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.

As Sarah Palin winked, wiggled, and gee-whizzed her way through the debate last night, a number of women were gathering together in homes all over Alaska to watch the debate and prepare their next steps. Already in the last month they’ve come together to organize major marches, petitions, and thousands of female voices to speak out against Palin.

The women against Palin movement in Alaska has grown beyond grassroots. In fact, up until McCain chose Palin as a running mate a few weeks ago, it was small and distant and barely a seed. But since then, vociferous female bloggers in Alaska helped organize an anti-Palin rally in mid-September that included around 1,000 mostly female Palin opponents carrying signs like “Palin does not speak for me.” It was the biggest political rally the state has ever seen.

And just last week those same women helped organize an online petition to demand the removal of Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg, who is accused of continually obstructing the ongoing Troopergate investigation being conducted by the Alaska Legislative Council. Why are they suddenly gathering en masse to deliver a message? They want the rest of America to know that, not only is Palin skilled in the art of mollifying and winking, she’s adroit at hoodwinking, too.

Maia Nolan, an Alaskan who blogs at OwnTheSidewalk.com, says she resents the McCain campaign exploiting Palin in an effort to collect disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters. Nolan, who supported Clinton, says the strategy was a sexist move, and not only does she not intend to support McCain and Palin, she says the public outside of Alaska is woefully misinformed about McCain’s VP pick.

“There seems to be this idea out there that she’s an Alaskan folk hero, with her 80 percent approval rating and her Iron Dog champion husband,” Nolan tells MnIndy. “People may not realize that she came into office with a 90 percent approval rating on day one. Why? She’s not [former governor] Frank Murkowski. All she had to do to be popular was show up and not buy another jet. Not only did she not buy another jet,” Nolan says, “she tacked an extra $1200 onto everyone’s Permanent Fund Dividend check — the amount of which was announced right around the time that last pre-VP poll was taken. Of course she was popular.”

But, Nolan adds, Palin’s Dividend Checks and slash on taxes have hurt smaller outstate regions who aren’t so generous with their support. “She may not be so popular in places like Adak,” Nolan says, “a remote Aleutian village whose residents have been notified they need to leave before winter comes because the town can no longer afford fuel for heat and power.”

Equal rights?

A woman who goes only by the name of AK Muckraker and blogs at Mudflats agrees that the public is being deceived about Palin, and adds that words like “equal rights” falling out of her mouth are just as ill-conceived and meaningless as the rest of her word stews. It’s for those reasons she blogs nearly every day about the issues, and hopes women everywhere are listening.

“I think that the public automatically assumes since she is a woman and a mother that she is pro-woman and pro-family,” AK Muckraker tells me. “They need to understand that while Palin may describe herself in these terms, her own definition of these terms falls far out of mainstream American views. The fact that N.O.W., which hasn’t endorsed any presidential ticket since Mondale-Ferraro, has endorsed Obama-Biden, speaks volumes.”

Blogger Linda Kellen Biegel

Linda Kellen Biegel, who blogs at Blue Oasis, says the misconception of Palin as any kind of champion of woman’s rights is one of the scariest and most dangerous. “She is a woman yet there is no evidence that she supports issues that are important to women… quite the opposite,” Biegel says. “She doesn’t support equal pay for equal work. As the Mayor of Wasilla she cut the budget so that rape victims had to pay for their own forensic exams [rape kits] and refused to change that until then-Governor Knowles signed a law that demanded the city pay for them. There are over 900 families of children with disabilities who are on a waiting list for services, when Alaska’s $5 billion surplus sits in the bank.”

Biegel notes it would cost $45 million of the $5 billion surplus in the sixth-wealthiest state in the country to cover these families. She and other Alaskan bloggers say Palin’s record has consistently been anti-family and anti-women.

The great debate

So how’d she do last night? Just hours before the debate, Nolan had a prediction. “I expect that Palin, lacking the experience and expertise Sen. Biden brings to the debate, will resort to cheap shots and campaign-crafted sound bites.  I don’t expect her to actually debate the issues.  She didn’t know much about the issues when she ran for governor in 2006, and she actually made that work for her in the debates by making her better-prepared, more knowledgeable opponents seem like bean counters who were out of touch with what the people of Alaska really wanted.” She couldn’t have been more right if she had posed the question to Palin’s talkative God.

Indeed, some pundits were left shocked at Palin’s performance last night. She cheerled for the GOP ticket and delivered her talking points as if she were at a rally instead of a debate. She skirted questions and reiterated key words and phrases. She made Biden appear like he focused too much on minituae and, in some cases, moderator Gwen Ifill. While Palin constantly looked at the camera—the “people”–Biden erred, perhaps, by focusing on the moderator and on numbers and policies.

By any reasonable calculus, Palin actually had the advantage going in. The bar had been lowered after a series of interviews.  She had no Washington record to defend herself against. And with many softball questions, she never had to discuss McCain’s real record and could instead refer to him as a concept. In a sense, she did what the right often criticizes Obama for doing: She chose style over substance.

Blogger and radio host Shannyn Moore

But for some Alaskan women, Palin’s small town librarian performance was exactly what they expected. Blogger and Air America radio host Shannyn Moore says she wasn’t surprised at all by Palin’s folksy production. “She did what I thought she’d do,” Moore says. “She didn’t answer questions. She talked around questions and avoided specifics. And she was a bit snarky, winked, and had some sort of accent no Alaskan I know has. The bar was lowered and she went over it.”

AK Muckraker was actually a bit surprised by the new winky Palin, but not her talking points. Muckraker says Palin has used the same strategy of avoiding questions during her short time as governor of Alaska.  “I was turned off by her winking and nose crinkling and cutesy, folksy answers,” she says. “My perception of her performance is that she was well prepared with a series of talking points.  She chose whichever one fit closest with the question, and if she didn’t have one, she used the energy talking point for good measure. I thought she did better than most people were expecting, but that after sifting through the ‘blizzard of words’ it was obvious that she didn’t really answer the questions, nor was there much substance to what she said.”

So what does AK Muckraker think will be the biggest outcome of Palin’s performance? “A great Saturday Night Live skit.”