The landmines in Governor Palin's path

With his canny decision to name Alaska Governor Sarah
Palin as his vice presidential running mate, U.S.
Senator John McCain has moved his chances of winning
the presidential election from dead in the water to
Olympian heights.

Critics from the left – Both Democrats and Republicans –
are condemning his choice as political. Well guess what?
This is politics. What do they think motivated U.S.
Senator Barrack Obama to choose U. S. Senator Joe Biden
as his running mate instead of Senator Hillary Clinton?
Good will and altruism?

While choosing Governor Palin does not by any means
guarantee Senator McCain’s team will win the presidential
election, it certainly improves his prospects. At this
point, anyone who thinks they know what the outcome will
be is fantasyzing. It depends entirely on how Goveror
Palin performs on the campaign trail over the next two
months.

If her remarkable, but largely unknown history - which is
rapidly being revealed,like peeling back layers of an
onion - is any indication, the prospect is promising.

While Palin has many qualities and characteristics in her favor,
there are a few ticking land mines in her path which
she and the McCain campaign failed to address at the outset,
leaving them to be sniffed out by her political critics,
thus making it appear she’s trying to hide something.

Landmine No. 1.

Governor Palin should have revealed and explained
at her very first public appearance as a candidate,
in detail, the circumstances surrounding the $100,000
investigation underway by her political foes in the Alaska
legislature.

It's designed to probe what role, if any, she played in the
firing of the former Anchorage police chief she had appointed
as the commissioner of public safety in her administration who,
among other things, is the head of the Alaska State Troopers.
She is vulnerable but not culpable in this scenario.

It stems from the fact that her sister was married to
and has divorced a state trooper with a checkered criminal
record, once suspended but never terminated from duty.
His record includes illegally shooting a moose without a permit,
virtually a capital crime in Alaska, driving a trooper vehicle
while drinking beer and probably drunk, tasering an 11-year-old boy
just for the hell of it, and threatening to shoot and kill Palin’s
father with a unsheathed pistol in his lap.

The pretext behind the legislative investigation is that Palin
and members of her staff and family used her office to try to
pressure her appointee, the commissioner of public safety, to
fire the trooper. He refused to do so, and later, based on what
her critics say was a pretext, Palin fired him, explaining only
that she “wanted to move (the department) in a different direction.”
Her critics say it was because he refused to fire the errant trooper.

What’s lost in the controversy is that the trooper clearly
deserved to be fired for his past record and actions. But in
handling the matter poorly and failing to give more plausible
and specific reasons for firing the commissioner, Palin left her
natural foes in the legislature – some of them still resentful
of the sweeping legislative reforms she pushed through last
year - found this way to get back at her.

While Palin and her husband Todd acknowledge they had
discussed the matter with the commissioner separately on
more than one occasion, she denies they ever asked him
to fire the trooper, though that was clearly their wish.

However, a ranking staff member has admitted he tried
to pressure the commissioner to fire the trooper. When
Pain learned of it she suspended him pending the outcome
of the invesztigation, which Palin said she welcomes.

To add fuel to the controversy, the fired commissioner
himself has publicly stated he believes the reason Palin
fired him was because he refused to fire the trooper,
which Sarah steadfastly denies.

Nevertheless, the legislative investigation, results
of which are due out the end of October, while vindictive,
politically-motivated and much ado nothing, will have
to be allowed to run its course, leaving a shadow
of a shadow over Palin's head until it’s resolved in her
favor.

So much for Landmine No. 1. I’ll continue this
post later to discuss a couple other landmines in
Governor Palin's path..