Old media avoid Gov. Palin's accomplishments

Bill Dyer does the leg work the main-stream media refuse to do: Bill Dyer posting at Hugh Hewitt's blog In considering Sarah Palin's fitness as a vice presidential nominee, it's absolutely crucial to distinguish between mere tenure in office and actual accomplishments while there. In their televised interviews with her, however, Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric have almost completely ignored Gov. Palin's actual record in office. So, too, have most of the old-media sources who've been writing about her. They'd far rather dig through a dumpster or watch videos of a guest pastor from Kenya speaking at a church Gov. Palin has sometimes attended than talk about Gov. Palin's day job as chief executive of the largest state in America. (There's yet another important aspect to her candidacy that the mainstream media has ignored almost as resolutely, which is her courage and determination in campaigning as an underdog reformer, taking on deeply entrenched and ethically challenged members of her own party in Alaska. Arguably that's her most important accomplishment of all, given how much of a cesspool Washington has become. But let's set that aside for the moment.) Gov. Palin is now finishing up her second year as Governor of Alaska. Even added to her years as a city councilman and mayor, or her service as chair and ethics officer of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, that is not a very long record. But length is only one dimension. How deep is her record? The answer to that question is critically important. Joe Biden has been a senator, as Gov. Palin points out, since Gov. Palin was in grade school, so of course he has a long record. With that seniority has come committee chair positions, first on the Senate Judiciary Committee, then on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But on closer examination, neither as a committee chairman nor a legislator has Slow Joe Biden particularly distinguished himself. His greatest legislative triumph has been in championing revisions to the bankruptcy code that dramatically changed the slope of the playing field to favor his home-state credit card companies in consumer bankruptcy proceedings — an accomplishment much disdained, in fact, by the Hard Left. So what, by contrast, has Gov. Sarah Palin done in her dramatically shorter tenure as a state chief executive? If you only know three things that Sarah Palin has accomplished as Governor of Alaska, it should be these three: 1. Gov. Palin is a proven fiscal conservative who used her line-item veto to slash hundreds of millions of dollars in spending from the state budget. [more details at the link] 2. Gov. Palin kept her campaign promise to revamp the state's pre-existing severance tax on oil & gas production, replacing a structure negotiated behind closed doors by ethically challenged predecessors and the big energy companies with one negotiated in full public view — and then rebated part of the resulting surplus directly to tax-payers. [more details at the link] 3. Gov. Palin broke a multi-year stalemate over the financing and construction of a $40 billion cross-state gas pipeline that will deliver cleaner, cheaper natural gas to Alaska's own population centers (Alaskans themselves pay some of the nation's highest energy prices), while also delivering gas to the energy-hungry Lower 48. [more details at the link]