...Palin ran for lieutenant governor in 2002 at the age of 39. She was just finishing her second term as Wasilla mayor. Though she had less money than the other three candidates, she finished a strong second, within 2,000 votes of winner Loren Leman.In the last two weeks of the general election campaign, she did her Republican duty, stumping the state and appearing on television for Frank Murkowski. She was still, as she herself put it later, "the golden child."
The victorious Murkowski offered her several jobs in his administration, she said, including commissioner of commerce or head of the state parks division. Her name turned up on the short list of possible appointments to replace Murkowski himself in the U.S. Senate.
Palin turned the governor down until he offered to put her on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. The body is responsible for overseeing state oil fields to be sure wells are operated safely and recover the state's resources efficiently. Two of the three commission seats were vacant.
Palin, who admitted to having little background in the field, was named chairwoman, with the $125,000-a-year seat designated for a "public" member. She said she took the job to learn more about the oil industry, vital for the state. It wasn't an obvious stepping stone, she insists. "As far as the resume goes, the Commerce job would have been better, gallivanting around the state," she said.
The other Murkowski appointee to the commission was Republican Party chairman Randy Ruedrich. He had a professional background as an petroleum engineer. But protests were heard immediately about having a fundraising partisan regulating the oil industry.
The crisis had enveloped Palin by September 2003, seven months after her appointment. The story eventually spilled into public view: staff complaints about Ruedrich doing party business on state time, a leaked document to a gas-drilling company, perceived favoritism toward companies the commission was supposed to be regulating.
"Because she's enthusiastic and positive, she can be misread as naive and someone who can be manipulated," said Tuckerman Babcock, a former Republican Party chairman, former AOGCC commissioner and a longtime Palin adviser. "I think Randy Ruedrich and (Murkowski chief of staff) Jim Clark misread her ... I think that people who wanted her to look the other way assumed that she would play ball."
Palin, acting as chairwoman and ethics supervisor, passed complaints up the ladder to the attorney general and the governor's office. By November, as the complaints compounded, Ruedrich resigned from the commission. But there was still no word on how the administration was handling the sensitive matter. Palin, who was asked to gather evidence from Ruedrich's computer, was bound by state ethics laws from saying anything publicly.
It was especially tough for Palin because one of the main issues Ruedrich had been promoting, shallow-gas drilling in the Mat-Su area, affected her friends and neighbors. She finally quit in frustration in January, months before specific allegations would become public. She had been on the job only 11 months.
"A good friend told me that in politics either you eat well or you sleep well," Palin said of those times. "I wasn't sleeping well."
CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE
Concerned that the matter might be dropped, she continued to talk to the state through a lawyer, Wayne Anthony Ross, the National Rifle Association board member who had made a right-wing primary challenge to Murkowski in 2002. A former national committeeman for the Republican Party, he knew what it was like to be outside what he calls the "power elite."
"It was a crisis of conscience for her," Ross said. "Her personal integrity is very important to her, and here it appears she's behind a cover-up."
Palin and her supporters say she was trying to grope through the state's secretive ethics- complaint process and did not fear political repercussions. But the potential consequences to her up-and-coming career were obvious.
"She could have ended up in as much of a political wilderness as Wayne Ross did for years," said Babcock...
"Palin found other, small ways to stay in circulation. She appeared on statewide television in an ad for Spenard Builders Supply."
Isn't Spenard the company that financed Todd's race team and built their house for them (at least partially)? Didn't Palin(™) give them the multi-million dollar Ice-Rink contract?
The account of this episode in her first book sold me on her, and made her later decision to resign the governorship understandable.
Her willingness to leave money on the table—big money for her at the time—in order to sleep well, and insistence on making big corporations work for the people instead of the other way around, or for the party, encouraged me to think she could bring Wall Street and the Fortune 500 to heel.
Maybe she will. Somebody’s got to, and it won’t be OWS or any gaggle of anti-capitalists. It will be a Chamber of Commerce capitalist like her.