have seen. Since Putin's rise to power, we have heard the drumbeat loud and clear: Russia is "resurgent," the Kremlin is in a newly "aggressive" mode, and Russian "authoritarianism" is on the march.
Well, to be sure, Russia is no libertarian paradise: far from it. Yet, looked at objectively, the Russians have come a very long way since the days of the gulag. Vladimir Putin's many Western critics compare his rule to that of his predecessor, former Communist Party local chieftain Boris Yeltsin, and somehow conclude that Yeltsin's regime was freer. But Yeltsin's Russia was the closest to a genuine kleptocracy that the world has yet seen. Those who looted the Russian economy took everything, including the kitchen sink, stashing a great deal of their stolen cash in Western bank accounts. Today, the exiled oligarchs lash out at Putin's Russia because they're all on the lam – under indictment for truly spectacular acts of larceny that make our own quite considerable financial scandals pale in comparison.
How much of this cash is finding its way into the Obama campaign, perhaps indirectly, is hard to say. What isn't hard to say, however, is that Obama has the full support of one of the world's chief Russophobes: George Soros, the man who almost single-handedly funded the network of "pro-democracy" and pro-Bosniak front groups that brought us NATO's war on the former Yugoslavia.
As much as Obama denounces the Iraq war, all the factors present in the Iraqi adventure were present in Bill Clinton's Balkan escapade, up to and including the existence of a "pro-U.S." guerrilla group that provided us with "intelligence" later exposed as pure invention. In both cases, the outcome of U.S. intervention was the ascent of a violent and authoritarian group to power. Additionally, in Kosovo, as in Iraq, the triumphant U.S.-supported faction carried out ethno-religious "cleansing" that involved the death and displacement of many thousands.
Yet all of this has been conveniently overlooked by the Western media and the "antiwar" liberals who hate George Bush but valorize the Clintons as the "saviors" of the Balkans. These same liberals will follow Obama into battle wherever he chooses to intervene – of that we can be sure.
It's the same old partisan politics, and one of the unfortunate facts of life that weighs particularly heavy on us here at Antiwar.com. It's just something we've always had to live with and have learned to endure. In the 1990s, when the Clintons were in power and Milosevic was the Hitler du jour, many conservatives gravitated toward anti-interventionism – and this Web site. During the Bush II era, that changed rather dramatically, with the War Party taking up residence on the Right, and the peaceniks returning to their contemporary stomping grounds on the Left.
This reversal of polarities has happened before – indeed, I once wrote a whole book about how the phenomenon has played out in the history of modern American politics – and it's dizzying to contemplate how many more times it will reoccur.
Standing above the partisan fray, defying the rather outmoded categories of "Left" and "Right," Antiwar.com will continue to warn its readers of the dangers posed by all political factions to the peace of the world. Yes, we've had a very rough eight years, and it will, indeed, be a welcome relief to confront a new adversary in the White House – and, make no mistake about it, if and when Obama is elected president, he will be an adversary, and a most formidable one. Unlike George W., he'll be an articulate exponent of his brand of interventionism, which promises to be no less dangerous simply because it's less brazen than its predecessor.
During the Obama years – if I may be so bold as to project that far into the speculative future – a great portion of the "antiwar" Left will fall away and eagerly sign up for whatever military crusades Obama has in store for us. On the other hand, a growing faction of the Right will remember their Clinton-era "isolationism" (i.e., opposition to wars that have nothing to do with America's real interests) and find their way back to this Web site.
In any case, no matter who wins in November, we're more than ready for him, because we start with the understanding that he is our adversary. We have no illusions about the candidates who are running for the White House this year, and none about the two "major" parties whose institutionalization, in law and custom, belies the "democratic" virtues we supposedly embody as a nation. We face the future without any hope of a quick victory. Long-term optimism married to short-term pessimism: that's my own strategic outlook and personal temperament. As a guiding editorial standard for Antiwar.com, it's served us well.
America's bid to become a global empire is a project that can end only one of two ways: in utter disaster – financially, as well as militarily and morally – or as a disastrous course averted just in time. We are fighting, day and night, to ensure the latter result. But there are no guarantees.
The illusions generated by the Obama campaign will be dissipated soon enough. Until then, however, you know you can turn to this Web site for clear-headed and nonpartisan commentary on what's really going on in the world of foreign affairs – analysis without illusions.
Original article posted here.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The echoing media finally starts doing its job
By THOMAS FRANK
Last week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for a commission to "find out what went wrong" on Wall Street. It was an excellent suggestion: Public inquiries into Wall Street practices served the country well in the 1930s.
And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation -- many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus. So the candidate should take a deep breath, remind himself that the country comes first, pull the Straight Talk Express over at a rest stop, whistle up his media pals, and begin.
Topic A should be deregulation. Financial institutions are dropping everywhere after playing with poorly regulated financial instruments; the last investment banks standing are begging the government for stricter oversight; and some of our nation's leading champions of laissez faire have ditched that theory in an extraordinary attempt to rescue the collapsing industry.
The philosophy of government that has dominated Washington for almost three decades is now in ruins, and it is up to Mr. McCain to find out exactly why we believed it in the first place. Why did government stand back and permit all the misconduct that generated all this bad debt? What particular ideas led us to believe that government should just keep its hands off and let markets run their course?
Maybe the McCain Commission on Deregulation can kick off with a statement from the candidate himself. It will be helpful for the public, if painful for the senator himself, to hear about Mr. McCain's own close brush with one of the towering figures of financial deregulation, Charles Keating, the master of Lincoln Savings and Loan. Keating had a special, urgent interest in getting Big Brother off our backs: in 1986 some meddlesome agency suspected him of massive violations of S&L regulations. Keating fought back by recruiting a handful of legislators, including Mr. McCain, to pressure S&L regulators to leave his S&L alone. A few years later, Lincoln became one of the largest financial failures in U.S. history.
After that, Mr. McCain can get on to witness No. 1: Phil Gramm, a former adviser to the candidate on economic issues and for many years the heavyweight champion of financial deregulation. It was this very fellow who, as a senator, co-authored the Financial Services Modernization Act, largely trashing the old financial regulatory structure and allowed banks, insurance companies and investment houses to merge into what Mr. Gramm called "a supermarket for financial services" -- supermarkets whose lousy decisions are now the wonder of the world and whose losses we will be underwriting for years to come.
The public will be intrigued to hear that Mr. Gramm, who eventually became an executive at UBS, a bank known for its subprime profligacy, also regarded uncompensated environmental regulation as "nothing less than robbery." They will want to know if he would now apply the same term to the activities of the industry on whose behalf he has labored for so many years.
If Mr. Gramm's wife Wendy happens to be on the bus, Mr. McCain might want to sort out some of the controversies that have followed her own career as a deregulator. For several years Mrs. Gramm headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where her tenure is best remembered by a decision to allow certain kinds of energy trades to go unregulated. A company called Enron turned out to be the greatest beneficiary of the decision -- there isn't space here to recall the statesmanlike things they did with their newfound freedom -- and they appointed Wendy Gramm to their board of directors just weeks after she stepped down from her government job.
Later Mrs. Gramm went to the Mercatus Center in suburban Virginia, a thundering fortress of deregulatory theory. And here we glimpse another promising avenue of any investigation of the laissez-faire faith: the market ideology industry in Washington. Any proper assessment of this industry would also include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, FreedomWorks, the American Enterprise Institute, and the minor stars in the libertarian firmament, including my favorite, Bureaucrash, where punk rock meets the gold standard.
There are others. Mr. McCain could call Kevin Hassett, one of his senior economic advisers, who declared back in March in the Bangkok Post that the blame for the current crisis could be laid at the feet of "out-of-control government regulation," mainly in the form of municipal smart-growth initiatives. (That's right: The man whispering in the candidate's ear seemed to once believe that not-in-my-backyard suburbanites caused the worst financial collapse since 1929.)
But maybe it would be best simply to agree that financial regulation really is in the country's interest. As Mr. McCain's hero Theodore Roosevelt said 98 years ago, "every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it."
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Run, Ron, Run!
Rep. Ron Paul attacks the two-party system Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington.
Paul, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination this year, told supporters at the National Press Club in Washington that he is not endorsing GOP nominee Sen. John McCain or Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama.
Instead, Paul will give his seal of approval to four candidates: Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney, Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, independent candidate Ralph Nader and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin.
Paul said he's supporting the third-party candidates because the two major parties and media had "colluded" to avoid discussing issues and falsely presenting the difference between McCain and Obama as real.
"I've come to the conclusion, after having spent many years in politics, is that our presidential elections turn out to be more of a charade than anything else, and I think that is true today. It is a charade," he said.
Paul offered an open endorsement to the four candidates because each signed onto a policy statement that calls for "balancing budgets, bring troops home, personal liberties and investigating the Federal Reserve," an aide to the congressman said.
Paul said a strong showing by the third-party candidates would express the public's frustration with the current system.
"I have no doubt that the majority is on our side," Paul added, citing public opinion polls. "We represent the majority of the American people."
Paul said that he had received a call from the McCain campaign Tuesday asking for his endorsement. Paul's response: "I don't like the idea of getting 2 to 3 million people [Paul supporters] angry at me."
McCain's aides argued that the Texas Republican should endorse McCain because he would do a "little less harm" than Obama, Paul said, but "we just don't need to do that anymore."
"If you ever get to the point where you believe the two parties are essentially the same, if the majority is outside of the establishment, it's not very democratic. The process is not working," Paul said.
Paul attacked Obama, saying, "He's not for change," and the congressman argued that his efforts would help the Republican Party.
"If the Republican side realized what I'm trying to do, they should be funding me," Paul said.
Paul failed in his bid for the Republican nomination, but he found a large, diverse audience for his anti-war and anti-tax messages.
The Texas congressman's campaign was fueled by an on-line, grass-roots fundraising operation. Throughout the campaign, Paul supporters called on others to join the "Ron Paul Revolution."
At the Republican National Convention last week in St. Paul, Minnesota, Paul supporters threw their own party in Minneapolis. iReport.com: See Ron Paul signs raised high at the "counter-convention"
Paul, who said he entered the presidential race reluctantly, told the roaring audience, "I lost my skepticism. I hope you lost your apathy."
"I did not want to run people's lives. I did not want to run the economy and I did not want to run the world. I didn't have the authority to do it, and I didn't have the Constitution behind me to do it," said Paul, who has been in the House of Representatives for more than 30 years.
Original article posted here.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Monday, September 01, 2008
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Many Alaskans not so impressed with McCain's pick
By SEAN COCKERHAM and WESLEY LOY
John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate stunned and divided Alaska political leaders on Friday. Supporters said she was a shrewd choice, but others argued Palin has no business being a heartbeat away from the presidency.
"I think it's very easy to underestimate Sarah Palin," said John Binkley, a former state legislator who lost to Palin in the 2006 Republican primary for governor.
Serving as small-town mayor of Wasilla was Palin's main experience before running for governor. Binkley said he underestimated her guts and campaign skill.
"I think there will probably a tendency for the Democrats to do the same thing," Binkley said. "They will assume that her lack of experience on the national stage will put her at a disadvantage, and I'm not certain that will matter."
The reaction wasn't so rosy elsewhere. State Senate President Lyda Green said she thought it was a joke when someone called her at 6 a.m. to give her the news.
"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"
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Green, who has feuded with Palin repeatedly over the past two years, brought up the big oil tax increase Palin pushed through last year. She also pointed to the award of a $500 million state subsidy to a Canadian firm to pursue a natural gas pipeline that is far from guaranteed.
Democrats helped give Palin her victories on oil taxes and the natural gas pipeline deal, over the opposition of many of Palin's fellow Republicans in the Legislature.
But Anchorage Democratic state Sen. Hollis French said it's a huge mistake by McCain and "reflects very, very badly on his judgment." French said Palin's experience running the state for less than two years hasn't prepared her for this.
Alaska Democratic Party chairwoman Patti Higgins, attending her party's national convention in Denver, said she was shocked to hear the news this morning.
"In this very competitive election for them to go pick somebody who is ... under a cloud of suspicion, who is under investigation for abuse of power. It just sounds like a pretty slow start to me," Higgins said.
The state Legislature is investigating whether Palin and her staff broke state law by pressuring the public safety department to fire a state trooper who was in a custody battle with her sister.
"We need a vice president who can step in if, God forbid, something happened to John McCain," Higgins said. "I don't think she's someone who is ready for that 3 a.m. phone call."
North Pole Republican Sen. Gene Therriault, who leads the minority caucus in the state Senate, said Palin has executive experience as governor and is ready for the job.
"It's a great opportunity for the state of Alaska," Therriault said. "For us to get our message out in what the state has to offer to the nation."
Therriault said Palin has proven to be a quick study who people respect for what she's done as governor, such as helping fix the ethics problems in Alaska politics.
"IT'S ABOUT THE PERSON"
Andrew Halcro, perhaps Palin's biggest political rival in Alaska, had a mixed reaction.
"When I first heard it, I thought, wow, that's great for Alaska. Then I thought, wait, what just happened? Because of course the lack of experience does jump out at you," Halcro said.
Palin is a skilled campaigner able to make people believe in her, said Halcro, who spent nine months on the campaign trail in 2006 running as an independent opposite Palin and former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, in the general election
"You really have to have a high level of respect for Gov. Palin in the sense that she has this real ability to connect with people. And suddenly people don't think about health care, they don't think about the economy, they don't think about whatever else, education," said Halcro, a self-described wonk. "It's not about the policy. It's about the person."
Palin always saw that, he said.
"It'll be interesting to see if that recipe works on the national stage," Halcro said.
The Republican Party of Alaska said it's 100 percent behind Palin -- despite the high profile battles she's had with state party chairman Randy Ruedrich.
"She brings her voice of new energy and change," party spokesman McHugh Pierre said.
Ruedrich was not giving interviews Friday. Palin's complaints against Ruedrich before she became governor led to the state fining him on ethics charges.
McCain noted approvingly in introducing Palin on Friday that "she's fought oil companies and party bosses."
Palin and Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens were at odds in the recent past as well.
The governor called on Stevens last year to explain why he was being investigated in the federal probe that has since led to his indictment on failure to disclose gifts
But they have appeared closer lately, and Stevens put out a statement praising Palin.
"Gov. Palin has proven herself as a bright, energetic leader for our state and will bring the same energy to the vice presidency. She will serve our country with distinction -- the first Alaskan and first woman on the Republican ticket. I share in the pride of all Alaskans," Stevens said.
"THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING"
The early morning news of McCain's pick sent jaws dropping throughout Alaska, with friends waking up friends with "Oh my God, have you heard?" phone calls.
State House Speaker John Harris, a Republican from Valdez, was astonished at the news. He didn't want to get into the issue of her qualifications.
"She's old enough," Harris said. "She's a U.S. citizen."
Former House Speaker Gail Phillips, a Republican political leader who has clashed with Palin in the past, was shocked when she heard the news Friday morning with her husband, Walt.
"I said to Walt, 'This can't be happening, because his advance team didn't come to Alaska to check her out," Phillips said.
Phillips has been active in the Ted Stevens re-election steering committee and remains in close touch with Sen. Lisa Murkowski and other party leaders, and she said nobody had heard anything about McCain's people doing research on his prospective running mate.
"We're not a very big state. People I talk to would have heard something."
Few wanted to talk about anything else on talk radio Friday. Conservative host Rick Rydell said there are some benefits to the state, but it's a gamble for McCain to pick an unknown with what he considered "questionable vetting."
"It seems almost like a Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game," Rydell said in an interview after his show Friday.
Rydell said McCain has destroyed his argument about Barack Obama's lack of experience.
But another local talk radio host, Eddie Burke, enthused on the air that he was "overwhelmingly excited" by the selection. "Alaskans will now have a chance to have somebody talking about resources, our undeveloped resources," Burke said.
Burke said McCain's vice presidential pick has already captured the nation's attention. That is what people are talking about, he said -- not Barack Obama's acceptance speech.
PARNELL, COLBERG AFFECTED
Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg, a Palin appointee, said McCain's announcement left him with "a mixed set of emotions, kind of an odd sense of Alaska nationalism or pride."
"This is like watching a moon landing or something. It's just something you don't expect to see very often. It's wonderful." He continued: "It was an emotional thing to see the governor walk out with her family, and I say, 'Wow, I work for her.' "
Palin likely will be spending much time campaigning outside of Alaska. Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell also is preoccupied with campaigning for Alaska's lone U.S. House seat. The outcome of his GOP primary race with Rep. Don Young is up in the air until absentee and questioned ballots are counted in September. As of Friday, Young was up by 151 votes.
Colberg would become governor if Palin and Parnell both are elected and leave their current positions. Parnell said he found at 6:40 a.m. Friday about McCain's pick, reacting with surprise and letting out a "whoop of happiness."
Original article posted here.