Contra Rick Davis' odious campaign tactics and Sarah Palin’s honorable motherhood, it is the issues that interest me in this election, So when Palin or the media talk about her role as Mayor of Wasilla, and the McCain camp cites her two terms as Mayor as a reason why she’s prepared to be Vice President, one needs to look at how she employed her responsibilities as Mayor. I have, I don’t like what I learned.
Nathan Thornburgh of TIME wrote a useful piece on September 2 describing how she ran Wasilla. One of the highlights of this piece is that, allegedly, Palin injected hot-button social issues in her campaign for Mayor in 1994. In a town where the pressing questions were infrastructure needs and public safety, Palin’s opponent at the time asserted that the Palin campaign raised gun control and abortion as issues in her campaign against her opponent, although an American municipal government has no leverage over these issues. To run a campaign on issues over which you would have no control as an executive is disingenuous and dangerous. Having been subject to small town politics, I’ve seen what happens when essential issues get overwhelmed by the traumas of the culture wars – and it’s never pretty. A quick read of this Washington Post article reminds me of some the various shenanigans, distractions, and putsches that have occurred in South Salt Lake, the small suburb where I live.
As long as we’re looking at her mayoral record, Palin did a few things that I question: her decision to hire a city administrator to assist her with the day-to-day tasks in a town of a little over 5,000 people, a budget of $6 million and a workforce of 56, was money probably better spent elsewhere. Her plan for a sports complex that cost nearly $20 million, supported by a bond and a sales tax increase, was an enormous financial burden to place on such a small community (one report I’ve read states that the sports complex is still not able to support itself through membership fees and is a continued drain on the Wasilla treasury). Certainly, her decision to hire a lobbyist to gather over $27 million in earmarks in her time as Mayor undercuts a fundamental claim that the McCain campaign has made: that she is a reformer who has stridently and consistently opposed earmarks. At least that was the impression I got from her speeches. But more on that later. These questions I raise are admittedly wonkish, and none of these prevented Palin from getting re-elected in 1998. Clearly, most of the people of Wasilla liked her.
Two separate stories emerged from her time as Mayor that caused me to question her judgment and fitness as a public figure. In two cases where she was given the opportunity to demonstrate grit, dignity, and humanity as a public figure, she apparently didn’t. The first issue is about the library and censorship. The second issue involved rape test kits.
Shortly after Palin became Mayor, she asked the City Librarian what the process was on banning books. The Librarian, reportedly aghast, replied that there was none and that books would not be banned on her watched. The Librarian was fired, then reinstated after a community uproar. Palin later claimed she was merely being “rhetorical” when she asked the question. For the sake of argument, let’s take her at her word for a moment as I walk you through a thought experiment.
For the past four years, I’ve been a Planning Commissioner, an appointed volunteer position in the City of South Salt Lake. Imagine me in a public hearing, where the petitioner is seeking the destruction of a man’s house in order to build a strip mall. In this hearing, I ask the City Planner if, hypothetically, there’s any way we can condemn a house to make way for commercial development, without paying the property owner?
Imagine the reaction. What do you think the City Planner would say to me? How would the Mayor react? He appointed me; would he terminate my appointment? Most importantly, what would that question say about my fitness to be a Planning Commissioner?
The answers are simple: The City Planner would say to me that people have a constitutional guarantee to life, liberty, and property, and that property owners are entitled to fair market value for their property if it is taken from them. The Mayor would be furious, and rightly so, for implying that one of his constituents didn’t have a valid property right, and he would be within his purview to terminate my commission. Most importantly, were I to ask such a ridiculous question would betray my fundamental lack of fitness for the job.
I hold the right to speech as high as the right to hold property safely, and I think the Founders would agree with me. Palin’s “rhetorical” question is ridiculous, and it shows a shockingly poor understanding of peoples’ rights and a callow attitude to the oath that she presumably took to uphold the Constitution. She had the opportunity to clearly state a commitment to free speech and the right of people to read and learn without the interference of a community censor. She failed, instead, asking a question that should never be asked by a responsible public official, hypothetical, rhetorical, or otherwise.
As if that weren’t bad enough, I came across a story on Thursday that asserted that the Wasilla Police Department under Palin charged the cost of rape test kits to victims’ insurance when possible. According to former governor Tony Knowles, Wasilla was the only municipality in Alaska that had such a policy. In 2000, the Alaska Legislature passed a law banning the practice.
When Palin became Mayor, Wasilla had a surplus of $4 million. By the time she left, Wasilla collected $27 million in federal earmarks and construction was underway on a $20 million sports center. Yet here’s what her Police Chief, Charlie Fannon, said in an interview to the Frontiersman, Wasilla’s newspaper:
"In the past we’ve charged the cost of exams to the victims’ insurance company when possible," Fannon told the newspaper. "I just don’t want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer."
Harry S. Truman famously said “the buck stops here” when describing his responsibility as President. Sarah Palin made much the same point when she described the nature of her tenure as mayor in a cheap shot against Obama during her convention speech: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” The buck stopped with her, and she had the responsibility over her police department. Fannon said in the local newspaper essentially that Wasilla couldn’t afford the $5,000 to $14,000 liability of performing forensic tests on rape victims, while apparently the City was able to find the money for a sports center, a transit hub, a rail project, and other earmarked goodies, some of which McCain objected to. Here again, Palin was given an opportunity to demonstrate leadership and kill this policy right away, because it’s egregious, deplorable, indefensible, and inhumane. Instead, she either chose not to or she didn’t know (and if she didn’t know at the time, shouldn’t she have been reading her local paper?). Either way, it causes me to seriously doubt her judgment and fitness to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.
Pasrt Four: Governor and Part Five: Vice President? are coming soon. Stay tuned!
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