Sarah Palin was my mayor
Portions of the following have been published in an editorial at TheRoot.com.
I’m an Alaskan. I grew up in Wasilla. Sarah Palin was my mayor. She explored the possibility of banning books at the library where my parents taught me how to read. Now it seems she’s just another symptom of McCain’s poor judgment. There have been many interesting pieces of journalism introducing my gun toting, mooseburger-eating former neighbors (I now live in Manhattan) to the rest of the country, and most have focused on how proud Alaskans are of their governor making the surprise leap to the big leagues.
But as reporters roam the streets where I grew up, chatting with my ecstatic neighbors, I feel compelled to offer another view, as an American, by pointing out that John McCain has demonstrated an alarming lapse of judgment by choosing Sarah Palin as his party’s VP candidate – and that it reflects a pattern of failed leadership and faulty judgment when it comes to who Sen. McCain chooses to surround himself with.
My fellow Alaskans have vouched for Palin as a charming, interesting person. I can add to that that she is perfectly friendly. But now she is running for a higher office and so it must be noted that Sarah Palin the Friendly Neighbor is different from Sarah Palin the Executive. The latter is a woman with intense agendas guided by a narrow set of culturally conservative and extreme religious values, which by now are well documented. When she was mayor of my hometown, these extreme views (on sex education, abortion, creationism, and homosexuality) came off as petty and irrelevant to people like me who did not share them. There seemed little cause for alarm. Most Alaskans are happy to live and let live; we don’t think of ourselves as Republican or Democrat. Besides, as mayor, it’s not like she had the power to wiretap our phones, amend our constitution, or send us to war.
For just 22 months Sarah Palin has been the governor of a state of just 680,000 people that is “awash” in money (as former Alaska governor Tony Knowles put it) and receives more pork-barrel money per capita than any other state.
