The Sunday New York Times brings further light to the already gaudy picture we've gained of Sarah Palin's corrupt, abusive, and paranoid style of leadership in Alaska. There are some additional details regarding Palin's tumultuous tenure as mayor of Wasilla, especially the vendettas she indulged in. For example, we learn of a city attorney whose firing she engineered after he'd put a hold on a development that was being built by one of Palin's supporters.
Most of the new information, however, concerns the abuse of power by Palin and her band of loyalists in the 20 months since she became governor. In an especially strange episode, for instance, an employee in the governor's office phoned one of Palin's conservative home town critics to tell her to pipe down.
And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.
“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”
But that's just the beginning of the disturbing information collected by the Times.
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform...
But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
As any number of observers of the political scene in Wasilla and Juneau have already made clear, it's easy to get your name onto Palin's list of "haters": just oppose or criticize her about anything. She has also turned against any number of friends, mentors, political allies, and employees - often for personal or arbitrary reasons.
Particularly after her election as governor, Palin made it a habit to hire old school friends from Wasilla for high state offices. Often they had minimal qualifications, such as her new state Attorney General, an undistinguished local lawyer named Talis Colberg. But her friends tend to be extremely protective of Palin, at least until she turns on them. For example, earlier this year Colberg inserted himself into the "Troopergate" scandal by issuing a bizarre legal opinion whose purpose clearly was to help Palin keep secret a large number of relevant messages that her staffers had sent around on official Blackberries.
Despite running for governor on a platform of greater transparency, Palin has instituted a highly secretive regime that begs comparison to Dick Cheney's style of governance. The Times exposes nicely how Palin and her top loyalists very deliberately used personal email accounts when discussing public business. Just as in the Bush administration, the idea was that these messages to personal accounts could more easily be withheld in case of any open-records requests or subpoenas.
Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”
As for actual governance, the Times confirmed what many other state and local officials have said about Palin's indifference and absenteeism. She rarely communicates her wishes or even her decisions to legislators. She rarely is present in Juneau. And mayors from around Alaska complain consistently that they can't get her to respond to requests. Her actual accomplishments are few and overhyped.
Finally, the Times turns up new information on Palin's obsession with banning books while she was mayor. Palin told ABC that she never desired to ban any books, that her questions about it were entirely hypothetical. That assertion made no sense at all, given what we already knew of the circumstances. Now the Times adds critical background to show that book banning was far from hypothetical in Wasilla.
The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.
“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”
Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.
But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.
“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”
“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”
Update The Washington Post has more about the "bad blood" Palin created while mayor of Wasilla.
Update Two At his blog Vagabond Scholar, Batocchio has an excellent survey of what is known about Palin's attempt to ban books in Wasilla. You'll want to read the whole post, but one particular piece of information stands out (via this report from ABC): Paul Stuart, a reporter at the local paper (The Frontiersman) who covered the book banning controversy in 1996/97, recalls distinctly that the librarian told him that Sarah Palin said she wanted to ban three specific books. ABC's report did not identify those books, but the information gibes with what the New York Times reports about specific books that Palin's church was seeking to ban.
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