Governor Palin for Veep? What do Alaskans Think?

Editor & Publisher has been doing a good job covering the selection of Governor Sarah Palin to be Senator McCain's running mate for the Republican Party.  They have been doing a series of articles reflecting on what Alaskans and their newspapers have to say.

Here is excerpts from Part IV:

From The Daily News-Miner of Fairbanks, by Dermot Cole:

"In her introductory speech Friday as McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin picked up on the Ketchikan bridge that was never built as a symbol of bad federal policy.

“I championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress,” Palin said at her first campaign appearance. “In fact, I told Congress — I told Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ on that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said we’d build it ourselves.”

That is not how Palin described her position on the Gravina Island bridge when she ran for governor in 2006.
On Oct. 22, 2006, the Anchorage Daily News asked Palin and the other candidates, “Would you continue state funding for the proposed Knik Arm and Gravina Island bridges?”

Her response: “Yes. I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now — while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.”

Palin’s support of the earmark for the bridge was applauded by the late Lew Williams Jr., the retired Ketchikan Daily News publisher who wrote columns on the topic. Williams wrote on Oct. 29, 2006, that Palin was the only gubernatorial candidate that year who consistently supported the Gravina Island Bridge, the Knik Arm Bridge and improvements to the Parks Highway.

Two months earlier, while campaigning in Ketchikan, Palin made a positive reference to the bridge....A year later, she issued a news release as governor saying Ketchikan needed better airport access, but a $398 million bridge was not going to happen.

“Despite the work of our congressional delegation, we are about $329 million short of full funding for the bridge project and it’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island,” Palin said on Sept. 21, 2007.

The money was not sent back to the federal government, but spent on other projects. That was hardly “Thanks but no thanks.”

Not exactly being the reformer who turned down an earmark for a bridge to 'nowhere'.  Is it?

And as the article concludes:

"Alaska has a clear record of seeking earmarks.

In March, Palin’s Washington, D.C., representative, John Katz, wrote a defense of earmarks, published in the Juneau Empire in which he said the state is cutting back on its wish list.

The Palin administration requested 31 earmarks this year totaling $200 million and “we are not abandoning earmarks altogether,” Katz said, as they are a “legitimate exercise of Congress’ constitutional power to amend the budget proposed by the president.”

But don't think that Republicans and McCain supporters will stick to the facts on this one.

As Jeff Jacoby for the Boston Globe had to say in an article today:

"Those who have observed the 44-year-old governor up close speak highly of her political skills. She took on her own party's ethically challenged leadership and beat it handily, and has gone on to earn high approval ratings. Unlike Alaska's better-known politicians, she is a spending hawk and a committed porkbuster; notably, she pulled the plug on her state's notorious $400 million "bridge to nowhere.""

Oh really?  What about the facts Jeff? 

So while running as a "reformer" with a very light resume indeed, the attractive Sarah Palin is already with John McCain spinning a web of distortion and misrepresentation of what she actually has been doing as Governor in the short period that she has held that position.

Welcome to 2008.  Or should I say Part 3 in a series brought to you by the same Republicans who authored Watergate, Abu Ghraib, Plamegate and the WMD's in Iraq.

So what else is new?