I'm Back!

The Washington Post reported this morning that Alaska Gov. and Veep nominee Sarah Palin billed the state for 312 nights that she spent at her Wasilla residence as part of a per diem arrangement that allows her to turn over expenses incurred when traveling on official business outside Juneau. The article also indicated that she had asked for and received reimbursement for over forty thousand dollars worth of airline tickets for her husband and children. While family members of Governors are permitted to bill the state for expenses relating to “official state business,” it's hard to imagine what official business seven-year old Piper Palin might have been engaged in that caused her to run up an $11,000 airline bill in the first nineteen months of her mother's governorship.

These revelations, coupled with the emerging fact that Palin was a strong supporter of the much-derided “Bridge to Nowhere” before it became a politically inexpedient albatross, are beginning raise doubts about the “maverick reformer” image McCain finally settled on for his fall message. While it was a well-known fact that Mayor Palin hired a lobbyist to obtain $27 million in earmarks during her tenure in that office, it is just now being revealed that she brought in close to a $750 million as governor. Her first year alone, she obtained $550 million in federal earmarks, or more than $800 per Alaskan, almost thirty times the national average. She even penned an editorial in one of Alaska's largest newspapers defending federal earmarks and describing their procurement as “incredibly important.”

There's nothing wrong with any of this. There's nothing illegal, lascivious, dangerous, immoral, or even particularly unique about the game she was running. But it's patently ludicrous to somehow paint her as the mortal enemy of pork and earmarks. Obama and his campaign have recently attacked her reformist assertions as misleading, and even deceitful, but the McCain campaign has issued this response over and over:

“Barack Obama's hysterical reaction to Sarah Palin's hard work as governor, combined with the vicious assault visited upon her family by his friends in the elite media, belie the contempt he has for ordinary Americans and the profound extent that he is willing to belittle America's working mothers.”

Ok, so I'm paraphrasing a bit. The point is that as long as the mainstream media are willing to cover the debate about Sarah Palin's record in the “he said – she responded” mold of tired journalism, Palin can keep re-issuing this statement and it will never lose any effectiveness. It won't gain any either, but it doesn't have to. It keeps us talking about the media and the “elite,” and prevents any honest, probing, or otherwise useful questions about her record in elective office.

This is another one of those cases that we desperately need the news media to help us, rather than hurt us, and just eight weeks from election day, it's hardly clear that this will happen.

UPDATE: Just saw this on HuffPo. He put it much better than I did:

So what is this house advantage the Republicans have? It's the press. There is no more fourth estate. Wait, hold on...I'm not going down some esoteric path with theories on the deregulation of the media and corporate bias and CNN versus Fox...I mean it: there is no more functioning press in this country. And without a real press the corporate and religious Republicans can lie all they want and get away with it. And that's the 51% advantage.

It's a pretty passionate piece about how and why we're going to lose. Interesting reading if you're looking for nauseous sweating.