Public Opinion: Is Barack Obama Qualified to Be President?

The Unusual Challenges Palin Faced in Alaska

By KIRK JOHNSON

ANCHORAGE — Like so many other distinctions about Alaska — the biggest, wildest, coldest state not even half a century removed from its territorial days — being governor here is just flat different.

“Alaska is its own world,” said Tony Knowles, a Democrat who served as governor from 1994 to 2002.

Sarah Palin’s experience as Alaska’s governor since taking office in late 2006 has been a keystone argument by Republicans that she is fit to serve as vice president. At the convention Wednesday in St. Paul, Ms. Palin and other speakers contended that her time as governor has given her more practical experience than Mr. Obama.

Many Americans in other states, though, might not recognize the job she holds or the unusual challenges she has faced — from managing a $5 billion budget surplus in a time of economic distress elsewhere, to upending an entrenched political establishment within her own party that was literally around for the state’s founding.

Alaska’s economic well-being — sustained, as most things are here, by oil and federal spending — has allowed Ms. Palin to avoid some of the tough budgetary choices vexing governors in dozens of other states. That in turn raises questions for some people about how much her experience is relevant to the rest of the nation and how much she can relate to the troubles of struggling blue-collar workers in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania, worried about the winter gas bills and the mortgage.

At a time when most other state governments are cutting back, Alaska is now distributing $1,200-per-resident oil-bounty bonus checks.

That said, by other measures, Alaska is harder to govern than a smaller, more settled realm in the Lower 48. With vast distances, large numbers of indigenous peoples and a narrowly based extraction economy — with a handful of giant multinational oil corporations dominating the game — some economists say a country like Nigeria might be an apter comparison.

“Alaska really is a colonial place,” said Stephen Haycox, a professor of history at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. “One third of the economic base is oil; another third is federal spending. The economy is extremely narrow and highly dependent. It’s not to say that Alaska is a beggar state, but it certainly is true that Alaska is dependent on decisions made outside it, and over which Alaskans don’t have great control.”

Overlaid across all of that is a distinctly informal Alaskan style. At the annual governor’s picnic, usually held in July, the governor is expected to turn the brats and burgers on the grill — something Ms. Palin has done with gusto — with cabinet members in aprons rounding out the kitchen staff.

Alaska also came of political age recently, which has meant two crucial things to Ms. Palin’s rise and experience as governor.

First, the State Constitution concentrates power in the governor’s office more thoroughly than in almost any other state — a legacy of the late 1950s, historians say, when statehood and a simultaneous trend all over the country toward elevating executive authority coincided.

Alaskan governors can edit legislation and their vetoes are tougher for lawmakers to overcome. In the numerical scale of power devised by Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, only Massachusetts’ governor has a mightier tool kit.

Second, inch-deep history has meant that the leading lights of statehood are not mere names in history books but are in many cases still around and even still in power, like Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young, both Republicans with decades under their belts in Washington. That old guard is still revered by some Alaskans, but it is disdained by others who have been on the lookout for fresh Republican faces.

It is in that densely layered Alaskan mix that Ms. Palin rose, governed and must be understood, academics and people in both parties say — not as merely a governor, or a woman, but as an Alaskan.

“The frontier mentality, whether myth or not, is still alive,” said Donald Linky, director of the Program on the Governor, at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

Political organizations and the careful grooming of rising stars have long been part of the political culture in creating governors-to-be in many other states, Mr. Linky said. Not so in Alaska, and elsewhere in the West.

In places where politics is closer to the ground, an insurgent like Ms. Palin, who challenged a governor from her own party in 2006 and won, has an easier road, Mr. Linky said. Ms. Palin’s storming of the gates was helped by the taint of the Alaskan money culture gone awry, as federal authorities investigated oil-cash corruption in the State Legislature in 2006, an inquiry which has since expanded to include Mr. Stevens and others.

“It was a situation that was absolutely ripe for somebody to come in and say, ‘Hey, the emperor has no clothes,’ ” said Mr. Haycox of the University of Alaska. “To give her her due, she had the morals and intellectual acumen to do that, but the situation was just waiting for someone to take advantage.”

Perhaps the biggest difference between Alaska and other states comes down to money. Alaska, at the opposite end of the energy equation from the one most Americans know, is booming as never before from the rise in energy prices in the last year.

Thirty-one other states are projecting shortfalls in their state budgets. Alaska is expecting $5 billion more than it can spend in a state with only 680,000 people.

Back when Mr. Knowles was governor, by contrast, oil was $9 to $22 a barrel, which meant year after year of state budget cuts and downsizing. “I struggled with the things you have to do, laying people off, making ends meet,” he said.

“That was at a time when Alaska was the only state cutting its budget — the rest of the world was going through the dot-com age,” Mr. Knowles said. “Now we’re awash in money.”

But if Ms. Palin’s arrival in power just in time for a new boom was good luck, what she did in pushing her agenda — including a tax increase on the oil industry, building from a process begun by her predecessor — was more about how Alaskan politics is played. In the process, people here say that a steely populist emerged from behind the sweet smile and the hockey-mom-who-loves-to-fish story line. She worked with Democrats, who are in the minority in the Legislature, to trump members of her own party on several crucial bills, and was not above using her personal popularity in the state to suggest that anyone in the Legislature who disagreed with her was perhaps in the pocket of Big Oil.

“People were afraid to vote ‘no’ against her,” said Lyda Green, a state senator and Republican — and a neighbor of the governor in the Anchorage suburb of Wasilla. In the oil industry tax overhaul, for example, Ms. Green said the pressure became intense.

“Her extraordinary popularity and this intense dislike of the industry that many Alaskans have — you put those two together and it’s tough,” she said. “People would go to town meetings and come back feeling compelled to support her.”

A debate is on now as to whether Ms. Palin’s policies will be wise for the state in the long run. Some economists have questioned, for example, whether the three-quarters of a billion dollars or so given to Alaskans this summer in the oil-bounty checks (a bill passed this summer with Democratic support in the Legislature), might have been better used in the state’s rainy-day fund.

And the oil tax overhaul, which linked state payments to net profits from the oil companies, rather than gross revenue, also exposes the state to potentially deep hits when oil prices decline. There are no neighboring states or regional economies to provide an alternative if the local economy dries up, nor is there a state income tax to fall back on.

“The state has always been exposed, but now it’s even more so because the state is now sharing the market risks more with the industry,” said Matthew Berman, a professor of economics at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. What might happen if commodity prices plunge is untested territory, he said.

“Nobody knows how the Palin administration is going to react to that, because they haven’t faced that problem yet,” Mr. Berman said.

William Yardley contributed reporting.

Sam of NY 11:34PM September 07, 2008