Todd Palin: As a power behind the throne, First Dude abides

Todd Palin pressing the flesh last night in Grand Rapids, Minnesota (photo: Paul Demko)

Last week, the release of the Branchflower Report added another ring to the Palin Family Circus. The investigation, commissioned in August by a bipartisan legislative council, concluded that while the Alaskan governor and Republican vice presidential candidate acted within the scope of her constitutional authority by firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan earlier this summer, she had violated the state’s ethics statutes by allowing state personnel and state resources to be used to settle a private grudge against Mike Wooten, a trooper who’d formerly been married to Sarah Palin’s sister.

The report devoted particular attention to the governor’s husband, Todd Palin, who repeatedly urged Monegan and other state officials to revisit a closed investigation into Wooten’s conduct. Given the acute national interest in the story, the results of the “Troopergate” probe obviously touched on, and further undermined, Sarah Palin’s image as a maverick reformer. But they also introduced non-Alaskans to questions that have long been raised about the so-called “First Dude” and the unusual role he’s played in his wife’s administration.

Shortly after the report’s release, as the governor’s supporters peddled the dubious claim that it had somehow vindicated Sarah Palin, McCain campaign spokesperson Taylor Griffin addressed the report’s strong criticism of Todd Palin’s efforts to have Wooten removed from his job. With a straight face, Griffin argued that Palin’s involvement in his wife’s work was, broadly speaking, comparable to Eleanor Roosevelt’s commitment to civil rights or Hillary Clinton’s work on health care reform. (There was no word on Palin’s resemblance to Mamie Eisenhower, who drew national praise in the mid-1950s for her “million dollar fudge” recipe.)

But Alaskan political observers have been pointing out for some time that no one can quite figure out what Todd Palin’s precise duties include. As Mike Madden wrote in a Salon profile last month, Todd Palin “lurks around the capitol if he doesn’t have anything better to do, which, since he works seasonal jobs in oil and fishing, is fairly often.” Business owner and blogger Andrew Halcro, who was the first to allege an unseemly motivation for Monegan’s firing, has been less charitable, describing Todd Palin as a “shadow governor.”

Though he is not officially a member of the executive branch, Palin is renowned for attending meetings with the governor and legislators or other public officials, many of whom have described his (almost totally silent) presence as odd or even discomfiting. Todd Palin, for example, has been copied on e-mails related to policy and personnel matters, and he’s taken numerous trips — with and without his wife — as a representative of the state.

By his own account, Palin regards none of this as inappropriate. In his deposition with the legislative investigators, Palin insisted that he and his wife were being subjected to “double standards,” since few questions had ever been raised about the involvement of spouses in previous administrations. Though Palin’s objection bore a kernel of truth, he had nevertheless overlooked the fact that gubernatorial spouses traditionally did not involve themselves directly in budgetary decisions, nor did they lobby legislators — as Palin did — regarding tax policies.

Nor, it might be noted, did they devote countless hours lobbying public officials to override personnel decisions of which they or their spouses disapproved. During the first 18 months of his wife’s administration, Todd Palin initiated “hundreds” of conversations with state officials over what he described as the “violent” and “dangerous” behavior of Mike Wooten, a “ticking time bomb.” Though Wooten had been suspended briefly in 2006 for (among other things) using his taser on his stepson and drinking a beer in his car while on duty, Todd Palin and his wife remained adamant that only Wooten’s removal from the force would be sufficient. In addition to pestering Monegan about the original investigation, the First Dude periodically introduced new “evidence” of Wooten’s serial perfidy: a jaunt on a snow machine that seemed to contradict a worker’s compensation claim Wooten had filed, or rides Wooten had given his kids to school in his trooper’s vehicle.

When those specific accusations failed to hold any weight — Wooten had received permission from his doctor and his supervisor, respectively – Palin resorted to nourishing implausible conspiracy theories worthy of second-rate police dramas. As he revealed in his deposition, he told one Palin aide that he worried that Wooten might “possibly pull over one of my kids to frame them, like throwing a bag of dope in the back seat just to frame a Palin.” Commenting on the report the night of its release, Washington Monthly blogger Hilzoy summed up Todd Palin’s behavior best.

“It’s pretty strange,” she wrote.

Equally strange — though considerably less well-documented — are Todd Palin’s associations with the Alaskan Independence Party, a second-tier state political organization of which he was a registered member from 1995 through 2002. Almost nothing is known about the depth of Palin’s interest in or affection for the party’s agenda, although as Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert recently discovered, the Palins have enjoyed the support of — the technical phrase, I believe, is “palled around with” — AIP members in one respect or another since their political salad days in Wasilla.

It’s quite probable that more has been written about the Alaskan Independence Party in the past seven weeks than in the previous four decades of the group’s existence. In brief, the AIP are essentially hard core, right-wing libertarians whose animating principle is the belief that our statehood vote in 1958 was illegitimate because — contrary to Article 73 of the UN Charter — the “non-self-governing territory” of Alaska was not properly offered the option of independence prior to its admission as a state. (The AIP’s ponderous legal argument can be read in .pdf form here.)

The most hardcore AIP members genuinely want Alaska to be a separate nation; others would prefer to become a commonwealth; still others would seek to meld Alaska’s fortunes with Canadian separatists living in the western territories and provinces, where the bridle of colonialism chafes the hide in similar ways. The broader goals of the AIP have brought the party from time to time into the embrace of Southern neo-confederate organizations as well as the black helicopter caucus in the Pacific Northwest’s militia movement. In this year’s presidential election, the AIP has endorsed the nomination of Chuck Baldwin, Constitutional Party member and gurgling madman best known for thwarting Alan Keyes’ latest bid for the presidency.

At bottom, though, it’s difficult to assess the significance of the Todd Palin-AIP connection. The Palins’ link to the group is perhaps less important than their generally odd provincialism and their staggering lack of knowledge about and experience with national and global issues. Because of its geographic isolation, its one-dimensional economy, and a variety of other factors, Alaska is not a state that’s conducive to the development of a coherent sense of national identity. Alaskans — whether they belong to the AIP or not — generally regard themselves as “exceptional” compared to the rest of the country, and there’s a strong tendency to regard Alaskan interests as unique and separate. The Alaskan Independence Party is merely one manifestation of a much broader phenomenon.

The prominence of Todd Palin in his wife’s administration clearly makes these issues more relevant than they ordinarily would be. As John McCain would put it, his role tells the public something about the “judgment” of the vice presidential nominee. And now that Todd Palin is apparently “part of the [Republican] ticket,” the quality of his own judgment is worth pondering.