Palin Would Fit Into the Bush White House Just Fine

NYT has a must read piece on Palin's governing style. To those who are fretting about the rise of Palin, this piece demonstrates that given a week or two the MSM can actually start burning through the spin and trust me Palin's edifice is built largely of spin.

Some money quotes:
"Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal...Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages...When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd...an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance...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...'Their secrecy is off the charts'...[TW is this an article on Palin and Alaska or the Bush Adminstration...just asking]

In the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They filled evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party. Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for Ms. Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to abortion and the ouster of the “complacent” old guard...'I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.'

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government

Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show...During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?hp