Time MagazineTakes The Shine Off Palin's Reformer Image

[kpete]

Time Magazine: Sarah Palin Book Burner
by sweetliberty
Tue Sep 02, 2008 at 08:50:47 AM PDT

Time Magazine is taking the shine off of Palin's reformer image. Its investigative report shows Sarah Palin to be no more than a opportunist who will use wedge or reformer issues to make her way to the top. The person presented by Time has shown herself to be cold and calculating, not a maverick at all. And on one account she even betrayed a family member because she was pro-choice.


But in the first major race of her career — the 1996 campaign for mayor of her hometown of Wasilla — Palin was a far more conventional politician. In fact, according to some who were involved in that fight, Palin was a highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.

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By shrewdly invoking issues that mattered to the ascendant majority, Palin won the mayor's race. But while she may have been a new face, says Naegele, she was no maverick, not yet. "The state party gave her the mechanism to get into that office," says Naegele. "As soon as she was confident enough to brush them off, she did.
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She ended up dismissing almost all the city department heads who had been loyal to Stein, including a few who had been instrumental in getting her into politics to begin with. Some saw it as a betrayal.

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Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving "full support" to the mayor.


http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837918,00.html
via:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/2/112743/6059/507/583261

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UPDATE:

I'm watching McCain surrogate Gary Bauer, a religious leader who had a fall from grace a few years ago, lecture MSNBC about how dare they cover the Bristol Palin unwed pregnancy story. McCain supporter Bill Bennett tried this tactic on CNN's Wolf Blitzer yesterday too. Someone needs to remind the McCain campaign, when they whine to journalists about how terrible it is that the media is reporting on the pregnancy, that none of us knew about Bristol Palin's unwed pregnancy until yesterday morning when John McCain's campaign leaked the story to Reuters.

[Egnever]

1. Nice it made it to time.

Vetted my ass