“It violated all common decency, all protocol,” says Ramras. “It just showed such disrespect.”
That’s Jay Ramras, a member of Alaska’s House of Representatives, talking about Palin’s tongue-lashing of an aide to the House speaker. The aide had told Palin it wasn’t the done thing for governors to leave the state when the legislative session still had a few days to go. Apparently Palin overreacted.
Mr. Ramras also has this thought, on Palin’s misfired nomination of a loudmouthed attorney general:
“He was voted down, and she blamed all of us,” says Ramras. “She’s perfected victim psychology.”
The quotes are from a
piece in the New Republic by Suzy Khimm about Palin’s activities as governor since ’08. These activities appear to have been few but frenzied:
… upon returning to Juneau last fall, “she managed to alienate most of the 60 members of [the Alaska] House and Senate,” says Larry Persily, an aide to state Republican Representative Mike Hawker. “It wasn’t a matter of burning bridges–she blew them up.”
Mr. Persily “spent two years working in the Alaska governor’s Washington office,” the article says. I guess that mean he was working for Sarah Palin, though the wording’s bit unclear; if he was, he must have come back to Alaska at the start of ’09. At any rate, he’s Republican and so is every politician and aide mentioned in this post. Judging by Ms. Khimm’s article, I’d say Republicans who take part in the Alaskan legislative process really enjoy talking about Sarah Palin.
More from Mr. Persily:
“We couldn’t get any decisions out of the governor,” says Persily … “It had nothing to do with critics harping at her–it was a lack of attention to governing.”
Rather than hash things out with lawmakers, Palin repeatedly rebuffed their engagement efforts, most notably canceling a key April meeting with legislators. When she changed her mind at the last minute, the frustrated legislators declined to meet with her. Palin issued a press release blaming them for the meeting’s failure, prompting both the Senate president and the Republican House speaker to denounce her claims as completely false. “You don’t see that often–the Senate president calling the governor a liar,” says Persily.
You don’t! Palin coped with the situation, as mentioned above, by chewing out the speaker’s aide. She showed up at the aide’s office to do so, which may have been the only time the speaker and his team ever got sight of her. All right, that’s hyperbole. But:
When it came to legislative matters of any substance, “we got very little information from the state,” says Republican House Speaker Mike Chenault. “All I wanted was to know what her response was…. There were many times we couldn’t get a clear answer.”
One complaint about the article. Like the lousy
Purdum article in Vanity Fair, it goes light on Palin’s attorney general fiasco. We’re told she nominated the guy to please the NRA and national Republicans nationwide, and that she left him out to dry when the going got tough — I believe that’s more than Purdum offered. But we’re given only a gesture of an explanation as to why Alaska found it so tough to swallow an attorney general who says mean things about gays. Maybe I just need someone to underline for me that the situation regarding gay respect/tolerance in Alaska is not what I imagine it to be.
