Palin Politics...

As it turns out, New York politicians have nothing on Sarah Palin. The NYT has some interesting insight into Palin Politics. Many of her tactics are right out of the Clinton and Bush playbook. Things like cronyism, secrecy, and shady dealings are all part of Palin Politics.

The most disturbing thing for me is her secrecy and deliberately trying to get around public transparency. When government is no longer transparent to the public we should all be very concerned.

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

This should be a weakness easily exploited by the B Hussein camp. Now the hypocritical piece of the puzzle:

Ms. Palin discovered that the state Republican leader, Randy Ruedrich, a commission member, was conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies. When Mr. Murkowski failed to act on her complaints, she quit and went public.

In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.

“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ ”

Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.

Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.

She certainly has a tendency to get rid of the old school politicians, but she replaces those people with friends. While loyalty is important, so is effectiveness.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

While the New York Times is normally bent to favor the left, these are the types of behaviors that are very alarming regardless of political point-of-view. Palin is not for smaller, reformed government. She has been for cronyism, secrecy, and the same politics that is taking this country down the wrong path. It will come back to hurt McCain.