With the nation on the verge of electing Barack Obama to the presidency, I decided to spend the evening surveying the political mood in Juneau, the city to which Sarah Palin would soon be returning as a defeated vice presidential candidate. Palin has never been especially popular here. She’s barely disguised her well-known preference for moving the state capital from Juneau to the Anchorage area, a departure that would devastate an already-struggling regional economy. Indeed, one of the interesting details to emerge from the “Troopergate” investigation was the revelation that Todd Palin had, on his wife’s behalf, urged at least one state legislator to revisit the idea of a capital relocation. Apparently, these are the sorts of things that mavericks do from time to time.

Palin’s reputation has not been enhanced by the 10 weeks she’s spent in the national spotlight. Though she remains quite popular as a governor, her bizarre stint as national ringmistress for the low-information base of the Republican Party has not served her well in certain quarters of the state. Still, I was curious to see how my fellow townsfolk would greet the end of Palin’s inarticulate and costly run for national office.

Time: 4:15 p.m.
Location: Downtown Juneau

Most polls on the East Coast closed about an hour ago. I probably haven’t felt this jittery and weird since October 2004, when the Boston Red Sox teetered on the brink of winning their first World Series since Woodrow Wilson was president. I spent that evening drinking beer at my favorite local restaurant, which is quite literally an old, converted floatplane hangar. For the sake of good luck, I thought I should begin the evening on familiar turf.

The bar is sparsely populated when I arrive. Two televisions are tuned to CNN at extremely low volume, while a third carries a muted Fox News. I take a seat at a small table next to a couple of women who are drinking wine and obsessing over an electoral scorecard. NPR has just called Pennsylvania for Obama, but no one else has followed suit.

Since my wife and I haven’t had cable since 2006, I’m more or less unfamiliar with the latest contours of cable news campaign coverage. As a consequence, I had no idea that Bill Bennett and Paul Begala were still relevant in some way to the national political dialogue. Who knew? But there they are, hanging out with Wolf Blitzer and two other people I’ve never seen before. Bennett appears to be a few warm cheese curds away from a massive coronary event, and I make a quick note to add his name to my 2009 Dead Pool list.

Suddenly, Blitzer begins chatting with a hologram. Freaked out, I turn to my neighbors and strike up a conversation.

Both are avid Democrats, and both are grateful to Sarah Palin for pushing several Republican friends and relatives into the ranks of Obama voters. One of them tells me about her father, an 82-year-old Republican from Norfolk, Va., who cast what may have been the first Democratic vote of his entire life. As Fox News calls Pennsylvania for Obama, she tells me that her father’s switch had much to do with the presence of our governor on the national ticket. Though he spent his career in the Navy, she tells me, he was never enthusiastic about John McCain. And Palin, so far as he was concerned, was a terrifying choice for a running mate.

“My father has a lot of respect for Colin Powell,” she explains, “and that endorsement pretty much nailed it for him.” Her sister, she adds ruefully, doesn’t share her father’s disappointment with the GOP.

“It’ll be a few weeks before we talk.”

Conversation segues to the question of impeaching Palin — hope swims upstream tonight — and then to a prolonged debate about whether our governor is smarter than George W. Bush. Before we can sift through all the evidence, Fox News — officially drawing a curtain on the era of Joe the Plumber — projects an Ohio win for Obama. A light volley of applause fills the room. A guy at the bar announces that he’s going to call his Republican friend in Cincinnati. A few minutes later, he’s gleefully shouting into his cell phone.

“Say it!” he laughs. “Say it with me! Say it! ‘PRESIDENT BARACK — ‘ Say it, you fucker! PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA! COME ON, SAY IT!”

It takes several minutes, but his friend apparently complies. A one-man rapture ensues.

Time: 6:45
Location: Mendenhall Valley

Before long, I find myself at Henry’s, a bar located in the more conservative section of the Juneau borough, about 10 miles north of downtown. I’m trying to find some devoted Republicans, to no apparent avail. The small congregation at Henry’s is significantly less animated than the folks I’d been hanging out with downtown. A few people are sitting around a table, watching the coverage. I can’t tell if they’re dejected or just bored. Blitzer is speaking with another hologram, so I figure it’s the latter.

I overhear a middle-aged man predicting optimistically that if nothing else went well for the Republicans, at least Ted Stevens stood a decent chance of being re-elected. I nose my way into the conversation, offering the unsolicited observation that the latest polls have shown Stevens to be pretty far behind. Another guy at the table dissents.

“Stevens is a winner,” he grunts. “You’ll see. He’s tough.”

Practically on cue, Lisa Murkowski — Alaska’s other U.S. senator — appears on the television, looking stern and explaining that her colleague has been railroaded by a federal court and that his seven convictions will be overturned in due time. She’s pissed. For the previous 48 hours, the airwaves in Alaska have been bombarded with sympathetic campaign advertisements from Stevens and his supporters. At the bottom of it all, they’ve been arguing that Uncle Ted is a state hero whose four decades of service have earned him the right to be the only felon ever elected to the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.

I ask, “So what if his conviction holds and the Senate boots him?”

“Oh, I think Palin will run for his seat,” a woman at the table suggests. A few heads nod.

Indeed, if Stevens won and then resigned or faced expulsion, a special election would be convened to select his replacement. A lot of Alaskans seem to believe that Palin would leap at the opportunity to assume national office. If she ran, I have no doubts that she’d win. But I happen not to think she’d actually pursue a Senate seat, for the simple reason that Alaskans expect their congressional delegation to do little more than retrieve armloads of pork for the state. Given the image Palin has tried to create for herself as an earmark reformer, she’d be something of an awkward fit for the office. Besides, I tell myself — not realizing what’s actually been happening in voting booths across the state — the entire scenario is moot, since tonight, Stevens is certain to be handed the second most humiliating verdict he’s received in the past two weeks.

Curiously, no one at the table thinks Palin would stand a chance of winning the presidency in 2012.

“I’m not a Republican,” the first woman explains, “but I think she’s an OK governor. I just don’t think she’d be able to run a campaign on her own.” The guy next to her agrees.

“Well, I am a Republican,” he says, “and I think this whole campaign thing has been great for the state. I’m sorry they’re losing, but she really doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s been saying what they tell her to say, and I don’t think she’ll be ready in four years. I dunno. Maybe she’ll get bored being back in Alaska, so she’ll probably run. She likes the attention.”

I turn back to the television. It’s a few minutes after 7:00. The polls in Alaska have closed, and Blitzer is now announcing that Virginia’s electoral votes will go to the Democratic candidate for the first time since 1964. Moments later, in a mass, near-simultaneous recognition of the obvious, every news organization on the entire planet calls the presidential race for Obama. One of the other men at the table whips out a camera, smiles and takes a few pictures of the scene in Chicago’s Grant Park, where a quarter of a million people are feeling their brains scramble inside their heads.

The mood at Henry’s is a little more contemplative.

“Well, it’s over,” someone else sighs. “So much for that.” Within two minutes, the whole table has settled their tab and wandered out into the parking lot.

As I sit there finishing my beer, I ponder the enormity of what’s transpired over the past few minutes. The United States — a nation whose founders could have owned a man like Barack Obama, a nation whose two major parties have at various times nourished themselves on white racist anxiety — just elected an African-American to the presidency, where he will succeed a man who has been almost inarguably the worst two-term presidency in the country’s history. The nation’s economy has been knocked into a cocked hat, and we’re nearly six years into a stupidly conceived war in Iraq. Our government spies on its own citizens and tortures people. And we just elected a black dude to lead us the fuck out of this terrible mess.

It might work, and it might not. But somehow the whole drama of Sarah Palin now seems beyond comprehension, as if it were simply a weird thing that nearly happened forever and a day ago.

And so once again, at least for now, Palin has become Alaska’s problem. Palin and her groundless ideas about science, Palin and her cavernous ignorance about the world, Palin and her peculiar species of the English language, Palin and her creepy husband, Palin and her right-wing fanboys, Palin and the whole goddamned lot of it — it’s over.

America spent several months with Sarah Palin and said, in a loud and resounding voice, “Thanks. But no thanks.”

As with the legislative investigation, the personnel board concluded that Palin was within her rights to fire Monegan for any reason whatsoever; however, the board challenged the legislative finding that Palin breached the Executive Ethics Act by using — and allowing others to use — the resources of the governor’s office to press for the removal of a state trooper against whom the family harbored a personal grudge. Indeed, the personnel board investigator, Tim Petumenos, insisted at today’s press conference that these such pressure “didn’t happen at all.” This latter assertion is particularly unusual, given the Branchflower report’s abundant detail regarding calls, e-mails and conversations initiated by the Palins or by staffers to Walt Monegan and other state officials on the subject of trooper Mike Wooten. Since the records of personnel board investigations do not have to be released publicly, it’s unlikely anyone will ever know much more about the evidence that served as the basis for today’s report. It’s also unlikely that the legislature is finished with the issue, so optimistic predictions — from, say, the Palin enthusiasts at Powerline — that the issue has been “laid to rest” are premature.

One wry detail from the personnal board’s executive sumarry:

These findings differ from those of the Branchflower Report because Independent Counsel has concluded the wrong statute was used as a basis for the conclusions contained in the Branchflower Report, the Branchflower report misconstrued the available evidence and did not consider or obtain all of the material evidence that is required to properly reach findings.

Given that Sarah Palin herself and several other state officials famously refused to cooperate with the Legislative Council investigation, the claim that the investigators failed to “obtain all the material evidence” isn’t particularly surprising.

As with most crystal ball economic forecasts, the Heritage Foundation’s predictions about job growth under an Obama presidency should probably be taken as seriously as the CDA’s prediction in 2000 that job growth under George Bush would expand more vigorously under than they would under a Gore presidency — specifically, by 1.5 million jobs above the Congressional Budget Office baseline. Instead, George W. Bush will finish two terms in office with the slowest rate of growth in non-farm employment of any president since Herbert Hoover.

The Heritage Foundation also predicted in 2000 that the US national debt under George Bush would stand at a mere $380 billion by 2010. It currently stands at $10.5 trillion.

Above: The good old days, as David Storck remembers them

Most readers have probably seen footage of McCain-Palin rallies in Ohio or Pennsylvania, where voters who could best be charitably as the “low information” variety have wound themselves into tight little knots of fury over the Islamo-Marxist-terrorist menace of Barack Obama.

Now that voting has begun, the panic over the possibility of an Obama presidency has apparently pitched to a level that can only be adequately conveyed with a stream of capital letters.   Via Open Left, check out this e-mail, sent the other day by the chair of the Hillsborough County (Fla.) Republican Party to his friends and colleagues.  Among other things, he’s clearly dismayed that black folks — and college professors! — are fearlessly casting ballots. 

THE THREAT:
HERE IN TEMPLE TERRACE, FL OUR REPUBLICAN HQ IS ONE BLOCK AWAY FROM OUR LIBRARY, WHICH IS AN EARLY VOTING SITE.I SEE CARLOADS OF BLACK OBAMA SUPPORTERS COMING FROM THE INNER CITY TO CAST THEIR VOTES FOR OBAMA. THIS IS THEIR CHANCE TO GET A BLACK PRESIDENT AND THEY SEEM TO CARE LITTLE THAT HE IS AT MINIMUM, SOCIALIST, AND PROBABLY MARXIST IN HIS CORE BELIEFS. AFTER ALL, HE IS BLACK–NO EXPERIENCE OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS–BUT HE IS BLACK.I ALSO SEE YOUNG COLLEGE STUDENTS AND THEIR PROFESSORS FROM USF PARKING THEIR CARS WITH THE PROMINENT ‘OBAMA’ BUMPER STICKERS. THE STUDENTS ARE ENTHUSIASTIC TO BE VOTING IN A HISTORIC ELECTION WHERE THERE MAY BE THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT.

THE COLLEGE PROFESSORS, PARTICULARLY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, FOR THE MOST PART HAVE LITTLE OR NO EXPERIENCE IN THE WORK-A-DAY WORLD.

THEIR LIFE EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN MOSTLY ACADEMIC UNDER THE TUTELAGE OF LIBERAL COLLEGE PROFESSORS. FOR THEM, A LITTLE SOCIALISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM IS A GOOD THING. AFTER ALL, IF TERRORISTS ATTACK US, WE MUST HAVE DONE SOMETHING TO PROVOKE THEM.

YOU AND I UNDERSTAND THE DANGERS THE POTENTIAL OBAMA PRESIDENCY PRESENTS TO OUR WAY OF LIFE. THE SUPPRESSION OF FREE SPEECH, INTRODUCING UNION INTIMIDATION IN THE WORKPLACE, INCREASED DANGERS TO OUR NATION BY TERRORISTS, CUTTING OUR DEFENSE BUDGET BY 25%, TURNING OUR TAX SYSTEM INTO A NATIONAL WELFARE SYSTEM AND ECONOMIC POLICIES THAT COULD DRIVE US INTO A DEPRESSION.

THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO STOP OBAMA: VOTE !!!——-
(AND GET EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO VOTE)
ONLY YOU AND I CAN STOP OBAMA NOW ! !
SEVEN DAYS TO GO AND WE MUST ACT IMMEDIATELY..

A PLAN OF ACTION FOR YOU AND I:

VOTE. OBAMA IS ADVERTISING ON TV ASKING ALL HIS SUPPORTERS TO TAKE A DAY OFF WORK OR CLASS TO VOTE.

CONTACT PERSONALLY EVERYONE YOU KNOW REMINDING THEM TO VOTE AND HOW IMPORTANT IT IS. PARENTS, VOTING-AGE CHILDREN, IN-LAWS, CO-WORKERS, CHURCH CONTACTS, SCHOOL CONTACTS, BUSINESS CONTACTS. MAKE A LIST AND CONTACT THEM.

SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR EMAIL LIST THAT WANTS TO DEFEAT OBAMA.

YOUR EMAIL IS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL IF YOU USE IT WISELY AND PROMPTLY. YOU CAN REACH 10,000,000 PEOPLE IN THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS IF AS FEW AS TEN PEOPLE ON YOUR LIST TAKE PROMPT ACTION AND TEN PEOPLE ON THEIR LIST AND TEN PEOPLE ON THEIR LIST…YOU GET THE IDEA.

LET’S ALL PRAY AND WORK AND WE WILL SURELY CELEBRATE OUR VICTORY ON 11/5/08.

David A. Storck Chairman
Hillsborough County
Republican Party

CBS reports that a new ethics complaint has been filed against Sarah Palin, this time in response to the recent disclosure that she charged the state more than $50,000 for her kids’ travel expenses when they attended events with the governor.  Though Palin had been invited to these events in an official capacity, her children typically were not, and last week’s AP story quoted some event sponsors as being “surprised” when the governor showed up with kids in tow. For other appearances, the Palin tots were extended official invitations only after Palin herself implored organizers to include them. Though state law permits governors from bringing their families to events where they have official responsibilities, no one can quite explain what responsibilities Bristol, Willow, or Piper Palin might have exercised.

The official response from the governor’s office? She’s a celebrity!

“The Governor’s office has expended $54,803.00 in Alaska state dollars for family travel since December 2006,” according to the Governor’s Administrative Services Director, Linda Perez. “The documentation related to family travel has changed and you have to keep in mind that the governor and her family are very popular,” added Perez.

It was a measure of something — doubts about the actual prospects for a McCain victory, or disappointment with the current alternatives in the Republican party — but in the days following the close of the Republican convention in Minneapolis, a few souls began looking forward to the 2012 presidential contest and to Sarah Palin’s possible headlining role in it. After Palin’s convention speech, more than a few conservative Republicans and self-professed centrist Democrats ignored John McCain’s own words and convinced themselves that if elected, he would only serve a single term, thus laying the groundwork for Palin to run outright in 2012.

Conservatives, of course, looked forward to the possibility of running one of their own — an opportunity the primaries had denied them — while unreconstructed Hillary supporters envisioned the triumphant return of their favored candidate. Internet domain names like “palinforpresident.com,” “palin2012,” and “sarahpalin2012” quickly disappeared into the speculative vortex.

With the McCain ticket facing a likely defeat next Tuesday, the “Palin 2012” conversation has now begun in earnest. Much of this has been prompted by Palin’s increasingly frequent “rogue” moments, which have evidently inspired an ugly rift within the McCain campaign. At The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder argued last week that Palin had already begun “play[ing] the Republican base against John McCain” by griping about the campaign’s abandonment of Michigan, by wondering aloud about the decision to avoid the subject of Jeremiah Wright, and by whipping crowds into spastic furies with talk of Obama’s “terrorist” pals.

On Monday, Palin wandered off-script again and spent several minutes dismissing the controversy over her wardrobe, thus assuring that the story would remain in the news cycle for another day. Many observers, including Ambinder, have wondered if Palin is not, in fact, distancing herself from McCain to gain early traction for a future run at the White House.

Most of the chatter about Sarah Palin’s political future rests on the optimistic premise that Palin, as a presidential candidate, would at last be capable of energizing social conservatives while drawing independent voters in ways that she’s been unable to do as a vice presidential pick. This tableau further assumes that Palin, having taken four years to mature as a national candidate, would carry none of the baggage she’s accumulated — quite literally — over the past two months. Barring a massive swing in the nation’s political climate, Palin will likely be a worse candidate in 2012 than she is at the moment.

Whatever else might be said about Palin’s nomination, her effect on the entire race has been unprecedented. Discovered on Wikipedia by a college student, promoted by lovestruck conservative men, and yanked onto the national ticket by John McCain in a moment of historic desperation, Sarah Palin was judged a superstar and party heiress apparent before she’d uttered a single unteleprompted word.

It was an odd spectacle, rendered even more bizarre by subsequent events, most of which — her seclusion from the media, her famously inelegant conversations with Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, her talk-radio demeanor at campaign rallies, and the conclusion of the “Troopergate” investigation — barely need mentioning.

While Palin entered the national stage as an alleged bi-partisan reformer who “governed from the center,” she has served on the campaign trail mainly as a courier of raw meat to an infuriated base, which has responded favorably to her insinuations that Barack Obama consorts with “terrorists,” harbors socialist economic beliefs and cares less about America than her running mate.

While these tactics have helped secure the loyalty of hardcore Republicans, Palin’s presence on the party ticket has arguably redounded to the advantage of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Nationwide, public opinion of Sarah Palin has soured noticeably. According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (October 21), one out of three registered voters has a “very negative” impression of the Alaska governor, a figure that has doubled since mid-September. More than of the survey respondents expressed the view that Palin was unqualified to serve as president if the circumstances required it. There is a strong likelihood that Sarah Palin is nudging voters away from John McCain.

Widespread doubts about Sarah Palin’s suitability for high office have not been confined to ordinary observers. The conservative punditocracy has divided itself over Sarah Palin, with high-profile doubts expressed by George Will, Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks, among others. Overt defectors to the ranks of Obama voters have included conservatives like Christopher Buckley and Ken Adelman as well as moderate Republicans like Colin Powell, all of whom have cited Palin as one of their primary reasons for rejecting the McCain ticket.

And now, with mere days left in the campaign, Republican leaders like Tom Ridge and Lindsey Graham are openly speculating that a different VP pick — Joe Lieberman or Ridge himself — would have done more to further Republican hopes of retaining the White House.

Palin, however, was the product of a more Rovian calculus, which insists that securing the party’s core is more important than courting independents. For precisely these reasons, Karl Rove himself allegedly pushed McCain to select Mitt Romney as his running mate. When McCain selected the Alaska governor, “Bush’s Brain” cheerfully predicted that Palin could add a durable, three-point swing in McCain’s direction.

At this point, Karl Rove appears to have been grossly mistaken, as he was in 2006 when he boasted that “The Math” would add up to continued Republican control of Congress. But the selection of Palin was wrong only to the degree that it failed to impress independents; as a base-magnet, she has been effective. As a candidate in 2012, she would enjoy what conservative activist Brent Bozell promises would be a “small mother lode” of financial support. Marc Ambinder argues that such levels of support, combined with the likelihood that Republicans will have been completely dispossessed of power in Washington, would allow Palin to run “the most anti-government, anti-Washington campaign this side of Barry Goldwater.” Given the fate of Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, that’s an analogy that should make Obama supporters especially optimistic.

In the meantime, of course, Palin will have to deal with a potentially rough homecoming in Alaska. The political fallout from the Branchflower Report on troopergate has yet to fully materialize, and the results of a second investigation, by the state’s personnel board, have yet to be released. State legislators from both parties were less than thrilled with Palin’s conduct on the campaign trail, where she allowed McCain officials to disparage the bipartisan investigation as an unprincipled hatchet job, and there are plenty of Alaskans who objected to Palin’s characterization of Walt Monegan as a “rogue” commissioner who undermined the governor’s agenda while failing to show an interest in protecting her family from an “out of control” state trooper.

Recent disclosures about Palin’s use of state funds to pay for her family’s travel, or per diem claims she submitted to sleep in her own home, may continue to haunt Palin during the last two years of her term. At this point, there’s no reason to assume she won’t cruise to re-election in 2010, but it’s also possible that the national campaign will turn Palin into the sort of polarizing figure that’s ill-suited for success in Alaskan state politics. Recast in a hyper-partisan role for national political consumption, Palin will have a difficult time resuming her earlier posture as a pragmatic, bipartisan executive.

Looking ahead, there seems little doubt that Palin’s 2008 message will be irrelevant in four years, by which point the chants of “drill, baby, drill” should sound even more beside the point than they do at the moment. And unless Bill Ayers receives a cabinet appointment in the Obama administration, Palin’s major talking points will have long since abandoned her. Even the term “maverick” will likely go down with the ship, and an entirely new marketing campaign will have to be constructed on Palin’s behalf. And if Joe the Plumber receives a tax cut over the next four years, there will be almost nothing for Sarah Palin to do in 2012 but smile and wink.

That, of course, might be enough for the weird men who write for The Weekly Standard, but for the rest of us — Tina Fey excepted — it will hardly be worth the time.

Glenn Beck pointing northward

Glenn Beck is a strange man. Given to public weeping when he speaks of George Washington, Beck also believes that schizophrenia offers a good model for sorting through and discovering the true meaning behind the day’s news. A living refutation of the principle that low ratings should pose a barrier to career advancement, the erstwhile star of Headline News was recently offered a job at Fox after his contract negotiations with CNN foundered. According to The New York Times, CNN was looking to replace the usual 9 p.m. rerun of Beck’s program with a rerun of Lou Dobbs’ show, a swap that promised to be the journalistic equivalent of replacing a nightly colonoscopy with a nightly punch to the groin.

Yesterday, Glenn “Prove-to-me-that-you-are-not-working-with-our-enemies” Beck offered his long-awaited presidential endorsement.

It was weird.

I have looked at the other candidates. I don’t see any of them that have the fire in the belly. I don’t see any of them that actually believe in you, who actually is you, except Sarah Palin. So I’m going to pull the lever for John McCain and let the Lord sort it out. I want somebody that just, whose compass points north. Even though all these candidates think their compass points north, it doesn’t. It’s pointing east and some places it’s pointing south. In Barack Obama it is pointing south. He says that it’s pointing north, it’s to you, but it’s not. It’s to the government, it’s to Washington, it’s to the special interests. John McCain I think points somewhere maybe northeast. It’s in the right direction but it’s not right. Sarah Palin points to you. I’m casting my vote for Sarah Palin.

Just to be clear: It appears that Glenn Beck is praying that John McCain will win the election next week, but that God will miraculously intervene at some point in the near future to incapacitate him, or worse.

Now that Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is sifting through pruno recipes, it’s worth reflecting on how his conviction might affect the presidential race. It seems unlikely that Stevens could to any further damage to the “Republican brand,” as the cliche has it. To the degree that non-Alaskans might associate Stevens with Palin, today’s news will probably reinforce Palin’s negative public image, but it’s uncertain what that degree actually looks like. Palin and McCain have done their best to distance themselves from “Uncle Ted,” but Stevens has been unambiguous in his support for Palin.

Most recently, there was this explosion of joy at Palin’s nomination:

“It’s a great day for the nation and Alaskans. Governor Palin has proven herself as a bright, energetic leader for our State and will bring the same energy to the vice presidency. She will serve our country with distinction — the first Alaskan and first woman on the Republican ticket. I share in the pride of all Alaskans,” Stevens said in a statement released by his campaign.

Before that, there was this gubernatorial campaign ad from Palin, who was hardly shy about accepting the nudge from Alaska’s most famous criminal.

The sources of the intra-campaign tension appear to be numerous, with Palin being accused of harboring diva-like pretensions, which she seems to have acquired from the mindless adulation she’s received along the campaign trail. As a result, CNN reports, Palin has in recent days “gone rogue,” offering public remarks that have diverged from the official campaign narrative. At the Politico, Ben Smith reports that a “Palin faction” has begun asserting itself within the campaign, seeking perhaps to cut their losses and position the Alaska governor as an early frontrunner for the 2012 nomination.

Among the more interesting sources of tension within the campaign, Palin and those closest to her have reportedly convinced themselves that Palin should have been allowed to speak to the press earlier and more frequently than she was permitted. Sources within the campaign are unimpressed with the argument:

[T]wo sources, one Palin associate and one McCain adviser, defended the decision to keep her press interaction limited after she was picked, both saying flatly that she was not ready and that the missteps could have been a lot worse.

They insisted that she needed time to be briefed on national and international issues and on McCain’s record.

“Her lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues was dramatic,” said another McCain source with direct knowledge of the process to prepare Palin after she was picked. The source said it was probably the “hardest” to get her “up to speed than any candidate in history.”

If the reports are true, it’s worth considering the possibility that both Palin and John McCain are, in fact, actually plants from the Democratic Party, surreptitiously guided and developed over the years in order to destroy their Republican rivals. Has anyone seen Donald Segretti recently?

The Alaskan executive branch, 2008 team photo

Many of the details in this LA Times piece have been reported before, but the argument — that Governor Sarah Palin has engaged in ritual cronyism since taking office in 2006 — is worth hearing again, given John McCain’s continuing argument that his running mate’s executive experience makes her uniquely qualified to take over the presidency if circumstances required it. (In their interview with Brian Williams the other day, McCain reiterated these claims — the video is here — while overstating the number of employees under Palin’s direction. McCain claimed the state of Alaska has 24,000 employees, when in fact the figure is closer to 14,000.)

In any event, while looking into the governor’s commission appointments — many of which went to high school chums of the Palins — the LA Times discovers some new information about favorable loans received by campaign donors.

Records show that Palin donors obtained state-subsidized business loans from the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, whose mission is to encourage “economic growth and diversification of the state, including expansion of small businesses.”In one case, Jae G. Lee, a former Los Angeles businessman who is the proprietor of Party Time, a rundown grocery store and bottle shop in Anchorage, sought a $2.7-million state loan to buy an aging strip mall in midtown Anchorage. It was on the market because of a glut of similar malls in the area, all of them losing customers to big-box stores.

Lee and his wife, who had contributed $3,000 worth of office space to Palin’s 2006 campaign, won the low-interest, state-backed mortgage although it was unclear how the old mall would add jobs. Lee said he did nothing to improve his acquisition, but with the cheap loan his profits have been robust.

Lee said he did not seek Palin’s help to obtain the loan.

Two other state-backed loans with favorable terms and questionable development benefits went to Palin contributor and local dentist Scott Laudon and his partners. The investors got $1.2 million to refinance debt on Northern Lights Village — a gritty collection of shops including massage and tattoo parlors, a secondhand-clothing store and a video arcade. Its neighbors along a 1 1/2 -mile stretch of Northern Lights Boulevard in midtown Anchorage include a dozen strip malls.

Laudon and other partners also received $3.6 million to buy two automated car washes in Anchorage. The benefit to Alaska, according to the approval documents, was the retention of five jobs — which would have remained without the subsidy. Laudon declined to comment.

Mmmmmm. Mavericky!