Palin to Maddow: "Can you get me a Diet Coke?" Andrea Mitchell looks on.
Posted on 05/01/2011 1:21:36 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
There are at least a dozen Republicans considering a run for the White House in 2012. NPR is profiling some of them to find out what first sparked their interest in politics.
Whether Sarah Palin will enter the 2012 presidential race is the political junkie's favorite guessing game — and Palin hasn't said much to end the speculation.
But how Palin entered politics in the first place may surprise you. It turns out, Palin was recruited into politics to help the cause of bigger government.
"We were looking for a moderate who was interested in community development, basically," says John Stein, one of those who recruited her.
In 1992, Stein was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. The city was growing fast, and he'd promoted new taxes to pay for big-city amenities like police and paved roads. As Stein recalls it, those taxes sparked a backlash — he calls it a "Libertarian revolution."
"We had experiences at the City Council table where the Libertarian activists would march around the room, passing out copies of the Constitution, singing, 'They'll remember in November' — I think that was the song," Stein recalls.
Mark Chryson — who at the time belonged to a group called SAGE or Standing Against Government Excess — says he remembers marching and singing.
"We didn't want to control the growth [of government]; we didn't want it to grow, period," Chryson says.
Palin's Ideology Shifted
Chryson is a fiscal conservative who also once chaired the Alaska Independence Party, so there's precious little he and Stein agree on.
But they do tell roughly the same story about what happened two decades ago, when the mayor was looking for new allies on the City Council.
"What we were after was to get people on the council who could make sensible decisions about roads, water, sewer, and those kinds of things," Stein says. "So Sarah came along — she was bright, energetic, attractive — she had all the attributes of really an excellent candidate."
Stein says it didn't take much to convince Palin to run, and she won, handily. And when she took her seat on the council, she seemed to be on the mayor's side. Chryson says Palin joined in the criticism of the anti-tax group — he says she went on local TV and said SAGE really stood for "Standing Against Government Everything." But after a couple of years on the council, Stein recalls, Palin's ideology shifted.
"Lo and behold, she really embraced a lot of the conservative, right-wing thinking," he says.
And, lo and behold, in 1996, Palin challenged Stein in the race for mayor. What turned her against him? In her memoir, Palin talks about policy differences. But Chryson thinks there was also a personal motive; he says the mayor and his allies sometimes condescended to Palin.
"That, I could see, torqued her," he says.
'Don't Piss The Lady Off'
Chryson says Stein's big mistake was taking Palin for granted.
"He thought that Sarah was going to be their rubber stamp. And he wound up getting snake-bit," he says.
Fifteen years later, Stein still seems shell-shocked by the intensity of the ensuing mayoral campaign. In Alaska, city races are officially nonpartisan, but Palin came after him on big ideological issues like abortion and gun rights.
"And there was such enthusiasm from the — I'm laughing now, [but] I'm crying on the inside — there was such enthusiasm in the community for this, you know — 'Yes, we're talking philosophy here now.' And here I am, down there, going, 'But I can fill potholes,' and, 'I understand how sewage treatment plants work.' But that really wasn't the point, anymore," Stein says.
She beat him — and then, in a rematch three years later, she clobbered him, 3-to-1. Chryson sees a clear lesson in Stein's experience.
"The one thing I can say about that is: Don't piss the lady off," he says.
Stein eventually moved back to southeast Alaska and used his degree in public management to get a job as a municipal administrator. During those same years, Palin kept climbing the political ladder to become governor, a vice-presidential candidate and a star commentator on Fox News.
Here endeth the lesson.
Palin ideology did not change. She was fighting establishment gop throughout her career, who practice crony capitalism.
Reagan or bust!
The Jews wait for the messiah and true conservatives™ wait for Reagan to rise.
I have a new tagline
I’m a conservative with some libertarian tendancies...
...but those Libertarians who start marching around and pamphleteering over things like government-funded paved roads, water, and sewage services crack me up!
Palin has always been for the roads and sewage. What turned Palin off was the new toys the local gov wanted to build. Like a new city hall etc. Palin believes that gov should stick to the fundementals of what it needs to do.
If running with Juan was fighting the establishment and was against crony capitalism even after Juan and she endorsed green renewable energy . I have a question for you, how do you get out of one of those straight jackets, you seem to have experience with them.
Was it spiked?
Please deign to tell us your perfect presidential candidate. We’re all ears.
However, the person with the best chance to win, at the moment, with the lowest negatives. Is Bachmann, the biggest lead in the polls is your friend Mr Trump.
Palin to Maddow: "Can you get me a Diet Coke?" Andrea Mitchell looks on.
Andrea Mitchell is a seriously unsympathetic character. She’s clearly obsessed and very bitter.
Rachel Maddow is apparently the victim of gender reassignment at birth due to a botched circumcision. She has an Adam’s Apple. I’d be somewhat sympathetic to her plight if she weren’t such a spiteful leftist nutbag.
Nothing wrong with renewable energy. I had a neighbor once who asked me what I would think if it turned out his then company, Amoco, came up with an energy source that every citizen could own and operate out of their home, with no utility distribution system. I said I thought that would be great. I never heard anything ever come of it, though, and that’s the point. Palin takes an all-of-the-above position. Anywhere we can get energy we ought to be considering, and energy with a small environmental footprint is great, if you can get it. Meanwhile, we have an energy-hungry economy, and Palin knows that and would aggressively pursue policy that would enhance our economy’s ability to grow by supplying cheap energy through an abundance of sources, whatever works.
Thus, to infer that just because she thinks renewable energy is worthy of exploration she is therefore a warm-earther is an unwarranted leap to a false conclusion, as it is an unsupportable conflation of two very different things. Eco-nazism uses greenism as a path to statism. That does not describe Palin’s position at all. Whereas a comprehensive energy policy that looks at everything, whether fossil, nuclear, renewable, or otherwise, but is focused on lifting the American economy on free-market principles, is a validly conservative position because it is a path to greater private-sector prosperity and liberty. And as I know from listening that latter view is Palin’s position, I therefore find her to be consistent in her conservatism even in this.
Toshiba Builds Ultra-Small Nuclear Reactor
“Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.”
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/12/20/0429200/Toshiba-Builds-Ultra-Small-Nuclear-Reactor
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.