There is a part of me that wakes up each morning and wonders what fun headline I’ll read today about Alaska’s politicians. I watch the Daily Show every night on the chance that Ted Stevens may be their star again. But in between those moments, I’m mostly sad about what’s happening in our state.
I was speaking to my sister about this recently and she snorted and said, “I live in New Jersey and you want to whine to me about corrupt politicians. Are you insane?” She was right. I grew up in a city whose mayor’s went directly from office to jail with monotonous regularity.
I guess that should make me more understanding and tolerant of our current crop of Alaskan politicians. They certainly have met what seems to be the expectation most Alaskans have for their elected officials, which is to bring as much money to the state as possible and have as much of that money as possible available for free to everyone. Alaska’s symbol really shouldn’t be the North Star or the northern lights or a bear with a salmon in its mouth. Alaska’s symbol should simply be a hand held out waiting for something free to fall into it.
At least in New Jersey no one pretended to be the independent frontier type. New Jerseyites know what they want from their politicians and are pretty open about asking for it. Alaskans, on the other hand, hide behind some coy veil of independent, frontier spirit when, in reality, no one can shovel government money at us fast enough to satisfy our greed.
So it’s no wonder that our choice in politicians is more based on what they can get for us than on how they might represent us. Because honestly, if we didn’t think that way, would we have re-elected Don Young after he threatened someone with an oosik on the House floor? And we would have been at least a little more embarrassed than we seemed to be with Ted Stevens’ designation as the king of pork barrel spending. Instead, we named an airport after him.
I think the only person who saddens and surprises me in this mess is Lisa Murkowski. I like the cut of her jib and the independent streak she exhibited in standing up for us against the current administration when it came time to renew the Patriot Act. I thought that with Lisa, we had a chance to have someone we could proudly call our own. Because, let’s be honest, even before the latest FBI raids and headlines about various federal investigations, we all kind of knew that both Stevens and Young had stayed too long at the fair; long enough to maybe be in bed with all the wrong people; long enough to have possibly lost their ethical compass in the morass of butt kissing they endure whenever they show their faces in public here. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and we freely gave them both absolute power.
Now this land deal on the Kenai has muddied Lisa and made me wonder if she too developing a deaf ear to the public’s perception of impropriety. She did right to return the land. But the fact that she was embroiled at all in this kind of controversy is really troubling. Has she already lost her ability to know when she’s overstepping the bounds of propriety? Especially in a case like this, where the boundaries should have been evident from the start.
There is a story, probably apocryphal, about one of South Jersey’s most famous politicians, Frank “Hap” Farley. He represented my little piece of South Jersey in the state capitol for at least as long as Stevens has represented Alaska in the Senate. The story claims that a person needing a zoning variance went to his office to ask for help, implying he would do whatever it took to get it. Hap threw him out in high dungeon, saying there was nothing he could or would do for him. The man walked out and was about two blocks from Hap’s office when a stranger approached him and said that for $5000 he could make the variance happen. The moral of the story is that Hap had standards and did not take bribes in his office. But two blocks away, well, that was a different story.
Ted Stevens has an international airport named for him. Hap has the rest stop at the southern end of the Atlantic City Expressway named for him. And Alaska now has the dubious distinction of threatening New Jersey’s almost century old reputation as the most corrupt state in the union. That’s not a good thing for us.