McCain's VP:

Sarah Palin is neither hick nor moron

I'm no fan of Gov. Sarah Palin. That's for sure. But even I am appalled by stories about her in the national media that make her seem to be a hick and a moron. She is neither.


Brennan
She is a conservative in name only whose policies have been anything but conservative. She is self-promoting, calculating, deceptive and sometimes vindictive, but definitely not a hick and not a moron.

She is quite bright, but has had little exposure to the snake pits of national or international politics, which is her greatest liability in her race for the vice presidency. She has catapulted from obscurity to the national stage because of the public's short attention span and fondness for instant celebrity.

Television's talent shows involving public voting, shows like "American Idol" whose results are reported in the newscasts, have given the American public a distorted idea of how to make its choices " apparently even of a president and vice president.

Palin is a product of the age and her ascent to the national stage comes at a time when America makes its mind up on weighty matters based very much on superficial impressions. That may have always been the way, but for years the public got its information . . .

(cont'd from front page) filtered through the news and views of people like Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite. And that information was necessarily the basis for their political decisions; they had no way to judge for themselves.

No more. Nowadays people decide based on their own exposure to the candidates and they distrust the media that served as gatekeepers for all information for so long, the so-called mainstream media. The gatekeepers decided what would get through to the public and what would not.

Unfortunately for Alaska, Palin has been quite effective at getting things done here as governor. I say "unfortunately" because her achievements are likely to be a drag on the economy for years to come.

Palin's political belief is a Robin Hood-style form of liberalism in which oil companies are taxed to the max and the money either socked away in the state treasury or redistributed in free-money programs like the energy rebates.

She does that because it will win her the most votes. Palin gives the public what it wants even if doing so is against the best interests of that public and will discourage investments that would bring jobs for those very people.

Though she draws shouts of "Drill, baby, drill" wherever she goes, Alaska under Palin's leadership has attained what is believed to be the highest marginal tax rate of any oil province in the world, a new and significant deterrent to oil investment in Alaska.

The high tax impact wasn't entirely her fault. She only asked the Legislature to raise the petroleum profits tax from 22.5 percent on net profits to 25 percent. Alaska's lawmakers " spooked by the unwinding corruption scandals reflecting on them " jumped at the chance and also wiped out many of the existing deductions. That supercharged the impact of the tax.

The pundits will note that the oil companies have not left the state yet, but what will be painfully obvious in time is that Alaska's leaders have raised the bar for investments so that many oil and gas projects will no longer "pencil out."

I worked in the industry long enough to know that the oil executives don't get emotional about such things (not often, anyway, and not for long.) Indulging their emotions at the expense of company stockholders and viable investment opportunities would be justification for such executives to be thrown out on their ears.

When taxes go up, the oil people get out their calculators and decide which projects can make a profit in such a tax climate and which cannot. If profit is no longer likely, the money won't be spent and the jobs will not come. By that time, Palin will be long gone onto other things and free to blame whoever followed her....

"Why did the McCain campaign take over the governor's office?" the Anchorage Daily News demanded in an editorial Saturday. "Is it too much to ask that Alaska's governor speak for herself, directly to Alaskans, about her actions as Alaska's governor?"

The partisan spillover of the presidential campaign into the statehouse, political analysts here say, now threatens Palin's most powerful political capital in Alaska: her commitment to transparency, her willingness to forge bipartisan alliances with Democrats to advance her legislative agenda, and her battle to upend the good ol' boy network.

. . .

Democratic leaders, whom the Palin camp accuses of initiating rounds of partisan sniping, say the bipartisanship that helped Palin win passage of ethics measures, a new natural-gas pipeline and an increase in the oil production tax -- in most cases over the objections of her own Republican leadership -- is essentially over.

"She would have gotten none of her bills passed without us, and to see her come in and attack us now the way she's attacking us, when it's completely unwarranted, is just tearing people up," said Democratic state Sen. Bill Wielechowski. "I think it's going to make it hard for her to come back and govern in this state."

If we do not demand leadership and intelligence and a plan, how can we whine when our elected officials leave us holding a bag of really trite sayings and overdue bills?

(Additionally, what's the deal on McCain's bloated cheek? Is it filled with cancer?)