A State of Two Minds

A State of Two Minds
By GAIL COLLINS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: September 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/opinion/18collins.html?ref=opinion


PETERSBURG, Alaska

It is very hard to have a conversation in Alaska without Sarah Palin’s name coming up.

“It’s because of the media,” said Alan Stein, an adviser to Joe Miller, the Republican nominee for the United States Senate. He looked at me accusingly.

I swear I didn’t say a word. Alaskans are very hospitable, and they offer strangers a plate of Palin anecdotes just as they would cookies. I spent the week here, and almost everyone I talked to wound up revisiting Sarahland unprompted, from a woman who said they went to the same gym, to a Republican who once ran against Palin and told me how, after a debate, she had complimented him on his grasp of figures and policy, and then added: “But then I look over the crowd and wonder — does that really mean anything?”

Currently, a lot of Alaskans are blaming Palin for the Republican primary in which Senator Lisa Murkowski was upended, depriving the state of its last bastion of seniority power. (The state’s lone congressman, Don Young, has been in office forever. But he was stripped of his seniority over an earmark he stuck in the budget for a connector road that was slightly outside his district — being located in the state of Florida.)

Now the Republicans have Miller, a far more conservative candidate, who got the nomination after Palin’s endorsement was followed by a big last-minute infusion of Tea Party money. He’s a rather professorial 43-year-old attorney who believes unemployment benefits are probably unconstitutional and that Social Security is a definite rip-off. “I want to make sure that in the future I can put my money where the government can’t steal it from me,” he said.

Democrats are hoping their candidate, an earnest mayor named Scott McAdams, can win on likability. However, Miller seems to be trying to increase his own warmth factor by toting along his wife (“Wave to everybody, Kathleen”) and continually pointing out they have eight kids.

On Thursday, in the beautiful fishing town of Petersburg, Miller and McAdams mixed it up in a candidate forum. The organizers seemed unsure about whether Miller would show up, but he walked in halfway through the proceedings to murmurs of excitement in the school gym where people had been listening to a rather unthrilling discussion on a transportation reauthorization act.

It was one of the first times in this campaign season that a Tea Party insurgent had any sort of joint appearance with his or her Democratic opponent. Quite a few of the new ultraright candidates seem to have gone to the ground, where they keep busy renovating their old positions. (In Nevada, Sharron Angle has evolved from “privatizing” Social Security to “personalizing” it.)

McAdams frequently says that he went into the race expecting to have “great debates about the great issues with somebody I have a great deal of respect for” until Murkowski was dumped. (Now that Murkowski has decided to run a write-in campaign, it will be interesting to see if his enthusiasm for her virtues cools.)

But there he was instead, going mano a mano with Miller. History was being made in the Petersburg gym. And it turned out that the two men’s worldviews were so different that they could have been running on different continents.

McAdams said he wants to bring home the bacon. (“We are a young state. We have great needs.”) Miller said the pig is dead, the barn is on fire and a killer tornado is headed for the farmhouse. Social Security can’t be saved over the long run. Instead of fighting to protect Alaska’s huge federal aid, Miller wants to make Washington give up control of Alaskan lands and waters so private enterprise can develop the resources untrammeled. Otherwise, he said, Alaska will be in big trouble “when the government goes.”

Since Alaska depends on the federal government for about a third of its budget, it’s reasonable to wonder why voters are attracted to Miller, who is pretty much opposed to federal spending on anything that doesn’t have to do with national defense. The answer is that he and McAdams represent the two sides to Alaska, which simultaneously regards itself as a land of free-spirited adventurers as well as an infrastructure-poor newbie in need of government help before it can walk on its own. “By and large, we’re a schizophrenic state,” said Andrew Halcro, the Republican who once ran against Palin on an independent line.

And the Palin spirit lives on in the Alaska Senate race. For most of their history, Alaskan officials regarded their state as needy and wheedling money out of the federal government as a sacred crusade. When Sarah teamed up with John McCain, she added on the anti-earmark campaign line. The state didn’t get rid of its dependency on federal cash. It just learned how to entertain two opposing views in the head at the same time.