CARPE MEDIA

by Craig Giammona

The Doodler Who Would Be Mayor (Source: The New Republic)

The storms pushing in off the Pacific have gained strength in recent days, wind and rain whipping us for hours at a time. Alaska Day has come and gone. The bald eagles have taken up their posts in the black poplar tree outside my apartment.

When the weather clears, usually for an hour or so, we glance up at the snow line, noting where it landed that day and its quick descent down the mountains toward town. It’s late October in southeast Alaska, and thoughts have turned to what we’re going to do when Sarah Palin becomes our governor again.

Two weeks is a lifetime in politics. Maybe Osama bin Laden is making the final edits on his latest terror tape; maybe he’ll declare that he and his Muslim brother Barack Hussein are ready to spread Islam throughout the land. Maybe Fox News is preparing to run video of Obama competing in a Stokey Carmichael look-a-like contest from Halloween 1985, or maybe a photo of him snorting cocaine off a worn copy of the Communist Manifesto will start circulating on Facebook. 

One way or another, Alaska stands on the precipice of a potentially landscape-changing election. In a state with a three-man Congressional delegation, we could have a new governor, senator, and U.S. representative on Nov. 5.

Both Ted Stevens and Don Young, who have served in Congress for a combined 78 years, have careers in serious jeopardy as the election approaches. 

The defense in the Stevens trial rested this week, and the case is now with the jury. How long it will take the jurors to parse the what-he-knew and when-he-knew-about-it evidence involving massage chairs, high-priced huskies, antique cars and home renovations is anybody’s guess, but increasingly, it looks like the verdict will come in just under the wire.

Sometime next week, Stevens will board a plane for Anchorage and return to the state he has served in the U.S. Senate since 1968. The belief up here is that if he’s acquitted, he’ll return home vindicated, having faced down the Feds in a nasty street fight. Stevens might be a vilified character in the Lower 48, but support for the iconic lawmaker remains strong up here. 

The only hope for Stevens challenger Mark Begich, currently the Democratic mayor of Anchorage, is a guilty verdict. Even then, it could be close. The tide of pro-Democratic fervor sweeping the nation might actually play against Begich and Ethan Berkowitz, the former speaker of the Alaska House who is trying to topple Young.

(Ironically, Young replaced Nick Begich, Mark’s father, who disappeared along with Congressman Hale Boggs on a flight en route from Anchorage to Juneau in October 1972. The plane, which was taking Begich and Boggs to a fundraiser, was never found. Young, who had been defeated by Begich and snagged the missing congressman’s seat after a special election, has served in the House ever since.)

Both Begich and Berkowitz have both been well-financed by money from “outside”—the candidates appear on lists of prominent seats that could turn blue—but all the talk about Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi makes Alaskans a bit uneasy. (Schumer and Pelosi have both been making cameos in Republican attack ads up here, appearing as all-purpose, anti-ANWR drilling liberals from Down South.)

“I’m Don Young and I approve this message, and Nancy Pelosi can go get her gun,” is how one radio ad for the incumbent Republican ends.

The idea is that Begich and Berkowitz will be beholden to the Democratic machine. When Alaskans survey the potential political scene, they see a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress and worry that their state will be forgotten.

Young and Stevens, the two angry pit bulls in the delegation, have a proven record of bringing home the bacon, and the natives here don’t really mind that they’re ornery—the average Alaskan would be pretty damn sour too, if forced to spend months on end in Washington, D.C. negotiating with Schumer and Pelosi.

Berkowitz holds a nice lead in the polls heading into the home stretch, and Begich has essentially been campaigning uncontested for more than a month now. But the question remains: will voters send an anti-corruption message and reshape the Alaska delegation in one fell swoop?

According to the Anchorage Daily News, there are 490,656 registered voters in the state—25 percent Republicans and 15 percent Democrats. Another 53 percent of voters are either “unaffilliated” or “undeclared”—categories that would translate to “independent” in most other places.

My sense is that the preponderance of independents are conservative-minded voters who, in most cases, pull the Republican lever. (At the very least, they live in rural, as opposed to urban, areas, which more and more seems like the salient dichotomy in American politics.)

In this disparate state, accurate polls are difficult to conduct, and while Stevens’ fate seems to lie with the jury in his corruption trial, the die will be cast on Young by the 53 percent of Alaskans who disavowed partisan politics on their voter registration forms. There’s also the potential Palin bump—and backlash—to consider as Alaskans mark their ballots.

By the time the polls close in Alaska, around midnight on the East Coast, there’s a decent chance that we’ll know the winner of the Presidential race. If not, something has gone horribly wrong for Obama. A long night of network political coverage means the race is uncomfortably close, and that the polls were wrong and perhaps the Bradley Effect took hold.

If I’m to believe my credulous friends, Sarah Palin will once again be Alaska’s governor on Nov. 5. It could be time to batten down the hatches here and ride out the storm. Palin has shown a vindictive streak in her short political career and her already contentious relationship with Sitka, and southeast Alaska generally has not been mended by this election season.

Similar to the way the state of Alaska interacts with the federal government—Dear Mom, please send money—cities and boroughs look to the state goverment to fund expensive infrastructure projects. The Legislature writes the budget and Palin has veto power. With the price of oil in sharp decline (Alaska makes almost 90 percent of its state revenue from the tax on its oil income), belt-tightening could be in order, making the competition for a share of the shrinking state pot that much more intense.

A major problem for Sitka could be John Stein, the former Sitka city administrator. At this point, Stein has been quoted in just about every major media outlet criticizing Palin, who we now know is a voracious consumer of news. I can only assume that few, if any, of Stein’s barbs have slipped past Sarah Barracuda. The fear now is that she’ll return to Alaska with her teeth sharpened, hungry to slice capital dollars headed for southeast Alaska.

Stein was a great source for reporters in the days immediately after Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate. An affable, down-to-earth Alaskan, Stein had intimate knowledge of Palin’s early political career and the scars to prove it. He was the two-term incumbent mayor of Wasilla when Palin, then a city councilor, decided to begin her political career in earnest. Backed by the state Republican Party and national anti-abortion groups, Palin won. The rest is history.

Before the whole VP candidacy, the Stein-Palin relationship was commonly bandied about in Sitka’s restaurants and bars as a possible, if long-shot, explanation for the governor’s frosty relationship with our fair city. Fresh off a defeat at the hands of Obama-Biden, Palin would be in no mood for reconciliation.

Then there’s the question of what Palin is planning for her second act. The press here (primarily the Anchorage Daily News) has already begun speculating about how Palin will emerge from the Presidential election. Of course, if McCain wins, it’s moot: Goodbye Sarah, hello Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell. (Parnell challenged Young in the Republican primary and lost by about 300 votes; the results were released amidst the Palin hysteria immediately after the VP announcement and he opted not to seek a recount.)

But the more fascinating question is how Palin will be treated upon her homecoming. Will she still be our Sarah? Saturday Night Live, posh New York hotels, rock-star rallies, private campaign planes—all that could end Nov. 4, leaving Palin to return to the Wasilla Elks Club and meetings of the Juneau Republican Organization.

Alaskans seem to agree that Palin plans to parlay her newfound popularity into a run for another political office. But it’s still a strange notion up here; the natives aren’t used to any of their political offices serving as a launching pad. One story line has Palin returning to the state with newfound credibility and political power. With a McCain loss, the pundits will look to assign blame, and Palin, the Right may well argue, was right on with her attacks. McCain should have listened to her. Maybe she was the stronger candidate.

But will she be able to govern? Palin antagonized the Legislature with her stonewalling on the Troopergate investigation, and if her higher aspirations are perceived to cloud her judgment, she’ll lose the state’s moderates.

She may have already lost them. Palin has her fans here, but some have watched with reservation as she gleefully picked up Republican orthodoxy, launching daily and not-quite-substantive attacks on Obama like a star student eager to please her teacher.

Maybe this whole VP episode has offended the large swath of Alaska’s independent voters. Then again, maybe Palin will return from her magical mystery tour of America with a newfound dedication to carrying out the state’s business. For now, the storm continues to gather, due to make landing—in some form—on November 5.