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Edited on Sun Sep-21-08 02:53 PM by Blue_In_AK
is the extreme partisanship and strident tone she has taken. Honestly, I was hoping (for her sake, not the Democrats') that when she gave her speech at the convention that she would display the inclusiveness and bipartisanship that she's shown here. I, along with probably 95% of the Alaska populace, was completely shocked when she attacked Obama, especially knowing that she had not been particularly a McCain supporter and had expressed favorable opinions toward Obama as an agent of change in the past. It was transparently obvious that she was scripted and that the speech had been written for her. We had never heard words like these from her before -- at least not in public.
That's what has been so hurtful to her former Democratic allies in the legislature -- most particularly Hollis French, who helped pass her three major first-term accomplishments -- the ethics reform bill, the revised oil tax plan, and the gasline inducement act. The attacks being directed by the McCain campaign toward French, Walt Monegan and the special investigator, Steve Branchflower, are totally uncalled for. These are all honorable men with many years of service to the state, and they haven't deserved these insults being thrown at them by Outsiders who don't even known their records.
We all knew that Sarah was a social conservative, but she had not made any overt moves that I'm aware of to enforce any of that on the state level. Her focus was almost 100 percent on energy issues, and she worked for consensus as much as possible. She seemed to sense that state intrusion into lifestyle issues wouldn't go over all that well here.
I think she has been changed, and she has been damaged irrevocably in Alaska, where people all across the political spectrum have been shaking their heads in disbelief. I didn't vote for her in 2006 and I won't in 2010, but I did meet her on election day in 2006 campaigning on a street corner in Anchorage (I was campaigning for the Democratic US House candidate) and she was very friendly, down to earth, wished my candidate good luck, and my initial impression of her personally was positive. A lot of her supporters in that campaign also supported my candidate Diane Benson, which may sound kind of odd since Diane is a strong progressive Democrat, but they both appealed to the independents and the Republicans who had issues with the old establishment.
A lot of people are coming out now and saying they saw this overbearing side of Sarah before, but if that's the case, they kept it pretty much under wraps. Wasilla apparently is as adept at keeping secrets as Sarah is because we didn't hear much about her time as mayor. Honestly most of the criticism against her these past two years has come from conservatives in her own party. She had a higher favorability rating with Democrats than she did with Republicans.
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