'American Idol’ Meets ‘Northern Exposure’

Because Palin was not vetted in the traditional sense, the scene last week in Alaska's airports and car-rental counters as McCain staffers, Democratic oppo artists and reporters practically clobbered each other in a scramble to see who could get info on the governor first was more like the Klondike gold rush than a presidential campaign. Forget about Hillary's YouTube campaign song contest, melting snowmen posing debate questions and Obama's point-and-click money machine. The ultimate Internet campaign moment of 2008 is the vetting of Sarah Palin: open-sourced and bottom-up, and happening in real time. McCain and Palin are on history's ultimate blind date---and the rest of us are strapped in the back seat, wondering how it's all going to turn out. 

Like her state, Palin is the perfect scrim for all of our fevered projections. Alaska's otherness is extreme. Canada is to the south; California lies to the east. It takes less time to get to Seoul or Tokyo than to New York. Anyone born before 1959 knew Alaska before statehood. Instead of paying taxes, the 670,000 inhabitants of Alaska are used to collecting an annual check just for waking up every morning. This year, the payout from Alaska's Permanent Fund---an annual oil dividend---together with a one-time, $1,200 energy rebate, came to $3,269 per man woman and child. For a family of seven, like the Palins, that means $22,883. "Everyone has to justify being here," says historian Haycox. "Alaskans have to say, 'We're a different breed. We love freedom more'." Ironically, the myth of the rugged, hyperindividualistic culture is contradicted by a few inconvenient facts. Alaska still has a colonial economy, says Haycox, narrowly dependent on oil and other extraction industries, without the population to support manufacturing, or the climate to allow agriculture. There is no reason to think the state will get off the federal dole anytime soon. While "Uncle Ted" Stevens is now ridiculed as the Senate's most profligate pork-slinger, to many rural Alaskans, he is the man who brought health care, electricity, telephone lines, roads---and air links to their impoverished communities.

Though Alaska is geographically its own subcontinent, politically and socially it is the world's largest small town. At last count, Alaska had 670,000 or so residents---including about 100,000 natives who live in rural and polar villages. It has an electorate of 390,000, fewer people than the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Most interesting, more than half of Alaska's voters---52 percent---describe themselves as independents. They are the people who elected Sarah Palin, and whose approval has kept her ratings in the stratosphere. (According to her pollster, Dave Dittman, only 25 percent of Alaska voters are Republican and another 16 percent are Democrats.) Palin won the 2006 governor's race with 110,000 votes. She won her mayoral race in Wasilla with 616 votes, less than it can take to be student-council president elsewhere. The state capitol, Juneau, population approximately 30,000, on the southeastern coast, isn't connected by road to the rest of the state. Lawmakers have to fly in and out, and Palin worries, like any working parent, about being stranded by bad weather or flight delays. She held her inauguration in Fairbanks, where this week her son's Army unit will be deployed to Iraq, so that more citizens could reach the ceremony.

There is always the sense in Alaska that someone is watching. Last summer, when Palin arrived late for an appearance at the Alaska State Fair, an attendant recognized her through the cracked windshield of her son's Toyota Camry and waved her to a special parking spot on the grass: "I feel so guilty," Palin said---and it seemed genuine. "If my parents saw this, they wouldn't be happy. I've been coming here all my life."

During several days of reporting, I kept returning to the same neighborhood to interview sources. The picturesque Bootlegger's Cove neighborhood of Anchorage, where sprawling homes overlook the Knik arm of Cook Inlet is a microcosm of Alaska's peculiar social network.  On one corner, in a house the neighbors complain looks like an offshore-drilling platform, lives Bill Allen, the lead defendant in a federal corruption scandal that rattled the state's ruling elite, making Palin's election as governor possible. (Allen pleaded guilty last year to charges of extortion and bribery in a case involving payoffs to state lawmakers who did favors for his oil-services company---and blew the whistle on Sen. Ted Stevens and other leading Republicans.) Allen's neighbor across the street is the federal judge who presided over his corruption trial, and who will sentence him in a few months. Former governor Tony Knowles, a Democrat, lives down the block, an Obama sign planted in his front yard. Ted Stevens's brother in law lives around the corner. "The number of people who handle power and money in Alaska is very small," says Haycox, who happens to live on the same block. These days, they all have plenty to say.

© 2008