Alaskans Ready to Move on From Palin Mania

WASILLA, Alaska (Feb. 3) -- It is not exaggerating to say that these days you have a better chance of a moose sighting than seeing Sarah Palin here.

"She's been invisible," said Anchorage Daily News columnist Julia O'Malley. "Unless you count the book signings."

Well, there is one other way to catch her. "We see her on Fox," said state Rep. Les Gara, an Anchorage Democrat.

With an undeterred Palin scheduled to give the keynote address at the first-ever and increasingly controversial National Tea Party Convention in Nashville on Saturday -- and having recently announced plans to campaign for fellow Republicans, including former running mate Sen. John McCain -- the distance between Palin and her roots in the permafrost will only continue to grow. But whether they count themselves as Palin fans or detractors, Alaskans hold a few shared views of the career turn their former governor has taken.

One is that the national stage suits Palin well. Another is that after the frenzied months that followed her return from the presidential campaign trail in November 2008, the calmer, post-Palin political atmosphere is welcomed.

Indeed, many of those who knew her when now seem ready to talk about something else.

"There is a weariness. Why don't we just turn the page?" said Michael Carey, an Anchorage public television host. "There was a point where she was new, fresh, what's gonna happen next. She was about tomorrow. Now she's about yesterday."

Lynn Gattis, 53, a self-described and unabashed "tea bagger" -- unlike most in the movement, she embraces that spin on its name -- takes a different view of Palin's trajectory. "She's a small-town girl who made it big," said Gattis, who is proud of Palin's increasing role in rallying national conservatives. But she, too, could do without all the fuss.

"We have so much happening with our economy, jobs and whatever, she's not necessarily front and center," Gattis said. "And I don't mean that in a negative fashion. But holy smokes ... Sarah probably isn't in our top 10 list."

The Q Factor

In July 2008, before McCain named the then-obscure governor to his ticket as vice president, 80 percent of Alaskans viewed Palin favorably. A new poll of Alaskan voters found fewer than half now do so. If there's a central cause for her decreased home-state popularity, it's expressed by Mary Lowrey, 55, a nurse from Kotzebue, above the Arctic Circle: "She was a quitter."

In interviews with dozens of Alaskans, the quitter theme came up often, both from critics who feel she lost interest in the governorship after barnstorming the country as a vice presidential candidate, and from Palin partisans who believe she was the victim of a political witch hunt.

"She cashed in and left," said former Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles, whom Palin beat in 2006 in his bid to return to the governor's mansion in Juneau.

At downtown Anchorage's 5th Avenue Mall, Palin supporters Alison Bodewitz, 83, and her husband Ben, 78, paused to consider her sudden departure last July.

"I don't know where she's going," said Alison. "Do you understand her anymore, Ben?"

"No," replied Ben.

"A lot of people were disappointed when she left," Alison added. "She was doing a good job."

The Bodewitzes don't blame Palin for quitting with more than a year and a half remaining in her term. They called the ethics controversies swirling around Palin at the time "trivial" and blame Palin's political opponents for making it impossible for her to fulfill her duties.

So does Crystal Nygard, 43, a businesswoman in Wasilla: "She looked at what it was costing her to be governor -- the taxpayers don't need to fund a bunch of attorneys."

But to some observers, the true cost of Palin's tumultuous final months in office was borne by the state's civic culture.

"There was this really unhealthy thing that developed" after Palin returned to Juneau, said Gara, the state representative. "The state divided into pro- or anti-Sarah camps. Every issue was discussed not on the merits but on whether Sarah was for it or against it."

It was a tension felt throughout Alaska. At Wasilla's Pandemonium Booksellers and Café, where "Going Rogue" is the biggest seller -- either as "a gift or a joke," says owner Shannon Cullip -- the mere mention of Palin's name would inflame passions.

But that's ebbed in recent months, Cullip said, noting, "It's mellowed a lot" since Palin resigned as governor. "It used to be really extreme -- they loved her or hated her."

Gerald McBeath, a political scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, credited the de-escalation to Palin's successor, Gov. Sean Parnell.

"He's laid-back, taciturn. He doesn't come up with a press release every day," he said. "And he can write and speak in complete sentences, sort of like other people."

The Sarah They Knew

The day after President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, local Republicans gathered for lunch at Evangelo's Restaurant on Wasilla's western outskirts. Dining on French dip sandwiches and black bean chili, they listened as conservative gubernatorial candidate Ralph Samuels held forth.

When Samuels said that "government needs to get out of the way," several in the crowd answered, "Amen." During the question and answer session, one man referred to Obama's "lecture" the night before. Another said environmentalists were "assaulting" Alaska, which had to stand up for "states' rights."

This was Palin's crowd.

Yet as the group broke up, a couple of attendees offered a darker view, one that has lingered since Palin gave her resignation speech last summer by the shore of glimmering Lake Lucille. The lake is now frozen over, and so too the feelings of some of Palin's most ardent supporters.

"I'm glad she's gone on to do what she wants to do," said Karen Tucker, 62, a Wasilla teacher whose pastor husband led the luncheon's opening prayer. She spoke of how Gov. Palin had tried to oust the state's GOP chairman, despite wide support for him within the party.

Moments earlier, another woman, who called herself a conservative Republican, spoke incredulously about the "cynicism" of national Republicans in choosing someone clearly unqualified for the vice presidency. "How in the world could they?" she asked. "The phenomenon of Sarah Palin exists because people are uninformed politically." (Like several people interviewed, she refused to be identified for fear of "retribution" from Palin and her allies.)

Sitting next to a stack of hair curlers in her Guys & Gals hair salon, Alice Massie, president of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women, said that despite what people from "outside" say, Palin is no conservative. Massie notes that as governor, Palin worked with Democratic legislators to pass an oil company tax that her fellow Republicans opposed. And despite the Tea Party movement's infatuation with Palin, Massie disputes her reputation as a budget hawk, noting that as mayor she plunged Wasilla into debt.

"Sarah is better suited to the media. She's for people who are looking for an 'American Idol,'" Massie said. "She's brought a lot of attention to Alaska, but what has she really done for the state?"

Parnell, who goes before voters in November, is already chipping away at Palin's legacy by pushing legislators to roll back the oil tax increase she championed, and it's not yet clear what lasting impact Palin's truncated stint in Juneau will have. But if she does launch a presidential bid in 2012 -- despite a recent nationwide CBS Poll finding that 71 percent of Americans don't want her to -- it's not as if she'll be running on her record in Alaska anyway, as one local political pro notes.

Palin has "what any politician out there would kill for," said Andrew Halcro, who competed against Palin as an independent gubernatorial candidate in 2006 and is challenging U.S. Rep. Don Young in the Republican primary this year. "And that is the ability to make substance irrelevant."

Speaking of her new side job as a news-network analyst, Halcro said, "It's brilliant for Fox. She brings in a built-in audience who want to listen to Sarah Palin and not listen to what she says." It's also, he believes, an opportunity that fits her better than her old position did.

"This is her sweet spot. This is what she was always cut out to do. She's found her groove."