A State of Two Minds
By GAIL COLLINS
NYT
PETERSBURG, Alaska
It is very hard to have a conversation in Alaska without Sarah Palin’s name coming up.
“It’s because of the media,” said Alan Stein, an adviser to Joe Miller, the Republican nominee for the United States Senate. He looked at me accusingly.
I swear I didn’t say a word. Alaskans are very hospitable, and they offer strangers a plate of Palin anecdotes just as they would cookies. I spent the week here, and almost everyone I talked to wound up revisiting Sarahland unprompted, from a woman who said they went to the same gym, to a Republican who once ran against Palin and told me how, after a debate, she had complimented him on his grasp of figures and policy, and then added: “But then I look over the crowd and wonder — does that really mean anything?”
Currently, a lot of Alaskans are blaming Palin for the Republican primary in which Senator Lisa Murkowski was upended, depriving the state of its last bastion of seniority power. (The state’s lone congressman, Don Young, has been in office forever. But he was stripped of his seniority over an earmark he stuck in the budget for a connector road that was slightly outside his district — being located in the state of Florida.)
(More here.)
NYT
PETERSBURG, Alaska
It is very hard to have a conversation in Alaska without Sarah Palin’s name coming up.
“It’s because of the media,” said Alan Stein, an adviser to Joe Miller, the Republican nominee for the United States Senate. He looked at me accusingly.
I swear I didn’t say a word. Alaskans are very hospitable, and they offer strangers a plate of Palin anecdotes just as they would cookies. I spent the week here, and almost everyone I talked to wound up revisiting Sarahland unprompted, from a woman who said they went to the same gym, to a Republican who once ran against Palin and told me how, after a debate, she had complimented him on his grasp of figures and policy, and then added: “But then I look over the crowd and wonder — does that really mean anything?”
Currently, a lot of Alaskans are blaming Palin for the Republican primary in which Senator Lisa Murkowski was upended, depriving the state of its last bastion of seniority power. (The state’s lone congressman, Don Young, has been in office forever. But he was stripped of his seniority over an earmark he stuck in the budget for a connector road that was slightly outside his district — being located in the state of Florida.)
(More here.)
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