On Monday, in the wake of news that Sarah Palin was stepping down as Alaska’s governor, we did a post on her legal fees. The post was titled: “Are Legal Fees at the Root of Palin’s Departure?” and in it we mentioned statements made Sunday by Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell indicating that she owed some $500,000 in lawyer fees.

Well, early this morning, a note from Sarah Palin’s personal lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, landed in our in-box. We’re typically not ones for reprinting emails in full, but we thought Van Flein’s note worthy of making an exception. Feel free, as always, to note your comments, thoughts, responses below.

It reads:

Dear Mr. Jones:

I probably have some additional insight for your readers.

Governor Palin championed ethics reform in Alaska and the current law was enacted at her initiative. Our state has had, unfortunately, some problems with legislative ethics, with several legislators convicted under federal law (notwithstanding subsequent events that may require re-trials–the subject of another story). Thus, Alaska needs strong ethics laws, and ethical people to serve in government.

During and after Governor Palin’s national campaign last fall, the Executive Branch Ethics Act was essentially hijacked by motivated partisans who saw fit to file one complaint after another for such monumental “ethics violations” as: wearing a jacket; giving interviews to reporters, traveling out of state to give a speech, having her official portrait used for a state sponsored seafood marketing program, and on and on. The abuse of the Act has in all likelihood caused a loss in public confidence of a very important law that was intended to address real ethics issues. All complaints ruled on so far (15) have concluded that Governor Palin has not violated any law, in letter or spirit. There is still one complaint pending regarding her legal trust fund to help pay her legal fees. The complainant has asserted that such a legal defense fund is itself unethical.

Because an ethics complaint by definition involves an allegation that a public official abused state office by promoting a personal gain over state interests, when such a complaint is filed, the subject of the complaint cannot use state attorneys for their personal defense. Indeed, doing so would likely result in a meritorious ethics complaint. That does not mean the state could not indemnify a state employee after the investigation and results are completed if it is determined that there was no merit to the complaint and the costs were incurred as a result state service. But initially the subject of the complaint, if he or she desires representation, must retain personal counsel. This is all the more imperative for the Governor, where the Attorney General is barred as a matter of law from any involvement in a complaint against the Governor and the matter is handled by an independent Personnel Board and special counsel.

Because of the abuse of the Ethics Act and the seemingly endless assembly line of questionable complaints, in addition to the fees incurred during the Troopergate investigation, the Governor has incurred substantial attorney’s fees in the range of $500,000. I recognize that by New York standards this is a modest legal bill, but it is substantial up here. The Personnel Board released information that it has spent about $300,000 in legal fees on its side of the aisle. As the lawyers reading this know, while it is easy to file a complaint, it takes research and fact investigation to address the allegations and rebut them with analytical precision.

As for those reading this who want to know if there were legal problems pending that served as a catalyst for the resignation, the answer is “no.” Indeed, speculation about alleged embezzlement, kickbacks, and imminent federal indictments were so wide spread, and were crossing over into the mainstream media, that we took the calculated risk of actually addressing the issue, and the FBI took the unprecedented step of confirming that there never was any such investigation, there is no such investigation, and that there were no plans for any investigation. I continue to maintain hope that political discourse will return to issues that are the subject of fair and vigorous debate, as opposed to false implications of serious criminality, jokes about raping a teenage girl, or abusive legal machinations intended to create headlines and impose personal financial costs. I say that relative to all public servants, Democrat or Republican, that they be judged on their actions in office, not on the clothes they supposedly purchased, the shoes they wore, the actions of their family, the statements of their preacher, or other essentially irrelevant matters.

Governor Palin determined that she had accomplished her major goals in the first two and half years of her administration (which is true, she enacted ethics reform, ear mark reform, pushed through a revised petroleum tax structure highly beneficial to the state, reached consensus with oil producers that resulted in new oil well drilling at Point Thomson, and was the only governor in the last 30 years to take concrete action on getting a major gas pipeline built as opposed to the prior administrations who did much to talk about it, but otherwise took no real action.) The Governor has created a new political reality and is changing the battlefield to pursue her goals of energy independence for America, rational tax policies, improved national security and more efficient and smaller government. I suspect you may see her in the future.

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss this with your readers.

Thomas V. Van Flein, Esq.
Clapp, Peterson, Van Flein,
Tiemessen & Thorsness, LLC

Shame on the posters on this forum who participated in spreading those unfounded politically motivated false charges and false rumors. Your efforts have made a state with a long history of being ethically challenged, even less likely to overcome that history.

And you efforts have allowed those very same ethically challenged corrupt politicians to drive out of office the author of the ethics laws that make their corruption more difficult.

That doesn't mean it was well thought out.

Palin goes on to explain that since one of the intents of the bill is to reduce costs in the health system it is logical to assume that seniors "might view such consultations as attempts to convince them to help reduce health care costs by accepting minimal end-of-life care." (This situation, it can be noted, leaves wealthy people, who by contrast do not depend on Medicare to pay for their consultations with doctors, free to be manipulated by nefarious doctors with discussions about end-of-life preferences.) Let us pause a moment here to consider the import of this argument. Palin is saying that the government should not fund a service many doctors want to provide to their patients--and many patients want provided to them--because doctors might try to dupe patients into denying themselves services. She is arguing, in other words, that the government's proper role is to restrict the range of services that doctors can provide patients. Isn't this the opposite of the traditional conservative stance on health care--that the government should not get between the doctor-patient relationship?

Palin's Saturday Night Live

If you didn't watch Sarah Palin's speech at the National Tea Party Convention on Saturday night, you should definitely give it a gander. It was in some respects an unprecedented opportunity for her: a prepared text (obviously her best format), but not one scripted by a campaign (unlike her 2008 Republican Convention address), and guaranteed major media attention. As a private citizen, she was in a position to say pretty much whatever she wanted. Yes, the venue was a bit tricky, because of the widespread criticism of the Tea Party Convention itself, but not remotely as perilous as her resignation speech as governor of Alaska.

She used her own Saturday Night Live opportunity to perform four tasks: general cheerleading for the Tea Party Movement (while making it clear the immediate venue and the controversial for-profit organization that sponsored it was a small piece of that Movement); a quick tour d'horizon of global hot spots to begin addressing one of her most glaring weaknesses, a lack of foreign policy chops; an assortment of crowd-pleasing snarky attacks on the Obama adminstration, not very original but pretty well-delivered; and an extremely conventional recitation of time-honored conservative themes, punctuated by ritual invocations of the Holy Name of Ronald Reagan.

Anyone who thinks the Tea Party Movement is vastly at odds with the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party should observe that this speech could have been delivered at a Lincoln Day dinner pretty much anywhere in the country, and would have received the same rapturous audience reaction.

Indeed, the speech is a good illustration of why Palin creates such dramatically different perceptions among different groups of politically active people. To most progressives, every other line in the speech was something of a howler, thanks to the exceptionally unselfconscious way in which she glides over self-contradictions. She genuflected at the altar of constitutional supremacy even as she mocked the president as a law professor. She called for a radical attack on budget deficits while she demanded more tax cuts, often in the same sentence. She repeatedly assaulted the of lack of transparency in Democratic policy formulation, but failed to offer any policy prescriptions other than minor (and frankly, stupid) conservative pet rocks like interstate health insurance sales or her own well-rehearsed pet rock of expanding fossil-fuel exploration. She redundantly assailed Wall Street bailouts that she endorsed when they were actually happening. And with every breath, she posed as just another citizen-activist fighting against political elites and media persecution, even though she was a professional politician lifted from obscurity by Washington-based Republican political professionals and then made a national celebrity by constant media attention.

But to conservative ideologues, Palin is simply expounding Revealed Truth, in the uncomplicated manner attributed to the sainted Reagan, and her red meat attacks on Democrats, her allusions to persecution by "elites," and her pose of independence from the GOP establishment, are all projections of their own feelings, cultivated over many years.

And that's why having watched Palin's act in Nashville, I disagree more strongly than ever with those who assert she can't possibly launch a viable campaign for the presidency in 2012. No, I don't think she will be elected president, but yes, I think it's possible she could win the Republican nomination.

To assess this question, you have to appreciate the psychology of movement conservatives at this particular moment of political history. Most of them have believed all along that there is a "hidden majority" of conservatives in America that can only be crystallized by the most rigorous conservative candidates and messages. After 1964, at least, conservatives have attributed every single Republican presidential defeat to a combination of RINO machinations, "moderate" policy prescriptions, and an unwillingness to exploit the opposition's vulnerability by any means necessary--all mistakes imposed by Republican "elites" who contemptuously betray conservative interest groups and causes. These are the kind of people who started showing up at McCain rallies in the autumn of 2008 to upbraid their candidate for failing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and ACORN, and who empathized viscerally with Palin's public frustration about the campaign's unwillingness to "take the gloves off" (a frustration she alluded to in her Nashville speech).

I don't think most progressives fully appreciate how vindicated conservative activists feel right now. Since the 2008 elections, their party has executed the most remarkable turn away from the political center any losing party has probably ever undertaken. RINOs have been intimidated and silenced; Republican Members of Congress have been whipped into highly disciplined submission; policy positions on issues ranging from health care to climate change to foreign policy that were highly respectable in GOP circles just a few years ago are now "socialist" anathema. And in consolidation of earlier conservative victories within the GOP, legalized abortion is now almost universally considered murder; "moral relativism," including homosexuality, is regarded as an abomination inflicted on a suffering "real American" population by decadent elites in Sodom and Gomorrah enclaves on the coasts; and any suggestion that Islamic jihadism is less than an Cold War-level existential threat is treated as "hate-America" semi-treason.

And lo and behold, even as Republicans finally take hard-core conservative advice, their electoral prospects are blossoming. A Tea Party ally has won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat! Even liberal media villains expect a big Republican victory in 2010! With every day, more American are beginning to blame Obama and the Democrats for the economic crisis, and Republican discipline in the Senate ensures he can't do much about it. And moreover, the most vibrant popular political movement in the country, the Tea Party Movement, is pushing Republicans (and perhaps the country) even further to the right, aiding materially not only in the savaging of Obama, but in the ongoing purge of RINOs and "moderate" squishes.

This is the context within which any assessment of Sarah Palin's immediate political future needs to be conducted. It's a context in which vast and largely sympathetic media coverage is devoted to an amateurish, financially-questionable convention in Nashville where people like Tom Tancredo and Roy Moore really don't stand out. It's a context where Sarah Palin is firmly in the mainstream.

So why wouldn't this sudden mega-celebrity, who believes her career is the object of divine favor, and who is surrounded constantly with adulation made even more intense by any mockery of her misteps, run for president? Why not take a chance on completely eclipsing Mike Huckabee and utterly destroying Tim Pawlenty in the Right-to-Life dominated caucuses in Iowa, a state where a new Des Moines Register poll shows one-third of all voters supporting the Tea Party Movement?

That's all a long way off, and a lot could change. 2010 may not after all represent the great gittin' up morning that conservatives expect. At some point, conservative activists may finally get tired of Palin's maddening lack of specificity, or tumble to the fact that Democratic horror of Palin does not actually represent fear of her general-election appeal. Maybe she really doesn't want anything other than her current level of fame or her very manageable political work-load. And perhaps her fans will find a new, or old, champion (her Fox colleague Glenn Beck, for example, seems to think Rick Santorum is The Bomb).

But it's far past time to stop pretending that Palin is just a joke. If her performance in Nashville was taken seriously by the kind of people who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process--and it was--then she's got a political future that she can only enhance by continuing to pose as the personification of grassroots conservative activism, "you betchas" and all.

Posted by Ed Kilgore on February 8, 2010 02:00 PM