Anchorage Daily News - How Palin Governs

[Blue_In_AK]

This is a pretty fair analysis of Sarah's governing style over the past couple of years here in Alaska. It might give some insight into her strengths and weaknesses.


http://www.adn.com/opinion/view/story/540072.html

When we look at Gov. Sarah Palin’s management style, we see three common themes. She concentrates on the public message, while others do the detail work. She takes her politics personally. She avoids the give-and-take that is normal in politics.

MESSAGE OVER MECHANICS

Gov. Palin’s political instincts may be the sharpest in the state. She can both take over a room and connect with people one on one.

Former aide John Bitney said Palin has taken a direct hand in crafting the message of her administration. She wrote some of her own speeches and heavily edited press releases. And focusing her message on her top priorities has brought her success.

She won passage of a $500 million state incentive and a state license with TransCanada to promote a North Slope gas pipeline — the most progress Alaska has ever seen on that long-sought project.

Palin also got the Legislature to pass ethics reform and revise the corruption-tainted oil tax passed in 2006, creating a financial windfall for the state.

Everything else took a back seat to these priorities. The governor immersed herself in the details of those issues, but not in others that are also important.

Gas line? Front and center.

Medicaid? Not much interested.

TOO NARROWLY FOCUSED?

Critics question whether Palin appreciates the complexity and hard work required to address the full range of gubernatorial responsibilities.

Supporters reply that the governor’s work on oil taxes and the gas line demanded most of her time and effort. They also point out that when Palin assembled the senior executives in her administration, she left deputy commissioners and other high-ranking officials in place — career public servants who presumably had a strong grasp of details where the governor did not. She deserves credit for keeping staff that knew how to run government, rather than replacing them with political supporters, and letting them do their jobs.

But while Palin focuses on appealing to the public, she may also be neglecting some of the old-fashioned, face-to-face connections that make government work.

“You can’t run government by Blackberry,” said a critic.

“You cannot be chief of staff by speakerphone,” Bitney said, referring to the split between high-level political staff, including the governor, in Anchorage and the chief of staff and agency heads in Juneau.

POLITICS IS PERSONAL

For Palin, the political is personal, and vice-versa. Exhibit A, the Monegan case, which we discussed in detail in this space yesterday. How could a messy divorce between the governor’s sister and a state employee become an expensive, divisive and distracting statewide scandal?

Her mishandling of the case is her biggest stumble as governor. It showed an inability or unwillingness to separate personal concerns from her job as a public official.

And when she sacked Commissioner Monegan, she should have done it face to face, but instead chose to let her chief of staff deliver the message.

DISSENT UNWELCOME

Gov. Palin has a reputation for not tolerating dissent. She has appeared to surround herself with yes men and women. Any executive wants her own team around her. But some of her appointments have raised eyebrows. She picked the unknown Talis Colberg as attorney general and former schoolmate Franci Havemeister as director of agriculture.

Were these appointments based on loyalty to Sarah Palin and the comfort of friendships or on competence and experience in government? These look like the former.

On the other hand, some of her most experienced and effective choices have come from nontraditional sources. Tom Irwin and Marty Rutherford at the Department of Natural Resources, for example, had strong records on oil and gas issues. They had worked for Gov. Frank Murkowski, the man Palin chased out of office, but had serious policy disagreements with him.

Because she is not a detail person, Palin needs a crack management team in her office. So far, she has not built an inner circle with the strength to complement her big-picture management style.

NO GIVE AND TAKE

What most politicians call the art and necessity of compromise, Gov. Palin regards as unsavory backroom politics. She pushes hard for what she thinks is right. And sometimes that’s just what Alaska needs. But at other times, steadfastness leads to antagonism and stalemate. Good goes undone.

She has cut bloated capital budgets, for example, despite strong protests from legislators and communities. In doing so, she established funding criteria that made sense, such as insisting on local matching contributions. But she also came across as imperious, treating lawmakers like supplicants, inviting them to come to her to plead for their projects.

Palin has easily crossed party lines to get what she wants, but tends to take it personally when others cross her. Her antagonistic relationship with Senate President Lyda Green has been undignified, to put it mildly.

IN NATIONAL OFFICE

How well would Sarah Palin’s management style serve her in the vice-presidency?

She wouldn’t have to sweat the details of running a bureaucracy of more than a million people, or of filling the most important public posts in the country. Instead she could concentrate on building and maintaining public support for the administration’s initiatives. That would appear to be a job that fits well with her skills. But if she were to become president?

Her two years at Alaska’s helm make it hard to predict. She has a strangely mixed record. She would get an A+ for her handling of the natural gas line incentive package. She would get an F- for her dealings with public safety commissioners Walt Monegan and Charles Kopp.

Her worst stumbles came, not early in her tenure, as might be expected with a rookie governor making the jump from mayor of a small town, but more recently, after she won important legislative victories.