Posted on 09/01/2008 1:47:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
Those who listen to my radio show know that I spend my mornings and some evenings practicing and teaching law. For the 20 years since I left Washington, D.C., I have been a land use and natural resources lawyer, guiding landowners –principally home builders but also churches and commercial developers—through the maze of federal, state and local regulatory permitting that blankets the use of land in the U.S. I have had clients throughout the west, and this has meant appearing hundreds of times before city councils, county boards and regional and state commissions and agencies. It has meant thousands of meetings with elected and appointed local government officials.
I provide this as background to a few comments on Sarah Palin’s decade as a city council member and mayor of a small town, Wasilla, Alaska. Don’t underestimate the enormous benefit this provides the governor in the campaign and beyond as she takes up the duties of a vice president. Local government experience means an immersion in the real problems of real people as well as with a myriad of issues from the details of budgets for road maintenance and police and fire forces, to the land use issues I mentioned above, to parks and recreation and school construction issue issues.
And, of course, snow removal, the bane of many mayors' lives.
It also means appearing at thousands of the events that define small town life, from the Rotary to the start of the local fund-raising 5K, and the hiring and firing of staff that has to make the traffic lights work and oversee the trash collection.
And mostly it means being able to connect with people who look to the local government to get the big things in small towns right.
Sitting on a dais week after week and listening to public comments and presentations from staff is the least glamorous of all elected offices, but very central to the functioning of the republic. Hundreds of thousands of Americans serve in these all-but-voluntary jobs and do so out of a sense of public spiritedness. Of course there are knuckleheads among the local electeds, and I have encountered many of them.
But by a very large measure these mayors, council members and commissioners are genuine public servants –and they get very smart, very fast about the communities they serve and the real successes and failures that define American life, whether in Wasilla, Alaska or Dearborn, Michigan or Sharon, PA.
Spend a decade doing this work and you will have made tens of thousands of decisions –and votes—and seen the consequences of public policy decisions play out in a large way even though the stage is relatively small. And you will have developed style and insight into people and bureaucracy. And you will be skilled in performing in public.
All of which is a way of alerting the MSM especially that just because they have never been to a small town city council meeting doesn’t mean they don’t matter, or that those who participate as leaders in such settings haven’t picked up quite a lot along the way.
I fully expect to hear quite a few Sarah Palin speeches that include a paragraph that begins “When I was mayor of Wasilla”
The political and media elites have been laughing at Sarah Palin’s “small town” years. But every mayor and council member she meets over the next two months will have a bond with her that no one else on the national tickets can match.
Most commentators have figured out or soon will with the help of Beldar that she really, really knows the energy issue, and to a nation stunned by the sudden shock to their household budgets brought about by 30 years of indifference to new exploration, this will be a huge advantage. But so will be her experience with federal Endangered Species Act, which has been and remains central to my law practice and which interests very few other than those impacted by it.
In many key states --Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Washington and Oregon to name just five-- the “ESA” has had devastating impacts on many industries and communities. When Sarah Palin led her state into federal court to challenge the absurd listing of the polar bear as a “threatened species” because of predictions about what might happen to the bears if what might happen to polar ice actually did happen, she took a stand that will trigger sustained applause in places and among people who are actually familiar with the workings of this extraordinarily onerous statute. As an avid outdoorswoman and conservationist, she has zero fear of environmental activists jeering about her indifference to nature. Her passion for the great outdoors will reawaken the TR tradition in the GOP and combine it with an experience in federal bureaucratic meddling with state and local governance that will put inside the Beltway a true property rights’ advocate. I haven’t seen reference yet to any specific experience witht Clean Water Act, NEPA or the Clean Air Act, but her familiarity with the federal hidden hand –the BLM, the USFWS, the ACOE—will be extremely useful as she campaigns across the country in communities hard hit by the expansion of federal regulation far beyond its intended and many believe constitutional limits.
The pro-life and pro-Second Amendment communities were immediately taken with Sarah Palin’s record. But there are other constituencies out there which will love what they learn about the Alaska governor.
The political pros all agree that votes for presidents usually turn on the question of which candidate is perceived to understand and value what that voter has experienced and feels. Reactions to the veeps typically do not enter into that calculation.
Sarah Palin may be different. To moms struggling to raise internet and text-messaging teens, to the parents of special needs children, to regular church goers, hunters and snowmobilers, Sarah Palin is already a friend.
She will soon be a friend to every land-owner bedeviled by complicated federal statutes wielded by remote and uncaring federal officials, and to the local elected officials across the country who appreciate exactly what it is that she did for that decade on the Wasilla city council.
Governor Palin is the DemocRATS’ worst nightmare. They are in trouble and they know it. Camp Obama has gone into FULL PANIC mode and are counting on their sleazy friends at Kos, MoveOn and DU to bail their asses out.
Exactly, and that is why they are attacking her
Being a success as an executive is not so much about what you can “do” as it is about what you can “get done.” Being able to get the best out of strong people, not wounding their egos so they sulk, but yet not having them go rogue, is as valuable as it is rare. It’s what Eisenhower was able to do with Patton and Monty...
She is the future. She makes conservatives look cool. That can’t be tolerated. The left needs the Republicans to be fat men from the South or rich CEO’s and perhaps the Church Lady as bogeymen
Indeed they *are* in full panic mode. Everyone now knows this, and what they have been trying to hide for weeks is now out in the open. Obama, who should be up by double digits, is in a statistical dead heat, and is going nowhere, fast. His highly-paid "professional" political gunman, David Axelrod, has been punked at every turn by his Team McCain counterpart Steven Schmidt.
Teeam "The Zero" has been off-balance, off-message, and *on* the defensive for weeks now!! They've been trying to hide it all this time, but the evidence was there, for anyone who cared to look. It's now glaringly obvious.
So, now, the fate of the entire SS "Audacity of Hype" rests in the hands of amateurs such as the Kossacks, and DU? They're basically done, it's over. They know it, I know it, and soon enough the whole world will know it, and wonder, "What happened?" The answer is simple, they didn't expect to actually have to campaign, at all, once securing the presumptive nomination. These morons on Team Oh-Bummer didn't expect to actually have to fight to win this election, and got blindsided by Team McCain's brilliant "death of a thousand cuts" campaign...
the infowarrior
The reality is, all he had to do was pick Hilary. The only fear any of us should have now is that he may now realize this, and blow off Biden, who has always known he’s not the guy. But the transparentness of that move would have dire consequences as well.
Yep, that was the genius of McCain/Schmidt's entire campaign strategy. He first forced the DNC to commit to Obama, by not totally eviscerating him before the convention, knowing that the acrimony between Clinton, and Obama would result in her being frozen out (do *not* forget all three serve in the same body, they know one another fairly well).
Once he was assured that he , in fact *would* be facing Obama, and Hillary would be on the outside, looking in, he sprung the Palin trap.
Now, it's too late for the Dems to do a re-do, and they *remain* off-balance, off-message, and on-defense, exactly where McCain and Schmidt had put them, before the convention. He has them right where he wants them, and there's no easy way out.
Axelrod got totally pwned in this from jump...
the infowarrior
excellent analysis
Here's a really good vid that covers a lot of ground about Sarah--hunting, fishing, her experience as Commander of the Alaska National Guard:
Correct. They are positively foaming at the mouth over at DU. The DU crowd is the most vile bunch I have ever run across in all my years on the Net. The more scared they get the more vile they become.
I always feel a need to run a virus check and take a bath after I lurk over there.
Well said. Bump.
I sent this article to the local weekly paper editor who appreciates the efforts of the city council in our even smaller town.
Good mornin sofadude!
hey champ! Hope things are good in your neck of the woods. You behaving yourself?
Sure am sofa! Lifes been good, and we finally got some rain.
I hope the sofa family is well! Hadn’t seen you in a while and thought I would give you a shout.
What do you think of Palin?
The Dems, of course, are out of their minds (more so than usual) over this ... which is delight.
Overall? Brilliant pick.
Agreed. This is a new ball game now. We'll still end up with McCain President but Palin makes me feel better about it.
Faced with Obama or McCain, I had to vote McCain anyway.
Good to see you sofa, enjoy the holiday!!
you too, mate. Always a pleasure.
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