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All Things Palin Handled By McCain Staff

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Los Angeles Times

Published: September 22, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Jerry McCutcheon went to Gov. Sarah Palin's office here last week to request information about the firing of former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, the scandal that for weeks has threatened to eclipse the governor's nomination as Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's running mate.

McCutcheon was given a phone number in Virginia to call: the national headquarters of the McCain-Palin campaign.

Why, he wanted to know, did he have to call a campaign office 4,300 miles away to find out what was going on in the Alaskan government? The longtime civic activist phoned his state legislator, Les Gara, who quickly filed a protest.

These days, many such queries about Monegan - or anything else involving Palin's record as governor - get diverted to McCain staff members. A former Justice Department prosecutor from New York flew in recently to advise the governor's lawyer and field media calls about Monegan. Soon after, Palin's initial willingness to cooperate in the state Legislature's probe of the affair suddenly ended.

A recent call to John Cramer, the head of the state Department of Military and Veterans Affairs who clashed with Palin during her years as mayor of Wasilla, was returned by a McCain campaign operative who had just flown in from Washington, D.C.

In stubbornly independent Alaska, the sudden intrusion of a political campaign into so many corners of state government - not to mention Wasilla, where a dozen or more campaign researchers and lawyers have also begun overseeing the release of any information about Palin's years as mayor - has touched a raw nerve. Even Palin's family members - who have been instructed not to talk - have McCain campaign staffers assigned to answer their calls.

The partisan spillover of the presidential race into the statehouse, political analysts here say, threatens Palin's most powerful political capital in Alaska: her commitment to transparency, her willingness to forge bipartisan alliances with Democrats to advance her agenda, and her battle to upend the old boys network.

"Is this going to dilute her image as a maverick who will clean out the rascals from their perches of power? When she herself cannot tolerate questions into her behavior, investigations into the firing of a public safety commissioner?" said Gerald McBeath, political science professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

Democratic leaders, whom the Palin camp accuses of initiating rounds of partisan sniping, say the bipartisanship that helped Palin win passage of ethics reform, a new natural gas pipeline and an increase in the oil production tax is essentially over.

But even conservatives are expressing resentment over the governor's about-faces on the Monegan investigation and the infiltration of the McCain campaign in state government.

Most of the battle lines have been drawn around what is commonly called troopergate: allegations that Monegan was fired in July because he had refused to fire Palin's former brother-in-law, a state trooper who had been mired in a messy divorce with Palin's sister.

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