The Atlantic asks: Where did Sarah Palin go wrong?

Anchorage Daily News: The Alantic asks: Where did Sarah Palin go wrong?


Most observers have come to believe that Sarah Palin won't run for the GOP presidential nomination, and her sagging poll numbers don't give her admirers much to defend her with. Is it too early for a post-mortem on Palin's national ambitions? The Atlantic's Joshua Green is getting started on his: He takes a look at her record as governor of Alaska for the June edition and finds much to admire. Then he asks: What went wrong?

Palin demonstrated many of the qualities we expect in our best leaders. She set aside private concerns for the greater good, forgoing a focus on social issues to confront the great problem plaguing Alaska, its corrupt oil-and-gas politics. She did this in a way that seems wildly out of character today-by cooperating with Democrats and moderate Republicans to raise taxes on Big Business. And she succeeded to a remarkable extent in settling, at least for a time, what had seemed insoluble problems, in the process putting Alaska on a trajectory to financial well-being.

After a lengthy cruise through Palin's Alaska political history, especially focusing on her ACES oil industry tax plan, Green poses the big question: What if she had campaigned on her record as governor instead of succumbing to an innate vindictiveness, turning sharply to the right and becoming a culture warrior bent on needling President Obama at every opportunity? ...

A big part of the answer is that the qualities that brought her original successes -- the relentlessness, the impulse to settle scores -- weren't nearly so admirable when deployed against less worthy foes than Murkowski and the oil companies. 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. "It was very, very powerful stuff," Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist for Knowles, and later for Barack Obama, told me. "She was this dowdy, but very attractive, person who drew a lot of support from progressive women. She was serious business." ...

But McCain and Palin didn’t run as mavericks. Instead, they turned hard right. Palin’s old colleagues were stunned. “The speech at the Republican convention that made her a star, that was just shocking,” [state Sen. Hollis] French told me. “She could have said, ‘I’ll do for the nation what I did for Alaska: I’ll work with both sides and won’t care where the ideas come from.’ Her background supported that. Instead, they handed her a red-meat script she’s been reading from ever since.”