Why does sarah palin look different

I do not like his health care scam. I do not like these dirty crooks, or how they lie and cook the books. Looking around at all of you, you hard-working Iowa families. You farm families, and teachers, and teamsters, and cops, and cooks. You rocking rollers. And holy rollers! All of you who work so hard. Palin came under serious political pressure. That spring, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act sailed to passage, helped along by criminal indictments in the Veco scandal, which were handed down just as the bill came up.

Still, Palin was the deciding factor. A new pipeline plan had seemed unlikely when she took over, but she kept the legislature focused on the task. She kept herself focused, too: though priding herself on her well-advertised social conservatism, she was prepared to set it aside when necessary.

Rather than pick big fights about social issues, she declined to take up two abortion-restriction measures that she favored, and vetoed a bill banning benefits for same-sex partners of state workers. Next came the oil tax. An explicit charge that the Petroleum Profits Tax was corrupt would imply, by extension, that the unindicted legislators who had passed it were corrupt, too—and she needed their votes.

Again Palin kept her worst impulses in check. And when she was drawn into the fight, she proved nimble and resourceful. Two things finally prompted her to move ahead: when tax season rolled around, the PPT yielded much less revenue than anticipated; and Democrats needled her incessantly about how much of a reformer she truly was.

Then as now twitchingly alert to any slight, Palin loathed the implication. Democrats, eager to capitalize on public anger, introduced several tougher alternatives that were particularly aggressive—that is, confiscatory—when oil prices rose. Palin focused on capturing more revenue when prices were low. At first, her team tried to win the Republicans over. So Palin did something that would be hard to imagine from her today: she pivoted to the Democrats. What she signed into law went well beyond her original proposal: ACES imposes a higher base tax rate than its predecessor on oil profits.

But the really significant part has been that the tax rate rises much sooner and more steeply as oil prices climb—the part Democrats pushed for.

The tax is assessed monthly, rather than annually, to better capture price spikes, of which there have been many. ACES also makes it harder for companies to claim tax credits for cleaning up spills caused by their own negligence, as some had done under the old regime.

Plunging natural-gas prices have made the project uneconomical. Her oil tax is a different story: though designed to capture more revenue under most scenarios, ACES has raised a lot more money than almost anyone imagined.

But it also shows that the law is working. Flush with cash, Alaska produced large capital budgets that blunted the effects of the recession. But given the corruption that plagued the PPT, a better benchmark might be the tax it supplanted—the one put on the books after the Exxon Valdez spill.

W hat happened to Sarah Palin? How did someone who so effectively dealt with the two great issues vexing Alaska fall from grace so quickly? In Alaska, she applied those qualities to fulfilling the promises that got her elected, and in her first year was the most popular governor in the country. She was serious business. But even before she left the state, she let herself be distracted by the many grievances she harbored against a wide range of enemies.

When I was in Juneau, a draft memoir by one of her former aides, Frank Bailey, was leaked to a number of political insiders, and from one of them to me. Bailey was cast aside after years of loyal service and has an ax to grind. But his portrait is persuasive nonetheless, because he peppers his book with internal e-mails that he kept, from Palin and her staff.

Ugly rumors of the sort common in politics were another fixation, as this e-mail furnished by Bailey attests:. Palin obsessed over her image, even more than most politicians. According to Bailey, she orchestrated a campaign to inundate newspapers with phony letters praising her. This evidently became a favored tactic. Bailey even includes a letter he says she wrote under another name accusing an opponent, John Binkley, of copying her Web-site design.

Much of this was harmless if also pointless and would not have undermined her political career. Politicians from Nixon to Clinton have been similarly consumed and still flourished.

But Palin also committed more-serious ethical breaches. An investigation by the legislature found that, in some of her actions, she had abused her powers.

Palin seems to have been driven by a will to advance herself and by a virulent animus against anyone who tried to impede her. On the big issues, at least, she chose her enemies well, and left the state in better shape than most people, herself included, seem to realize or want to credit her for. And it raises the question of what she could have achieved.

She had it. But on the issues she made the focus of her administration—the oil tax and the gas line—she had good staff, listened to them, and backed them up. She was a transformative governor, no question. But she must have appealed to him for reasons beyond her gender and vivacity. Palin was fresh from major, unexpected victories.

For this, she was wildly popular. Bush and the Republican establishment, and the glory they had won him. Instead, they turned hard right. She says unwarranted ethics investigations are what prompted her to quit. Most Alaskans seem to think she left to get rich. We'll notify you here with news about.

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