Everyone in Alaska knew this was coming sooner or later didn’t they?
Half-term former Gov. Sarah Palin has told a British newspaper she’s going to do the Gold Rush thing and take her riches south.
“…Even the state’s most famous resident admits the cold weather in The Last Frontier can get a little too much,” writes Jesse Palmer at the Daily Mail. A middle-market, British tabloid, the newspaper sent Palmer, a host at Daily Mail TV, to Wasilla for an end-of-summer interview with Sarah and hubby Todd.
The subsequent Daily Mail “Exclusive” focused on her moose chili and belief that Trump might get caught out by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but most other media picked up on the revelation the Palins are leaving Alaska.
“Sarah Palin plans to leave Alaska” was the simple headline in The Hill on Friday.
Arizona, New Mexico?
What exactly the plan isn’t clear in the Daily Mail story.
On the one hand, Palin disses her longtime hometown of Wasilla, the ever-growing suburb north of Anchorage.
“‘We’re not going to be holed up in Wasilla, Alaska the rest of our life,” she told Palmer.
On the other hand, she suggests she’ll always be a resident even if she doesn’t really live in Alaska anymore.
“This is always our home, but we’re ready to bust out and do a lot more even than what we’re doing now especially with the kids getting older, and things are getting easier in terms of travel and logistics,” she told Palmer.
Maybe she plans to try the strategy of former Board of Fisheries member Roland Maw and live in two states, although that didn’t work out too well. Maw is now scheduled to go to trial in November on multiple charges of defrauding the Permanent Fund.
A well-intentioned Palin is unlikely to stumble into that kind of trouble.
“I want to do something that will influence our culture,” she told Palmer. “To really remind people how important a work ethic is and to try to erase a lot of this idea that people have that government owes them anything. Or that anybody owes them anything.
“I want to be in some positions here to get that message out there, how important it is to be independent, get out there and work for yourself.”
Maybe Palin herself will get a job? Palmer’s story does captures the enigma that is the former governor.
“Now Sarah tries to turn cable news off and watches more scripted shows. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her favorite is Veep,” he writes.
“‘It’s flipping hilarious,’ she said. ‘Probably I shouldn’t admit it because maybe my mom would say, “Sarah, they’ve got so many bad words in it!” But we lived that!'”
But while she’s busy watching comedy TV and turning off the news, she “has always been fascinated by politics,” he adds.
There is no mention of what she is reading, a touchy subject with Palin. It was the reading issue that got her in so much trouble when she was running for vice-president in 2008.
Mama Grizzly emerges
At the time, she accused then CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric of trying to trip her up with a “gotcha question” about “what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read…?”
Palin fumbled the answer; Couric pushed with a demand Palin name something she read; and Palin lost her temper:
“I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kinda suggested, it seems like, ‘Wow, how could you keep in touch with the rest of Washington D.C. may be thinking and doing when you live up in Alaska?'”
Years later, Palin admitted to TV Newser that she simply blew the interview.
“I had a crappy answer. But it was a fair question,” she told reporter Mark Joyella in 2015.
The Couric-Palin interview did serious damage to the campaign of Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, but might well have helped Palin later launch a new career as a pol-ebrity.
Her pushback against the ruling media elite of the East Coast resonated in Middle America, and once Palin bailed out as governor of Alaska she rode a wave of popularity that built to the point it once had a good segment of the U.S. media chasing her family’s motorhome vacation in the Lower 48 thinking it was a harbinger to a run for president.
The statement was woefully inaccurate, but had enough truth to it that Palin supporters and Palin critics could argue for days over what she said as they did when she declared the Affordable Health Care Act (ie. Obamacare) contained a provision for government “death panels.”
Arguing over Palinism’s was an American sport until Donald Trump stole her mojo and got himself elected president using a Palin model. She almost never gets the credit she deserves for showing him the path to the White House, which might well go down in history as her greatest success given a string of other failures.
Hello Trump, goodbye Palin
An early and active Trump supporter, Palin was rumored to be in line for a Cabinet post after his election, but that never materialized. Her other jobs did not last long.
Sarah Palin’s Alaska lasted only nine episodes. Amazing America with Sarah Palin did better; it had a 16 episode run that ended in February 2015. She has not had a TV show since, though there were reports of plans for 2016 Judge Judy-style show on which Palin would preside over the “Court of Common Sense” – common sense being Palin’s answer to solving most of the world’s problems.
Maybe she was just resting. It now appears Palin is ready to get back in the game.
She praised Trump in the Daily Mail interview in Wasilla, told Palmer “she still speaks regularly to the man in the Oval Office,” and said the time has come to start playing offense, which is what she does best.
Where she and Todd plan to move was not reported, but Todd did tell Palmer this:
“If you see sea planes flying around Arizona or New Mexico you’ll know who it is.”
A licensed pilot, Todd flies a single-engine, Cessna 206 on amphibious floats.