Corruption, Neoptism, Earmarks and Dairy Farms

Timothy Egan has a fascinating op-ed piece in the New York Times today about the political culture in Alaska under Sarah Palin. It’s some shocking stuff, from the state subsidized dairy farms to connecting Anchorage to an uninhabited peninsula that would speed up Sarah Palin’s trip home – and cost two billion dollars. Then there’s this charming story:

As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Governor Palin overturned a decision to shutter a money-losing, state-run creamery — Matanuska Maid — when her friends in Wasilla complained about losing their subsidies. She fired the board that recommended closure, and replaced it with one run by a childhood friend. After six months, and nearly $1 million in fresh losses, the board came to the same conclusion as the earlier one: Matanuska Maid could not operate without being a perpetual burden on the taxpayers.

It is honestly unbelievable to me that this woman has not been laughed off the national stage. From everything I’ve read, Alaska operates in some sort of bizarre elseworld where corruption, nepotism and incredible, pointless projects funded by the rest of the country are common place. Let us not for get, as Egan points out, that Palin appointed a childhood friend to be her secretary of agriculture. The friend claimed she was qualified because she loved cows as a child.

Perhaps Palin does qualify as a reformer, but that can only be true in regards to Alaska. The fact that John McCain and Sarah Palin are still going around and fighting the good fight on earmarks (which, let us not forget, make up a whopping .05 percent of the federal budget) and able to keep a straight face is astounding to me. It’s really very impressive.

The fact of the matter is that people do hate earmarks – other people’s earmarks. Constituents, however, love earmarks that build projects and fund all sorts of things in their communities. I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with the practice in general. Who doesn’t like extra stuff? But Alaska has gotten so good at it – in part because of the seniority of Sen. Ted Stevens – that it’s kind of an obscene distortion of what earmarks actually do. It’s pretty much the same as how people have negative views of Congress, but have positive opinions about their congressman. The McCain campaign’s obsession with earmarks is so deeply trivial it amazes me the press hasn’t made more hay out of it.