Final thoughts on Election Day
I believe the readers of this blog need no encouragement to vote, so we’ll skip that.
I have 10 final items to mention about the 2022 elections in Alaska, however.
Kelly Tshibaka has spent her entire campaign blending fact and fiction to improve upon whatever story she is telling at the moment. This is a dangerous combination for someone who will say anything she thinks she can sell in a dogged pursuit of high office. There are too many examples of her embellishing stories to ignore this character flaw.
We still don’t know who is paying Sarah Palin’s enormous and mounting legal bills. Palin’s high-priced lawyers are pursuing an appeal of the defamation lawsuit that she lost against the New York Times. Palin’s lawsuit is a threat to the future of a free press in the United States. Palin wants to overturn a 1964 Supreme Court ruling that requires public officials and people in the spotlight to prove actual malice. “The rule, even if it has a valid textual basis in the First Amendment, is obsolete in the modern speech landscape,” Palin’s lawyers claim.
If Palin or Nick Begich the Third do not defeat Rep. Mary Peltola for Congress, much of the blame or credit will to Palin and Begich the Third, who did much to help create favorable political conditions for Peltola. The sniping and insults traded by the two showed that they were slow learners about ranked choice voting. Begich said Palin was a washed-up celebrity, while Palin claimed, “Negative Nick, you’re what’s wrong with politics today.” They half-heartedly asked voters to rank the other as a second choice.
Win or lose, Pelota has run a smart campaign and made the most of her two-month incumbency. I wrote here Aug. 16 that whoever won the special election would not enjoy a big advantage, but that was incorrect. Peltola’s upset win, which the so-called “experts” had not expected, made her more than a credible contender. She ran a positive campaign and capitalized on the GOP in-fighting. Begich and Palin never recovered from their poor showing in the special election.
The right-wing forces pushing for a “yes” vote on the constitutional convention question have failed to make a coherent case. The proponents have deluded themselves into thinking a convention would be miraculous means of enacting their particular vision of what Alaska should be, whether that means ending the right to abortion, giving more politicians the power to pick judges or guaranteeing big Permanent Fund dividends. But the proponents don’t understand that the main reason their vision of Alaska’s future hasn’t come to fruition is that lots of people disagree with them.
If Gov. Mike Dunleavy wins re-election, it will be because the war in Ukraine has temporarily hidden the fiscal crisis in Alaska, meaning the failure of Dunleavy to do anything about it has been obscured. Dunleavy has managed to say almost nothing during the campaign, protecting himself from real questioning by misusing state employees, state offices and state contractors as campaign tools. The executive branch ethics law is useless and unenforced.
Dunleavy has largely escaped being held accountable for his disastrous 2019 budget. It’s true that he retreated at full speed when the recall movement proved far stronger than anyone had expected, but he’s been denying for years that he failed the state. Vladimir Putin has given him a temporary reprieve.
No one should forget that Dunleavy, Tshibaka, Palin and Begich have either signed onto Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him or tried to hide from the question by never giving a straight answer.
Matt Buxton has a good column on Dunleavy’s tenure: “At one of the few times that Dunleavy could be bothered to share a debate stage with his opponents, Dunleavy met concerns about school closures by attacking school administrators and suggesting that he could help them balance their budget. On the radio, his surrogates suggested that the Anchorage School District had dug itself into a hole through fraud.”
The Alaska Beacon has a good story revealing that Attorney General Treg Taylor and his wife are tied into a right-wing group that has been spewing campaign garbage. This is out of line for an attorney general. Or anyone else for that matter. Perhaps we need an elected attorney general to avoid having that office filled by a political hack. The Beacon said Jodi Taylor, the wife of the attorney general, is in charge of the group that has been attacking Scott Kawasaki, Cathy Giessel, Grier Hopkins. “Taylor and his wife are each listed as ‘director’ in the group’s founding documents.”
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