In office, Palin hired friends and hit critics

Interviews indicate a governing style that uses loyalty and secrecy

WASILLA, Alaska - Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as one of her qualifications for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!�?Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!�?

Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy�?politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics �?she sometimes calls local opponents “haters�?�?contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

 In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records. 

Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article.  

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26691018/ 

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{ I'm glad to see that more and more information is coming out about how this woman operates. It seems she runs Alaska like a mafia family runs it's business. She's eccentric, bull-headed and authoritarian and seems as Machiavellian as Dick Cheney. "Democracy" is a word that doesn't seem to be in her vocabulary and she acts like a Indian Nabob ruling over all the vast empty spaces that make up America's last frontier. The Wyatt Earp of the far north or better yet the Annie Oakley of the snow drifts.

The more Americans learn about this strange local character the more angry they are going to get at John McCain for possibly endangering the nation in this way. His "brilliant" choice will be seen for what it really is......expedient, smug, shallow, arrogant, politically motivated for the most base of reasons. As we can see "America first" really means "McBush first".}