Sarah Palin and the Alaska difference

I don't want to start another endless round about Sarah Palin, but I would be remiss if I didn't post a link to Todd Purdum's much-talked-about Vanity Fair hit piece on Palin, which I only caught up to on the flight home from Anchorage last night. Palin really does seem like a complete flake, even to more than a few Alaskans who'd supported her initially. But this is territory we've covered well here, and I am going to police this comments thread pretty hard to keep it from devolving into a beating-a-dead-horse spat.

What I find interesting to talk about is this passage from Purdum:

The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, "Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked 'U.S. Mail.'" That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska's largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.

So, of all the puzzling things that Sarah Palin told the American public last fall, perhaps the most puzzling was this: "Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America."

Believe me, it is not.

But Sarah Palin herself is a microcosm of Alaska, or at least of the fastest-growing and politically crucial part of it, which stretches up the broad Matanuska-Susitna Valley, north of Anchorage, where she came of age and cut her political teeth in her now famous hometown, Wasilla. In the same way that Lyndon Johnson could only have come from Texas, or Bill Clinton from Arkansas, Palin and all that she is could only have come from Wasilla. It is a place of breathtaking scenery and virtually no zoning. The view along Wasilla's main drag is of Chili's, ihop, Home Depot, Target, and Arby's, and yet the view from the Palins' front yard, on Lake Lucille, recalls the Alpine splendor visible from Captain Von Trapp's terrace in The Sound of Music. It is culturally conservative: the local newspaper recently published an article that asked, "Will the Antichrist be a Homosexual?" It is in this Alaska--where it is possible to be both a conservative Republican and a pothead, or a foursquare Democrat and a gun nut--that Sarah Palin learned everything she knows about politics, and about life. It was in this environment that her ambition first found an outlet in public office, and where she first tasted the 151-proof Everclear that is power.

What is interesting here is to think about how place shapes a politician's personality, as well as his or her politics. It is impossible to conceive of Rudy Giuliani as being from anywhere other than New York. Obama, on the other hand, is pure Blue State Urban, but he's not particularly Chicago (I mean, you could see him having come from just about anywhere on the West Coast, but not so much on the East Coast). The longer I live in Texas, the harder it is for me to conceive of any other state producing George W. Bush -- both what's good about him, and what's bad about him.

This worries me a bit about Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, and about the only really hopeful thing going on in the GOP right now. He is a Louisiana native, but he's a non-standard Louisiana politician. He is a certain kind of Louisianian -- I'm more or less like that too, and there are a lot of us -- but given the state's political culture, I worry that any governor that hopes to be effective will become so compromised by having to roll around in the mud that he will struggle to be appealing to a national electorate.

I'm not saying this explains Palin at all; she is what she is, probably more because of her personal quirks than the way Alaska's culture, political and otherwise, shaped her. Still, is it the case that to succeed in politics in some particular parts of the US, you have to make yourself almost unelectable to the broader American polity? I'm thinking specifically of Giuliani, but surely there are others. Discuss.