The latest McCain campaign theme is to paint Obama as a candidate bent on turning America into a “socialistic” nation. As David Corn pointed out on Hardball last week, Governor Palin is a particularly strange messenger to bring this charge against Obama:
The funny thing about using the word socialism in this context, who is the most socialistic governor in the United States? That would be Sarah Palin. Alaska survives fiscally because what it does is it taxes the oil companies and then sends a check out to every citizen of Alaska, because the argument is-and actually, I like this argument-the citizens of the state own the wealth, the natural resources of the state collectively, and they all should get a payment back when those resources are exploited by the big bad oil companies. If that’s not some form of socialism, I don’t know what is.
Hendrik Hertzberg adds details:
The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist–Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine–that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.
McCain and Palin like to point out Palin’s high approval ratings in Alaska and that she has supposedly cut taxes while balancing the budget. What TV analysts covering the race generally fail to point out is that her stint as governor has coincided (until recently) with a huge spike in oil prices. Consequently, oil royalty payments to the state have soared.
Given the recent crash of oil prices, it will be interesting to see how popular Palin remains if she has to start slashing government services, instead of merely doling out a windfall. At any rate, it would be informative if some enterprising reporter would press either McCain or Palin on his or her philosophical view of Alaska’s “socialism.”