Ah but we’re told here the governor of Alaska is more important than any other governor in the USA. We’re told Perry’s 10 years as governor of Texas is meaningless because he’s just a figurehead whereas Palin was a CEO.
More powerful, not the most important. The Alaskan Governor's office is extremely powerful and hands on.
The only question about Governor Palin being the most powerful is whether she was the most powerful or the second most powerful Governor in the United States according to experts and historians.
USLaw.com: “Given its source, today’s article in the NYT entitled The Unusual Challenges Palin Faced in Alaska is remarkably balanced and informative. As PrestoPundit Greg Ransom notes, though, in his post linking the article”
Remember when the Democrat press wouldn’t stop telling us about how Texas has a “weak Governor” system, when Bush was running for President? Well, don’t expect them to talk much about the fact that Alaska has the most powerful governor in the country.
New York Times:
That said, by other measures, Alaska is harder to govern than a smaller, more settled realm in the Lower 48. With vast distances, large numbers of indigenous peoples and a narrowly based extraction economy — with a handful of giant multinational oil corporations dominating the game — some economists say a country like Nigeria might be an apter comparison.
“Alaska really is a colonial place,” said Stephen Haycox, a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage. “One third of the economic base is oil; another third is federal spending. The economy is extremely narrow and highly dependent. It’s not to say that Alaska is a beggar state, but it certainly is true that Alaska is dependent on decisions made outside it, and over which Alaskans don’t have great control.”
Overlaid across all of that is a distinctly informal Alaskan style. At the annual governor’s picnic, usually held in July, the governor is expected to turn the brats and burgers on the grill — something Ms. Palin has done with gusto — with cabinet members in aprons rounding out the kitchen staff. Alaska also came of political age recently, which has meant two crucial things to Ms. Palin’s rise and experience as governor.
First, the State Constitution concentrates power in the governor’s office more thoroughly than in almost any other state — a legacy of the late 1950s, historians say, when statehood and a simultaneous trend all over the country toward elevating executive authority coincided.
Alaskan governors can edit legislation and their vetoes are tougher for lawmakers to overcome. In the numerical scale of power devised by Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, only Massachusetts’ governor has a mightier tool kit.
Second, inch-deep history has meant that the leading lights of statehood are not mere names in history books but are in many cases still around and even still in power, like Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young, both Republicans with decades under their belts in Washington. That old guard is still revered by some Alaskans, but it is disdained by others who have been on the lookout for fresh Republican faces.
It is in that densely layered Alaskan mix that Ms. Palin rose, governed and must be understood, academics and people in both parties say — not as merely a governor, or a woman, but as an Alaskan.
“The frontier mentality, whether myth or not, is still alive,” said Donald Linky, director of the Program on the Governor, at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.
Political organizations and the careful grooming of rising stars have long been part of the political culture in creating governors-to-be in many other states, Mr. Linky said. Not so in Alaska, and elsewhere in the West.